I was asked to speak at Southern California Edison’s Big Creek ALP Settlement Agreement Signing Ceremony. I am glad that they gave me an opportunity to say thank-you and good-by to all the people who worked so hard on the upcoming FERC license. The signing of the Settlement was a great accomplishment by great people.
Southern California Edison’s Big Creek ALP Settlement Agreement Signing Ceremony
Radisson Hotel
Fresno, California
April 12, 2007
Seven years ago, I stood before many of you and I talked about the Forest Service’s interest in working collaboratively with FERC and SCE and the Agencies and the Stakeholders on the Big Creek project. A lot of you were there at that “Big Creek Alternative Licensing Process Kickoff,” and you know what, seven years ago – we really didn’t know what we were saying.
We didn’t know what we were going to do, but we kept on talking…
And we talked and talked. Two, three, four times a month, for seven years, we would get together to discuss what it meant to collaboratively work through a very difficult FERC re-licensing project.
We talked because we didn’t know what we were going to do, but we were determined to figure it out.
Southern California Edison hired Kerns and West to help us talk to each other. We created something called a “Communications Protocol.” We spent lots of time talking about how to talk to each other.
We continued to discuss agendas, ground rules, meeting minutes. We talked on conference calls. We called in to working group meetings and we thrashed around with the question of “when will we have our next meeting?”
And, we continued talking, because we respected the positions and the interests of the others in the room and we respected their ability to understand our interests and our positions.
When we talked, we used a strange, perplexing, alien language from another planet…
FERC
APE
HPMP
BE
DOT
PDEA
PA
TRG
CWA
CYA
VELB
CRIM
PHABSIM
SHPO
And…
And my all time favorite: WUA ( That stands for Weighted Usable Area, for you non CAWG’ers) Six pages of acronyms and abbreviations. Relicensing vocabulary is staggering.
I would go home at night and try to tell to my family about what I was doing at work. “Today at the Big Creek ALP SCE and DFG agreed to the Agency’s MIF but we are still working on the CRMF. We differ on the PHABSIM and argued about the WUA, so we’re still not together on the CRMF…” My teenagers would look at me, and they would be speechless.
But at the BCALP collaborative kept talking because we knew the complexity of our task and we were confident in our ability to get around this strange unique language.
While working on the Big Creek Project, we would look at reams and reams of paper with little tiny numbers. (I didn’t need reading glasses when this started.) Entrix would bring us pages and pages of numbers. We would bring pages and pages of numbers. We would talk about concepts, we talked about ideas, ideologies and we would talk about words. What words would go onto the paper and which words would be definitely not go on the paper.
And we continued talking because we had faith that there was an answer somewhere, we just had to dig through all the details to see it. We also had faith that others would see our answer if we could just made it understandable.
Even when we couldn’t tell where things were going, and it was quite clear that we were repeating ourselves, and we were convinced that no one was listening, and we did not know what more to do…
We talked until we agreed that we didn’t need to talk anymore.
Today, with the signing of the Settlement Agreement the talking is over. We are now prepared – maintaining determination to move ahead, with our respect for our relationships in tact, with continued confidence in our technical abilities, and reaffirmed belief in our ability to make a difference.
With a leap of faith, and a hope for the future,
We have agreed that the talking is over – and now we have something to do.
Today, we stand together here at the “Kickoff of Doing” for the Big Creek Project. Collaboratively with FERC and SCE and the Agencies and the Stakeholders on the Big Creek project; this is the start of doing.
I want to thank you all, SCE, Entrix and mostly our brothers and sister agencies for all your hard work, determination, respect, and faith over the last seven years. I’m very proud to see this project come to a Settlement Agreement that will Care for the Land and Serve the People.
Thank you. And now, I’ll stop talking and I’m going to go do something.
