BOARD00647

• Board Meeting Date: 8/15/1973
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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I would like first of all to express my appreciation to you, Mr.
Chairman, and to the Commission for postponing final consideration
of this matter until I might have an opportunity to appear. I also
would like to express my appreciation for having been supplied a
copy of the memorandum prepared by Mr. Sparks and his staff and
given an opportunity to comment upon it. As you have just indicated,
I did comment upon it in the form of a letter addressed to you, as
Chairman, Mr. Stapleton, on AUgUEt 8.

Perhaps, first of all, I might identify myself.
Rocky Mountain Power Company and also acting as
an appreciable part of its legal work.

I am President of
its attorney doing

Rocky Mountain Power Company is a Colorado corporation. It is sub-
stantially owned by Coloradoans. It initiated steps to develop a
hydroelectric project at the so-called Meadows area on the South
Fork of the White River and at Sweetwater Lake on Sweetwater Creek,
the upper reaches of both of those streams being not more than maybe
fifteen miles apart at one or two points.

Since 19S7, the Rocky Mountain Power Company has spent approximately
three million dollars in its effort to do the engineering, the
. mapping, the geology, the hydrological studies and legal and related
work. I mention 19S7 because you will recall that the Wilderness
Bill was not enacted until almost ten years later. Nevertheless, at
the very time that the initial planning was done and inasmuch as
this land is primarily in the Forest Service or in the public domain,
the people who then ran Rocky Mountain Power Company, the officers
and the counsel for them that included in the early stages,
Mr. Charles Beise, whom many of you know, and also Judge John Barnard,
who succeeded Mr. Beise and who I succeeded as counsel for the
company, these people conducted the preparations, including a great
deal of work to recognize what then was not legislatively required,
but recognized the wilderness, protect the primeval characteristics
of the area and do their very best to leave them undisturbed

Later on there was a formal hearing on the Flat Tops and with par-
ticular reference to the Meadows project and the Forest
Service recommended an area, the boundaries of which are irrelevant
for our purposes, except the Forest Service at the suggestion of
Governor Love, the Bureau of Reclamation, and all of the professional
agencies connected with or interested in that matter at that time
decided that the power potential, the beneficial uses of the water
of the South Fork of the White River with a reservoir at the Meadows
area would be a .desirable thing and therefore the site for the
Meadows reservoir was excluded.

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