BOARD01799

• Board Meeting Date: 9/8/1961
• Description: Minutes and Resolution
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

amount of money which has never been computed
in any payout study and which does not reflect
in anything which the Board has ever seen.

I

We started out with the assumption, in our
study, we were concerned only with one thing,
and that was the amount of dollars that was
coming to Colorado to build these participating
projects. This Board, nor our staff, has never
taken a stand in the past nor do I think that
we will in the future, in this controversy of
public vs. private power. We could care less
about that controversy. What we are interested
in is the future of the State of Colorado. We
were confronted with two systems neither one of
which we think is the best as illustrated on
that board. But at this time, at least, the
federal system is much preferable to the system
as proposed by the private investor utilities.
The tragedy of this situation is that these
investor utilities belong in the power scheme
and unless they do come in here by intercon-
nection, there will be a great loss of money
both to their stockholders and to our project.

I

As I said, we had started out with certain
basic assumptions. First we examined the cost
to the private companies of constructing trans-
mission lines. We found out from the Federal
Power Commission that the Public Service Com-
pany of Colorado, for instance, receives 14.11
percent return on its capital investment for
plant and substations and l3.81 percent for
investment on transmission lines. Now all we
have to pay the federal government for its
investment is less than six percent. So it is
an absolute impossibility, we think, for these
private companies to compete with the federal
government in the construction of transmission
lines. The differential in these costs goes
to our Project Fund. That's what we build
these participating projects from. As a matter
of fact, it has been a cry for many years, and
it's true I think, that the private investor
utilities have constantly complained that the
federal government can construct these facili-
ties cheaper than they can. They've said that