Ada County to decide on selling Barber Dam to investors including former Micron CEO
Ada County intends to sell Barber Dam to a team of investors, filings show.
An agenda for Tuesday’s Ada County Commissioners meeting shows that the county plans to sign an agreement to sell the dam, located on the Boise River on Boise’s eastern edge, to Barber Pool Hydro, an LLC formed by investors specifically to buy it. A spokesperson for the commissioners could not immediately share the price or the details of the agreement.
The team of buyers includes engineer Ted Sorenson, former Micron CEO Mark Durcan and developer Larry Leasure. They have said they want the dam both to preserve the Barber Pool Conservation Area, which includes more than 700 acres of land adjoining the river, and to continue producing green energy. Fred Boelter, an engineer, will be involved in master planning activities.
The new owner must show the ability to own and operate the dam under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission guidelines. Sorenson told the commission in June that the investors would be able to do that, in part by forming an LLC that would demonstrate the stability required to transfer the dam’s FERC license.
Sorenson’s company, Sorenson Engineering Inc., has been involved in FERC licensing for more than 30 years, he told the commissioners at the time. The investors formed the Barber Pool Hydro LLC a few days later, records from the Idaho Secretary of State show.
Ada County has owned Barber Dam since 1977. It acquired the dam after the previous owner failed to pay taxes on it.
The dam generates hydropower that is sold to Idaho Power. It is now operated and maintained by Fulcrum LLC and Hull Street Energy, which acquired Barber Dam and 29 other hydroelectric plants across the country in January. It is not clear if or how operation or maintenance would change under new ownership. A spokesperson for Sorenson could not immediately be reached for comment.
Barber Dam has had problems in the past few years, including two separate instances in which a power outage effectively cut the flow of the Boise River. The most recent stop was last August. During that 61-minute power failure, the Idaho Department of Water Resources said fish, recreation and maintenance flows on the river all were interrupted, and downstream irrigators were deprived of water.
Ada County was fined $50,000 as a result. State law allows a fine of $50 per one-tenth cubic feet per second that gets diverted, a fine that would have cost the county $832,500 if not for a statutory maximum civil penalty.
Another outage in 2015 did the same thing, prompting Ada County to create an environmental advisory board, which has not met with quorum since September 2016.
This story was originally published August 24, 2020 at 11:33 AM.
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