C in the FPA. The Policy Statement reasserted that the Commission was allowed to either deny a new license and/or require the removal of the dam, or impose expensive environmental conditions on a new license that might cause the project to become unprofitable (Sherk,1996). Furthermore, the Policy Statement decreed that FERC would place the responsibility of financing the decommissioning of the dam and restoration of the river upon the shoulders of the owner since the licensee created the project and benefited from its operations. The Commission also made it very clear that it would like for the parties involved to attempt creative, voluntary settlement agreements that could resolve the issue of relicensing, but it retained the authority to force decommissioning nevertheless. (Project Decommissioning at Relicensing: Policy Statement, 60 Fed.Reg.339(1995)]. One could almost read into this as being the physical evidence of FERCs reluctance to test the validity of their FPA-granted power in court. The deliberations over the Edwards Manufacturing Company relicensing again continued uneventfully for about two years, until the late fall of 1996. For the past six years the Kennebec Coalition had been working to compile a report documenting the innumerable benefits of removing the Edwards Dam, covering everything from sportfishing to tourist trade to the aesthetically pleasing view. From the moment the Coalition dropped the massive seven thousand-page report on the desk of the Commission, the remaining proceedings of the case started to move noticeably faster. That was the turning point. FERC had never seen anything like that (Brownie Carson, executive director, Natural Resources Council of Maine) (Allen,1999). In July of 1997 the Commission had completed its Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and found that even the best available fish passageway facilities would not be conducive to restoring the fishery, and tha...
