Technical Work Group Meetings 2009

• Description: Technical Work Group Meetings 2009
• State: CO
• Date: 9/29/2009
• Title: Technical Work Group Meetings 2009
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Meeting

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Glen Canyon Dam Technical Work Group Page 8
DRAFT Minutes of March 16 -17, 2009, Meeting
FY2010 -11 Preliminary Budget Development (AIF= Attachment 7a). Shane reviewed the schedule for
the remainder of the day. Once the group hears the BAHG recommendations, he would like to identify items
which are controversial and might require more discussion, add any new issues, and then go through all of
them for final disposition.
USBR CPI FY08 and FY09 Budget. Dennis Kubly directed the TWG to go back to the FY08 carryover and
the FY09 underfunding document (Attachment 7b). In the past, he said Reclamation would estimate 3%
indexed by the CPI for each of the years. They don't know what the actual CPI will be until after the
beginning of the next fiscal year. At the close of FY08 they estimated 3% but it ended up being 4.9% so
there was actually underfunding in the projected FY09 budget that the AMWG saw and went as a
recommendation to the Secretary by 1.9 %. For Reclamation's portion of the budget, the amount of the
underfunding was almost $88K. He broke that down into four major categories. He said the numbers were
derived by multiplying forward by the amount that would've been in the FY09 budget if it had been 3 %, the
amount that was actually there in 4.9 %, and subtracted the difference. He said some of them were off quite
a bit. For example, in FY08 there was a $300K Canyon Treatment Plan budget and then in FY09, it went to
$500K.
On the FY08 carryover they had $55,175. The majority of that, about $40K, comes from the LTEP fund.
Reclamation paid for the LTEP expenses with 50% from power revenues and 50% out of appropriated
funds. There was a smaller amount of funding that was used for LTEP than was originally programmed so
they ended up with about $40K in carryover there. They're proposing to apply the carryover to a non - native
fish contingency fund and this is precipitated by the mainstem mechanical removal question and whether or
not funds would be available if they have a non - native fish eruption, the old "vampire in the basement"
problem. In FY09 one series of controls is programmed rather than six separate trips and this year only one
trip with four passes. GCMRC put in their MRP a projection to hold those same fish at 10% of their 2003
numbers. Nobody knows what level of control is necessary to do that and then there's the issue if the water,
instead of being cold goes warm, and there is a warm water non - native fish eruption and what would be
done. The program would have to come back and re- program a lot of dollars. The contingency fund is an
attempt to get in front of that. They advocate the $55K in carryover be in that fund and then $48,500 of the
underfunding for a total of about $104K. The other underfunding is allocated to AMWG expenses, TWG
expenses, and to a small degree the Programmatic Agreement. They took $10K above the underfunded
amount for AMWG expenses and TWG expenses and $5K for Contract Administration because they were
negative in those three areas in FY08.
Q: So that makes FY09 whole? (Barger)
A: Yes, it does. There is also the carryover which is really on top of that. ( Kubly)
Q: Would the contingency fund be an ongoing thing? (Garrett)
A: Yes. If you look at your budget spreadsheet and you have to tie these things together. When you go over to
FY2010 -11, we incremented by 3% but it wasn't the total $103K but only the $48K that came from the underfunding.
( Kubly)
Q: If we don't use it for a few years, are we shooting for $300K then we would not be putting money in? (Capron)
A: We could do that but we really didn't calculate the amount because it's such an unknown. Steve was making these
points in our BAHG discussions. You might be talking about another $130 -40K. However, something could come out of
the woodwork but you just don't know. We could set an upper limit on it ( Kubly)
USGS CPI FY08 and FY09 Budget. John Hamill referenced his memo dated March 6, 2009, "Subject:
' Allocation of FY2008 Carryover Funds and FY2009 CPI Funds" (Attachment 7c). John said they had three
sources of funding to deal with: (1) carryover from planned budget, $1.9 million, (2) the HFE carryover was
about $670K, and (3) CPI funding was about $207K. The majority of the carryover (Attachment 7c) was
allocated to completing activities that were deferred due to the HFE. There were a number of things that fell
into that category, various other planned activities that were expected to be funded in 2009, like the HFE
data analysis, overflights, nearshore ecology study, etc., of this he considered about $531 K to be truly
discretionary, things that weren't already spoken for. Referring to the spreadsheet, they broke out the
discretionary from the non - discrectionary. The criteria he used in allocating the funds were to put them into