Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions - S. 2319

STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS

By Mr. ALEXANDER:

S. 2319. A bill to authorize and facilitate hydroelectric power licensing of the Tapoco Project; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I rise to speak about an issue that concerns the Senator from North Carolina and her constituents. I know of her love for the Great Smoky Mountains and her concern for the outdoors, and while most of what I am about to say affects eastern Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains, anything that affects eastern Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains has something to do with western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. This is some good news for the outdoors men and women and all of the people who love the mountains, the valleys, and the rivers of east Tennessee and western North Carolina.

The legislation I have introduced will save thousands of good-paying jobs at the Aluminum Company of America plants in Blount County, which is my hometown, and at the same time provide recreational opportunities on thousands of acres of ALCOA mountain land for canoeists, hikers, and fisher men and women. Of importance to all of us who enjoy the outdoors in east Tennessee and North Carolina, this agreement should help to create fuller lake reservoirs during the summer recreation season.

This bill I have introduced today is necessary because since 1913, a little more than 90 years, the Aluminum Company of America has operated dams high on the Little Tennessee River adjacent to what is now the Great Smoky Mountain National Park near the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. These dams were built before either the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Great Smoky Mountain National Park were created. These four dams provide half of the electric power ALCOA uses to operate its plants in the valley below the mountains in Blount County, TN. ALCOA's license to operate these four dams expires next year. The company has applied to the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission for a 40-year license renewal.

ALCOA's license renewal application has created a lot of interest in the Tennessee Valley, and for two reasons. The first reason involves the economic well-being of thousands of current and retired ALCOA workers in the communities in which they live. The second reason is the application has attracted broad attention from conservation organizations because of the opportunity to create recreational opportunity on land ALCOA owns in the Little Tennessee River watershed adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Some of this ALCOA land is actually within the legislation boundaries of the park.

On this chart the darker area is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This is a unique park created in the mid-1930s and given by the people of North Carolina and Tennessee to the United States. It is the only national park in our system that was given to the Government and not bought by the Government. It has 500,000 acres, more or less, and it is visited each year by about 10 million Americans. It is by far the most visited national park in America. Yellowstone National Park, as an example, has about 3 million visitors a year.

This is the Little Tennessee River. It was the center of the Cherokee civilization when the European pioneers came. This is the river on which Alcoa began to build dams nearly a century ago.

Around these four dams on the river is the land we are talking about. This is approximately 10,000 acres that lie between the Great Smokey Mountain National Park and between the Cherokee National Forest and the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness Area. This is Tennessee. This is North Carolina. The Tennessee/North Carolina border runs right across the top of those 6,000-foot mountains. One of the most beautiful areas in America with virgin timber is right here in the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Creek Wilderness Area just across the line from Tennessee. So we are talking in my remarks and in this legislation about 10,000 acres that lie between the Great Smokies and the Cherokee National Forest.

One may wonder, just listening to this, what does that have to do with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Under our rules, Alcoa now has to apply for a 40-year renewal to operate these four dams. The conservation organizations in the area and the neighboring communities began a discussion with Alcoa 7 years ago about what would happen when that application renewal came up. That 7 years of discussion between the Aluminum Company of America, the neighboring regions, and the various conservation organizations have come up with a settlement agreement on which people have worked long and hard. Basically it does this. Alcoa will basically swap or exchange this land here in exchange for community and conservation support for the license renewal.

We are going to hold a hearing on this whole subject on April 27 in the Senate Energy Committee. I look forward to working with our chairman, Senator Domenici, and with the chairman of the National Park Subcommittee, Senator Thomas, on that day.

We hear a lot about obstinate companies that are not interested in the environment. We hear a lot about conservation organizations that will not be reasonable. Here is a good story. Here is a textbook example of how a major American company can work with communities and conservation organizations to help Americans keep a high standard of living as well as to conserve the environment. Once approved, I expect it to become a model for many other companies, communities, and conservation groups.

I see on the floor now the Senator from Georgia, who spent a fair amount of his younger life in Tennessee, probably in these same mountains. He, as I, and the Senator from North Carolina, have visited and hiked in and enjoyed these mountains as thousands do. Let me say first a word about the jobs involved and then a word about the recreational opportunities.

On the jobs, looking back those 90 years, this is the story. In 1913 a group of men from Pittsburgh came quietly to Maryville, TN, to meet with the mayor. The businessmen were looking for a location for an aluminum smelter. They came to Maryville because alumina is extracted from bauxite ore in an electrolysis process requiring huge amounts of electricity, and the opportunity for producing huge amounts of electricity existed better in the Tennessee Valley than in almost any other part of the United States.

The Great Smoky Mountains rise to more than 6,600 feet above the valley in which Maryville is situated, and the rainfall in those mountains is more than 80 inches a year, one of the highest in America. So that combination, heavy rainfall and fast-running water, created a formula for making cheap hydroelectric power, so Alcoa built four dams along the Little Tennessee River: Calderwood, Cheoah, Chilhowee, and Fontana. Half of the electricity for the Alcoa operations in east Tennessee comes from those four dams. The rest of Alcoa's power is purchased from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Here is what happened to the far-sighted mayor who visited with those Alcoa executives in 1913 and approved the location of that aluminum smelter in the Tennessee Valley. He was literally tarred and feathered and run out of town because the mountain people did not want to be disturbed by what they were afraid was about to come and disturb their lifestyle. What came was the largest aluminum smelter in the world, which, when combined with a fabricating plant and a rolling mill, employed as many as 14,000 during World War II. The Alcoa plants made the metal that helped win the war.

