A rural, recession-wracked town in central Oregon asked Capitol Hill lawmakers yesterday for rights to more water from a local river to attract technology companies interested in building water-hungry data centers there.

Local leaders from Prineville, Ore., told lawmakers that its timber and tire industries have given way to technology firms interested in building "server farms," massive facilities stocked with computers that serve as the engines to popular websites.

Facebook recently opened a $188 million data center in Prineville that helped drive unemployment down from a recent high of 20 percent, and two other firms are said to be in talks with city leaders. But the facilities consume large amounts of water to keep cool and Prineville, in what may be a sign of things to come for other rural areas courting a information industry, does not have enough (E&E Daily, June 20).

"For Prineville and the surrounding areas, these types of projects are good news because it means jobs. Good, family wage jobs," said Dan Gardner, a representative of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, whose Local 280 union covers workers in Prineville. "Before the Facebook project came along, there were several months where half of the Local's workforce was without work."

Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee's water and power subpanel heard testimony on a bill introduced by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) (H.R. 2060) that would allow the release of another 5,100 acre-feet of water from the Prineville Reservoir on the nearby Crooked River. That would, in turn, allow the town to pump the same amount of additional water from the ground. The reservoir now has about 80,000 acre-feet of unallocated water.

Critics of the bill, including the conservation group Trout Unlimited and the Bureau of Reclamation, say that trouble could arise in times of drought, leading to conflicts between users and harm to fish and wildlife if the town continued to draw its enlarged share of water without restriction.

"The bill fails to allocate any water for the specific purpose of improving downstream conditions for fish and wildlife," said Steve Moyer, Trout Unlimited's vice president for government affairs.

Bureau of Reclamation chief of staff Robert Quint also raised concerns, saying the bill would "preferentially benefit" Prineville and be inconsistent with the principle that the beneficiary of water rights should pay for them, as opposed to taxpayers.

Both Reclamation and Trout Unlimited stopped short of opposing the bill outright.

Walden said the criticism was more about "what the bill doesn't have in it" than what it does and that time was short, given that talks are already under way between the city and technology firms.

"We've got companies ready to locate in this area and create real jobs right away," he said.

Small-scale hydropower

Lawmakers also heard testimony from industry officials about the need to exempt small hydropower projects from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission permitting rules, which they said were costly, burdensome and standing in the way of tapping unused and environmentally harmless hydropower sources such as man-made canals, pipelines and conduits.

On such small scales, FERC rules can turn "simple straightforward hydropower projects into expensive, prolonged regulatory messes," said Nebraska Republican Rep. Adrian Smith, who introduced the bill along with California Democratic Rep. Jim Costa.

The bill (H.R. 795) would exempt hydropower projects generating less than 1.5 megawatts from the FERC permitting rules.

"This is necessary to ensure the already tenuous cost-benefit ratios of these projects are not further burdened by paperwork and bureaucratic red tape," said Gary Esslinger, treasurer-manager of the Elephant Butte Irrigation District.

Quint said the Bureau of Reclamation believed that environmental laws should continue to apply even if permitting requirements were lifted and urged that the bill wait until the department finished studies by the end of the year that would investigate hydropower opportunities and development along waterways, including conduits and canals.