Political Quotes

“At the heart of the problem is a broken Federal permitting process that has created an unnavigable gauntlet for our hydropower projects. It can now take well over a decade to relicense an existing dam. I will say it again. We are not talking about licensing a new dam; we are talking about relicensing an existing dam--a process that can take over a decade. For the California consumers of Pacific Gas and Electric, relicensing costs have run as high as $50 million per dam simply to continue an existing project. We are not building anything new. We want to relicense it. It is costing $50 million and taking over 10 years. There was a recent editorial in a Eugene, OR, newspaper, the Register-Guard, which called for the preservation of hydropower assets, and it noted that the existing Carmon Smith project has been mired in the relicensing process for over 10 years, with a pricetag estimated at $226 million. It amounts to 10 times as much and 3 times as long as it took to build the project when it was constructed in 1963. What is wrong with this picture? Taking 10 times as much--requiring 10 times as much money--$226 million--and taking 3 times as long to build as when they built that project back in 1963. We are going in the wrong direction. This is not progress. We are headed exactly in the wrong direction. We can change that. Let us put it in the context of what we have existing in this country right now.…”