Meanwhile, the Alcoa jobs, those 14,000 jobs since 1913 until today, transformed one of the poorer parts of America. When Alcoa came to Appalachia, family incomes of these families of east Tennessee were about one-third of the national average. I know about this. Our family has been in that part of Tennessee for seven generations. But the Aluminum Company of America began to pay steelworker wages to these 14,000 families and those wages were national wages. So suddenly men and women from all over east Tennessee, and I imagine some from North Carolina, were driving dozens of miles to get one of those Alcoa jobs that brought with it good income, good health care, and a retirement income.

Some of those who went to work there included many African Americans who had been brought to Tennessee from Alabama to help build the plants. The changes that those Alcoa jobs brought to Blount County and to the surrounding counties is proof positive of what three generations of good jobs can do: good housing, low crime, strong families, some of the best public schools anywhere in America, almost nobody rich but almost everybody with a good job.

Today, there are 2,000 Alcoa jobs in east Tennessee. That means $140 million in salaries and benefits. It means $½ million a year in Alcoa Foundation education scholarships to children of those employees. It means $230 million each year in purchased goods and services; $7 million in State and local taxes-a total of $377 million a year just to Tennessee.

I must confess a personal interest in this story. I grew up hearing about Charles Martin Hall and the discovery of Aluminum. My father went to work for Alcoa in 1941, the year after I was born. The job the plant manager, Mr. Granville Swaney, offered to him as a safety engineer paid twice what my father was being paid as principal at West Side Elementary School, and one of those Alcoa Foundation scholarships went to me in 1958, making it possible for me to attend Vanderbilt University, something I never could have afforded to do otherwise.

So you can see why I believe, as well as I am sure almost all Tennesseans believe, it is critically important to renew this hydroelectric license for another 40 years and keep these good jobs in the Tennessee Valley. Without these four dams providing low-cost reliable power, these jobs would be gone overnight, probably to Alcoa plants in Quebec or Iceland where the hydroelectric power is plentiful and cheap.

The second reason and the final reason this settlement agreement has attracted such widespread interest is because of the recreation opportunities it will provide.

Tapoco is the name of the Alcoa subsidiary that owns the four dams I described along this Little Tennessee River. The acres contained within the Tapoco project are sandwiched between nearly 10,000 acres of nonproject lands owned by Alcoa. These nonproject lands are the 10,000 acres in green here. This is in the area I mentioned of the Great Smokies, the Cherokee National Forest, the Nantahala National Forest, the Citico Creek, and Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness Areas.

A critical requirement in obtaining this 40-year license renewal is this settlement agreement negotiated by and with a large group of interested relicensing stakeholders. These stakeholders include the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the eastern band of Cherokees, State agencies representing Tennessee and North Carolina, numerous nongovernmental organizations, local government, homeowners associations, and individual citizens.

They began to discuss all of this 7 years ago. It has taken all of that time to work this out.

In order to make this effective, however, Congress must authorize the land exchanges in the settlement agreement. The terms and conditions under the settlement agreement will then become terms and conditions under Alcoa's hydroelectric license.

In order for the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission to have legal authority to put the settlement agreement terms and conditions in the license, legislation from Congress is required prior to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission making a relicensing decision in August of 2004.

Much of the settlement agreement is focused on the transfer of land interests between the Great Smoky Mountains, the U.S. Forest Service, and Alcoa.

Let me see if I can describe it simply.

The first part of the land swap is between the Great Smokies National Park and Alcoa. The Great Smokies will transfer 100 acres of flood areas of land in exchange for 186 acres of biologically sensitive acreage that Alcoa owns.

All of us growing up always heard about people from Florida coming up and wanting to buy land and we would sell them land that was flooded, or they would sell us land that was flooded. But basically, flooded land-100 acres-is being swapped for 186 acres of land that is a biologically diverse area, and this will go into the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

In fact, it was already within the legislative boundaries. But I suppose the park ran out of money back in the 1930s and couldn't buy it.

The second component is a big tract of land-6,000 acres between the Smokies and the Cherokee National Forest.

After a complicated set of arrangements, what can happen is this:

It involves the Nature Conservancy, but this legislation authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to purchase this land at a reasonable value from the Nature Conservancy after Alcoa gives it to the Nature Conservancy.

The long and short of it will be that after 3 years, hopefully the Great Smokies will be 6,000 acres larger and immediately people who live in this region will be able to enjoy this 6,000 acres.

There is one other part to this. There is a 4,000-acre tract over here. The Nature Conservancy will own this under the agreement, but it will also be open to outdoor recreation, to hunters, and to fishermen.

All of this is part of Alcoa's relicensing agreement. The people who work here get the jobs. Everybody who lives here gets to enjoy a national park with 6,000 more acres and an area that includes 4,000 more acres.

That is the legislation I have introduced today. The legislation will allow the settlement agreement worked on for 7 years to be implemented and for Alcoa's relicensing process at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to proceed.

Alcoa, American Rivers, Blount County, city of Alcoa, city of Maryville, eastern band of Cherokee Indians, Great Smoky Mountains National Park-I say particularly the Nature Conservancy and the National Parks Conservation Association-thank you for your hard work.

Also, North Carolina Department of Environment and Conservation, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Tennessee Clean Water Network, and various other organizations I want to mention have also been a part of this effort.

It gives me a great deal of personal pleasure to be able to come to the floor and compliment the hard work of others over the last 7 years.

The hard work of the Aluminum Company of America, the creativeness and reasonableness of the conservation organizations and communities will result in 2,000 good jobs being saved and all of us being able to enjoy up to 10,000 more acres adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.