Tentative deal struck on Columbia River Treaty

The United States and Canada struck an agreement in principle that will modernize and extend the Columbia River Treaty for another two decades.

The tentative pact, which was announced Thursday and still needs to be finalized, signed by the two nations and ratified, reduces the amount of hydropower the U.S. ships to Canada and makes it available for domestic use instead.

It requires the U.S. to take a more active role in flood control compared to its responsibilities over the past 60 years. But it heads off more drastic flood control changes that will take effect if the treaty is not updated.

It gives tribes in the U.S. and First Nations in Canada a strictly advisory role in the way water is managed for the benefit of salmon and the environment but does not adopt ecosystem function as one of the main objectives of the treaty as some had hoped.

“For 60 years, the United States and Canada have managed these waterways together through the Columbia River Treaty. Now, our two countries have found common ground on how we will work together to care for them for the next 20 years,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement issued by the White House.

The treaty, which is designed to govern flood risk management and hydropower production on the river that starts in Canada and flows south into Washington and Oregon before joining the Pacific Ocean, was ratified in1964. Since then the two countries have worked together to operate a series of dams that capture and store spring runoff to be released later in the summer.

Canada is compensated in the form of hydropower for the water it stores in the spring and then releases in the summer, a time when it is much more valuable for hydropower generation.

Hydropower producers and ratepayers in the U.S. have long complained the so-called Canadian Entitlement was too generous. Under the new agreement Bonneville Power Administration chief John Hairston said the value of the Canadian entitlement will be cut by 40% almost immediately and then drop to 50% of its present-day value by 2033.

That will free up 600 megawatts of capacity and about 230 average megawatts of actual generation.

“These new terms will go a long way toward helping meet the growing demands for energy in the region and avoid building unnecessary fossil-fuels-based generation,” Hairston said.

Under the terms of the treaty as it exists today, scheduled changes would soon make it so Canadian dams would no longer be obligated to provide downstream flood control protection unless the United States first demonstrated it had done all it could to reduce flood risk by capturing more spring flows in its reservoirs. That means reservoirs behind Grand Coulee Dam in northeastern Washington, Dworshak Dam at Orofino and others would be drafted much lower than they have been over the past 60 years.

The new agreement softens the potential change. It spells out that Canada will store 3.6 million acre-feet of water, down from 8.9 million acre-feet today. In exchange for that storage, Canada will be paid $37.6 million annually.

Mike Conner, assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, said it will provide “critical operational certainty for flood risk management.”

Up to 1.5 million acre-feet stored in Canada will be available to be used for salmon-friendly flow augmentation, similar to the amount of water devoted to fish today. An advisory board led by Columbia River tribes on both sides of the board will be created to advise water managers on how and when to release water for the benefit of salmon and steelhead populations, many of which are imperiled.

Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho called the agreement promising but said he wants to see more details. Risch is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will play a key

role if and when the treaty is submitted for the Senate for ratification.

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273.