“They
acknowledged when the license was up, they no longer had the right to
use the property,” Hartsell explained. “We’re saying there needs to be
an equivalency for the run of our river, and when I say ‘our,’ I mean
everybody’s. It’s not a private entity. The feds and the state have had
control of the run of the rivers since the beginning of the republic.” The
language of the Federal Power Act includes a stipulation that the
controlling entity, in this case Alcoa, must estimate the recapture
value of the resource in the event it must surrender the rights to that
resource, Hartsell said. “There is a statutory formula for how you calculate recapture and Alcoa computed it to be $24.2 million in 2006,” Hartsell said.