Listening in by phone is so much better than traveling to these meetings.  It greatly reduces one's exposure to the toxins of this process. 

1. A learned expert on Secured Transactions  from Mike's firm gave an opening address on the principles of granting and receiving the grantation of security interests.  Almost completely irrelevant. The guy up and suggested that for a given transaction, the parties might consider giving a security interest in an office building, ie.real estate,  as collateral.

2. A cannabalized EEI Credit Support Annex  was tabled by Deedee Russo of Reliant and muddled through.  The format was typically:  
   Mike:  "Okay guys, why don't you explain to me what you want."  
   Member:  "We think we need this...blah blah blah, "
   Mike:  "Okay, we'll put that into our next draft and have a conference call in December and a meeting in   January and remember, none of this is binding, its all optional." 

3.  At the very end, a lawyer from PacifiCorp managed to raise the vital issue and Mike got his hackles up very quickly.  The PacifiCorp guy was basically saying that the WSPP was becoming more and more like the EEI and that this made it more and more difficult for parties to decide which agreement to use.  His implication was that the WSPP should try to remain different or throw in the towel and be just like the EEI.  Small reacted from a position of religion, dogmatically and loudly asserting that the two agreements were fundamentally different.   Here is where he left himself open to the shining light of rational analysis:  if someone, had the time,  and we thought it mattered enough, the approach to take would be this:  

Dispassionate Spokesperson:  A question has been raised:  is the WSPP agreement becoming more or less like the EEI?  To fairly answer this question one needs to look at all the changes that have been made by  the WSPP in the last three years, comparing each change to the EEI agreement.   (prepare comparison document).  If we look at the evidence do we see convergence or divergence?  The answer will be overwhelmingly convergence.  If this objective study could be placed before the "Membership" it would speak for itself.  Nobody would have to utter a word.  The comparison document would do the job.  If we are going to bother playing with these guys, this is what we should do. It would take some time, but if we circulated it to the membership and then merely raised the question of future direction, we might deal this tedious process a mortal blow. 

 Believe it or not, the solution to  this process is to follow the same process that went on when the King James Bible was put together in 1611.  Various scholars took various views on how various Hebrew passages should be translated, and it took a committee of draftsmen, appointed and sent to Geneva  by King James  to pound out the form that has stood the test of time for centuries. The Joint Drafting Committee's time on the historical stage is finally arriving.  I am going to talk to this Pacificorp fellow and Brenda Anderson at BPA and see what happens.     ----cgy