This month two senators, John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, made fun of the $8 million in federal stimulus spending on Albany's "Talking Water Gardens" wetlands project. Its inclusion among 100 possibly wasteful or ridiculous stimulus projects was based on wrong or incomplete information. One wonders how they would have reacted had they known more of the story.

Albany and Millersburg got $4 million each under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to build the 39-acre wetlands near the Albany-Millersburg treatment plant. Construction will start early in February 2010. The project is designed to cool the treated effluent from the treatment plant and from the Wah Chang metals company before it enters the Willamette River. Albany says the wetlands will also further purify the effluent.

So far, so good.

The river has to be cooled, especially during early fall, to accommodate spawning salmon, according to the Department of Environmental Quality.

The DEQ's modeling has determined that just downstream from Albany, the "thermal load" coming in elevates the river's temperature in early October, the critical period, by 0.3 degrees Celsius, or 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gene Foster, section manager for watershed management in the DEQ, says this thermal load comes from three sources, the Albany treatment plant, with 197 kilocalories a day; Wah Chang with about 117 kilocalories; and the Albany Paper Mill, with a whopping 581 kilocalories per day.

Now, sad to say, International Paper has shut down operations at the paper mill, killing the mill's remaining 230 jobs, all paying very well. Right away, 65 percent of the thermal load contributed to the river below Albany is gone - even before the waterfalls in the Talking Water Gardens has said its first word.

International Paper says it will not sell the plant for production of containerboard, so the prospect that the plant's heat load on the Willamette River is restored is - unfortunately from the jobs standpoint - bleak.

The DEQ says it cannot separate the heat signatures of Albany, the paper mill and Wah Chang on the river. But with two-thirds of the heat load gone, it is reasonable to guess that the effect in raising the river's temperature is reduced from 0.3 degrees C to 0.1 degree.

This is almost nothing, and it lasts for only a short distance. When the river passes the mouth of the Santiam nine miles downstream, its summertime temperature drops several tenths of a degree, the DEQ's Foster estimates.

The senators ranked the "Talking Water Gardens" as No. 64 on their list of 100 questionable stimulus expenses. Wonder where they would have ranked it now that the heat load is so much less, or what they would say about about federal regulations that are forcing the expenditure of $13 million (the expected cost of the project including property acquisition), and will cause sewer rates to rise to help repay part of the stimulus grants, all in order to "cool" a river by one-tenth of a degree C over a few miles to accommodate salmon, which are not even known to spawn in that reach? (hh)