The multiyear federal relicensing of FirstLight Power Co.’s Northfield Mountain and Connecticut River hydroelectric plants is moving toward a flurry of end-of-year filings, with licenses due to expire April 30, 2018.
But in the midst of studies and responses about fish passage, recreational facilities and other topics, the operator of the Turners Falls and Northfield plants has been meeting for settlement discussions with Gill, Montague, Northfield and Franklin Regional Council of Governments officials as well as representatives of the Connecticut River Conservancy and other nonprofit organization and government agency “stakeholders” in the relicensing.
“We’re working with various stakeholders, trying to come up with solutions” to a variety of differences,” said FirstLight spokesman Len Greene. “It’s a very common practice.”
The federal government licenses dams to for-profit utilities but in exchange for using the public’s rivers to make money, the company’s have to agree to provide certain public benefits and meet certain conditions. It’s those conditions that the negotiations cover.
The “conversations back and forth,” which began a month or so ago, Greene said, are a way of avoiding the process getting bogged down with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) “having to make determinations based on contests between parties.”
“We’re trying to find a middle ground,” Greene added. “There have been a lot of conversations back and forth of different issues that are out there.” He declined to be more specific.
Tom Miner, a Franklin Regional Planning Board member who has been a liaison with the Franklin COG-led Connecticut River Streambank Erosion Committee, said those attending the settlement discussions have agreed formally to not disclose specifics of the talks.
The goal of the overall relicensing process, Miner said, is for all groups to reach agreement on the issues by the end of the year. These include erosion along the Connecticut River’s banks in the 20-mile pool between the Vernon, Vt., and Turners Falls dams, fish habitat in the river’s Turners Falls “dry stretches” and recreational access to the river.
Miner, a former co-director of the Connecticut River Conservancy’s predecessor — the Connecticut River Watershed Council — said “behind the curtain” settlement discussions haven’t taken place on licensing before for any of the plants along this river, but added, “There have been so many FERC proceedings, I’m sure it’s been utilized before” as a technique to “avoid acrimonious results at the time a license is issued.”
A collaborative process during relicensing of the dams along the Deerfield River in the 1990s brought together recreational and environmental, government and nonprofit groups in an ongoing “compact” process that was more public and less of a utility-led effort, Miner said.
He called it “bizarre” that there are studies that still need to be completed this late in a process that began in early 2013 and needs to be wrapped up by next May.
But of the current talks with FirstLight, Miner said, “This has the conceivable benefit of not having to fight over things in court or in FERC’s procedural process. If there are key agreements that we can work out among all parties, it’s a gain for everyone. And just because we signed on to take part, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in agreement to what it will produce.”