From: Douglas Albright
<DudleyDevices@Aol.com>
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2019 1:13 PM
To: DudleyDevices@Aol.com; admonern@aol.com
Subject: Letter about FOIA search fee
Hi Will,
I got a response from HDC’s FOIA contact last Monday
that says she has spent 2.5 hours searching already and estimates another
3-hours will be required to find the records at a minimum cost of $168. The
actual price was left open-ended because Heather doesn’t know how long it will
take to find the requested documents. I believe this is disingenuous abuse of
the FOIA.
The fact is that government engineers have failed at
duplicating my Index Test Box with their renamed “Gate Blade Optimizer” and now
the people currently at HDC are just covering up the wrongdoings of their
predecessors by hiding the fact from us now that: government engineers were
unable to duplicate my Index Test Box.
I object to this new tactic of padding the cost of the
FOIA to discourage a private citizen from seeking information via the FOIA
process. This not the first time these guys have done this; that’s why I asked
you to send the FOIA so you could see any abuse first-hand. Did Heather copy
you on her reply to me?
The Next FOIA will ask for all funding and man-hours
expended on their Type-1 Optimizer or GBO projects to see how serious they are
about working on it.
I object to HDC charging a large fee for searching
because it doesn’t seem reasonable that Heather could be having trouble finding
the information I’ve asked for.
The information should be readily available. The 3-D
Cam profiles are standard operational data for these turbines. In 2006, after 2
successful demonstrations of my Index Test Box I was asking for 3-D Cam data on
all of the turbines at all of USACE’s dams to setup my Index Test Box data
storage for the entire Columbia River Power System. Data was easily produced
for Bonneville, Ice Harbor and McNary Dams, until
HDC decided they could do a better job of creating the (Index Test Box, Type-1
Optimizer or Gate Blade Optimizer - a rose by any other name…) than me,
commandeered the project by diverting my contract's funds to their Captive
Supplier and then buying their unproven product instead of my proven product.
What I want is:
1. some help in getting to the truth of this without
going personally bankrupt.
2. A Congressional Investigation (they are all-over
investigations these days – what’s one more?) into this situation to really get
to the truth.
3. A side-by-side comparison of the performance of my
Index Test Box against their Gate Blade Optimizer, winner take all.
Here’s what I think it will reveal:
Gate Blade Optimizer Index Test Box
That the Gate Blade Optimizer is a counterfeit,
non-functional knock-off of my successful Index Test Box.
My product is named Index Test Box. After I
successfully demonstrated my Index Test Box at USACE’s McNary and Ice Harbor Dams, HDC engineers commandeered my project and
started calling it their own, especially in ASME and IEEE hydropower working
groups where all of the major potential customers were represented.
HDC continued to call their reverse-engineering
project the Index Test Box for another year to avoid raising any eyebrows about
their Bait and Switch scam. Their project to reverse-engineer my product was
called Index Test Box until my complaints to DOD IG brought investigators
sniffing-around, then they changed the name to T1-Optimizer, and then to Gate
Blade Optimizer (GBO, the current name) to keep it off of the IG’s radar. The
name-change to T1-Optimizer was announced in a 1-23-2007 Bonneville Power
Administration Hydro Optimization Team (BPA HOT) meeting by Dan Ramirez (scan
down to yellow highlighted section). 2007-01-23
HOT_Minutes_No_Longer_Called_Index_Test_Box.htm Later on the name migrated to Gate Blade Optimizer
(GBO).
Another reason the search fee seems unreasonable is
the BPA FOIA response looking for “HOT Meeting Minutes” from May 2016 that
shows Dan Patla of HDC reporting that as of the
October 28, 2015 Hydro Optimization Team (HOT) Meeting, “…the data has been properly collected and stored.”
This “properly collected and stored” data would work
for my purposes and should be readily available without an extensive, expensive
faux search.
Figure 1 Excerpt
from Oct 28, 2015 HOT Meeting
The full Minutes of that meeting are at
this link: (It’s a few
pages down - the redaction makes a good place-finder. Scroll down till you find
it.)
Yet another reason this elevated fee is unreasonable
is that according to Andrew’s recent reply to you the GBO is an active and ongoing project. If
Heather couldn't find anything in 2.5 hours, she’s looking in the wrong places
or people are hiding the information from her. She should just ask Andrew. He’s
got the answers.
The following email is Andrew’s reply for your
reference:
Figure 2 Email
from Andrew Long P.E.
And then Andrew said a FOIA was needed to ask for more
information. By the way, Will - Thanks
for sending that in for me.
The letter from HDC's FOIA District Officer, Heather
Hall demanding $168 to pay search fees was received last Monday. I believe this
is abuse of the FOIA process; the excessive search costs are bogus. The
requested information, if it exists, is being hidden by HDC engineers to
cover-up past wrongdoings by making this more expensive to discourage my FOIA
request.
