BOARD00647

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

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companies have planned to make available to the Piceance basin. In
short, any inference that there is not a complete concept here on
the part of the holder of the priority rights to the use of this
water for power and other purposes that it is not going to be used
for power and other purposes, is I respectfully submit incorrect.

Paralleling what I have just said, the history of what I have said,
has been a long series of litigation. Starting out in the District
Courts on the West Slope at Mee~er and at Glenwood and all of them
have finally found their way to the Supreme Court of the state of
Colorado, and in one case, to the Supreme Court of the United States.
I take no credit for this. I just call your attention to the fact
that the Rocky Mountain Power Company was active in all of those
proceedings. As of mid-year, in 1972, it began to appear that it
was for the first time in a position to negotiate with responsible
power users and responsible users of waters after they had served
their power-producing purposes. To that end, in 1961 an application
for a right was filed with the Federal Power commission. All of the
engineering, all of the survey work, all of the necessary work for a
permit by the Federal Power Commission was supplied. We went to
Washington. We discussed it with staff for a considerable length of
time and there were no technical objections and there never has been
a technical objection statewide. However, because of the pendency
of litigation, all we could ever secure from a potential power user
was a conditional letter of commitment. And we did have a condi-
tional letter of commitment from Nebraska power users, the Nebraska
Public Power District, which in turn distributes to REAs and munici~
palities in that state. And we did have a letter of commitment, a
conditional letter of commitment from Kuhn Loeb which I believe is one
of the major financing houses in New York City. Both of them, how-
ever, were conditioned upon the settlement or ultimate disposal of
the litigation.

When the Federal Power Commission concluded its hearing, it denied
the Rocky Mountain Power Company the right to a license to start
construction. I guess that was perfectly justifiable in the face of
our record at that time because we were still in the Supreme Court
or on the way to the Supreme Court with one or another piece of liti-
gation. But I call your attention to this statement by the Federal
Power Commission, and I am quoting, "this dismissal is without
prejudice to any later application which may be made supported by a
sufficient showing of financial feasibility and a market for the
power." In short, gentlemen, the Federal Power Commission said only
one thing. That if you have a contract with a responsible user, of
course you can get the financing and you come back at that time. And
this was what we were expecting to do in 1972 when the Wilderness
problem was injected into our neW series of confrontations.

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