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./ -. <br />2 <br />U.S. Energy consumption in the year 2000 is expected to be 160 quadrillion <br />btu's, twice the 1980 consumption. Coal production would double. We will <br />need to increase total electric generating capability by 325 thousand <br />megawatts, an amount equivalent to the nation's total generating capacity <br />as of 1970. Even before the turn of the century, we have to make massive <br />repairs and replacement of infrastructures, for example: <br />-- Almost one-quarter million of the nation's highway bridges are <br />already deficient or obsolete; <br />-- An estimated one-half of our communities cannot expand because of <br />water treatment systems that are at or near capacity; the aging <br />municipal water systems in many eastern cities are in critical need <br />of repair; hundreds or perhaps thousands of existing dams should <br />be repaired or replaced; and here in the West, where water always <br />has been of paramount concern, there is urgent need to get on with <br />the work of reclamation. <br />The problem that is being faced in the Upper Basin is a pattern that is <br />being repeated nationwide with, as near as I can tell; only two differences. <br />The first difference is that the problem is more critical here because water, <br />is literally your life blood. Very few people anywhere else in the country <br />a ,_ <br />v a to live in a region that received 12 to 14 <br />inches of annual precipitation. And yet that is the situation you live with <br />in the country year after year. The second difference is that there is more <br />misinformation and misunderstanding concerning the conflicts over Federal <br />requirements in the Upper Colorado River Basin than in almost any other <br />area I can think of. <br />For instance, the status of the Colorado River Conservation Plan. The <br />document that's been floating about since last summer is not the conservation <br />plan. It's a draft technical paper. And I'm not splitting hairs and I'm not <br />using any kind of bureaucratic jargon. It's just a technical draft, a summary <br />of some of the facts and figures about the basin that was put together for <br />review by some of the scientific types. It's got some unclear and (if you <br />don't know how to read it) some pretty startling stuff -- like that 17,000 cfs <br />for May and June. That was a case of incompleteness that caused some real, <br />and justifiable, howls. It's not 17,000 cfs for two whole months. It's <br />17,000 cfs for a mere 5 days only during that 60-day period. I want to <br />repeat and emphasize again that -- and if you don't remember anything else <br />I say today, please remember this -- that plan, so called, is not the plan. <br />It's just a preliminary technical draft. There will be a plan later on, <br />and it will be a plan that includes your ideas, your thoughts, and your <br />input. That's what the plan will be -- a do put that represents and <br />balances the valid and legitimate rnnr??rn.g of ?naon?P in the 11CP _a A-4h,e <br />resources of the reui'Qn. Bluntly put, we are reviewing all documents <br />associated with these endangered fishes and a conservation plan for the <br />UCRB.