Did Heather copy you on her $168 demand letter to me
(below)?
Would not a U.S. Senator’s office get such information
for free from a federal government agency in any event?
The collateral damages from this ruse
are huge.
The
problem isn’t just about me and my Index Test Box technology. Fish mortality in
Kaplan turbines is the root-cause of the lawsuit ongoing in the Portland,
Oregon Federal Court since 1998. Index-testing and optimizing these turbines is
the best, most effective way to reduce fish mortality in turbines by correcting
the problem at its source.
The
Environmental Preservation Act (EPA) lawsuit was brought by the 5 Native
American Tribes that fish the Columbia for a living and a host of
environmentalist agencies (Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Save our
Wild Salmon etc.) against USACE, DOE, USBR and NOAA for killing all the fish in
the river with hydroelectric dams.
The
Judge’s remedies include spilling ½ of the water annually instead of generating
power. Spilling scoots the fish past the dams without
going through the turbines by throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars
annually. The judge is aware of this and decided that saving the fish is worth
hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Add
to this waste the cost of building, maintaining and operating the fish
hatcheries, fish-ladders, fish-diversion screens and trough and gutter systems
that bypass the dams.
Court-ordered
costs to the Federal Treasury for fish-morality-mitigation projects are said to
exceed $1B annually, when the entire problem could be solved by simply
index-testing and optimizing each and every turbine individually. For many
years marine biologists have said that a properly tuned-up Kaplan turbine will
pass 95-98% of
fish unharmed – which is what they set out to do in the early 1980s but were
thwarted by others; highly-placed managers with commercially-based agendas.
Efforts have been steered away from the most effective and logical solution to
the fish-mortality problem in favor of more expensive, cumbersome and
ineffective fish-screens, fish ladders and bypass systems to move the fish
around the turbines.
Government
engineers took over my Index Test Box project but then failed to complete the
work and now they’re covering up the fact that they’ve wasted so much time and
money on this foolish, greedy scheme.
For
these and other reasons I believe they’re gouging me on FOIA fees to discourage
this inquiry, which is why I came to you with this issue in the first place.
Conclusion
It
seems unreasonable to demand search expenses because with Dan Patla (the engineer who seems to have inherited the GBO
project - or got left holding the bag if what I suspect is true) saying the
data is safely stored away and Andrew Long saying the GBO is an ongoing, active
project – how is it that Heather at HDC is unable to find any of the normal
operational data I have requested? This data is needed for any ongoing turbine
maintenance and upgrade program, if they don't have it, they're pencil-whipping
the maintenance tasks.
Something
else is going on here. They’re hiding the information for a personal agenda.
HDC’s
inability to capitalize on the Index Test Box technology ever since they took
it away from me in 2006 to pretend it was theirs has HDC acting like a Dog
in the Manger with the project now.
They
commandeered it away from me after seeing how valuable it is; and now because
they can’t personally benefit from my invention via their Captive Supplier prearrangements they won’t let the Index Test Box project go
forward with anyone else benefiting from the enterprise.
What
can be done about this?
Doug
Albright
Actuation Test Equipment Company
Heather's email about search fees is attached below:
On
5/14/2019 11:27 AM, FOIA-NWP wrote:
Mr. Albright:
The FOIA allows fees to be charged to certain types of
requestors who are placed in one of three categories: commercial, news media,
and "other".
Requesters who do not qualify in
another category are considered “other” requestors and ordinarily request agency
records for their personal use. Based on the information contained in
your request, you are considered an “other” requestor and shall receive two
hours search and all review efforts at no cost. Search efforts exceeding
two hours are charged at a rate of $48 per hour (see Fee Schedule, 32
C.F.R. § 286.12).
Please be advised that search
efforts have exceeded two hours (currently, 2.5 hrs).
The Corps estimates an additional 3 hours will be necessary to compile all the
documents before this office may review. As indicated above, all review
efforts are at no cost to you, search efforts here forward will be charged; we
estimate approximately $168. Please note, this is an estimate and we
cannot guarantee the costs will be more/less.
Please reply to this email
acknowledging costs associated and willingness to pay those costs. Also, please
be aware that, in accordance with 5 USC § 552(a)(6)(A)(ii)(I), your request has
been put on hold until we receive a written response from you.
Regards,
Heather
………………………………..
Heather HallDistrict
FOIA Officer
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Northwestern Division
Portland District Counsel, CENWP-OC
333 SW First Avenue
Portland, OR 97204-3495
(503) 808-4521 | FOIA-NWP@usace.army.mil
http://www.nwp.usace.army.mil/About/FOIA.aspx