NOTE: After reading, please leave your comments in the space provided at the end of this article.

CENTRE — A spokesman for Alabama Power (APCO) last week told The Post he is hopeful his company's request for a new 50-year license to operate Weiss Dam will clear the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's approval process by the middle of next year.

APCO has been operating Weiss on annual renewals of its existing license since the original expired in 2007. That license was issued in 1957, the year before the company began construction of the dam near Leesburg.

A FERC license contains specific terms and conditions describing how the project should be operated with respect to all of the required project purposes, such as power generation, flood control, recreation, environmental resources protection, etc.

“The FERC, in conjunction with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, issued their final environmental assessment regarding our license renewal last December,” Alabama Power Hydro Services Manager Jim Crew said last week. “That document is an in-depth analysis of the potential environmental effects of the project and had to be completed as part of the relicensing process.”

Now it appears to Crew and other Alabama Power officials that the process is nearing completion.

“Hopefully, by mid-year 2011, we'll have our new FERC license,” Crew said. “But that's strictly an educated guess on my part.”

Alabama Power has been working towards securing the new license, good for another half-century, since its relicensing process for Weiss Dam began in 2000. But even after Alabama Power gets its new license, the question of when, or even if, the company can reduce the winter drawdown of Weiss Lake will still have to be answered by the Corps of Engineers.

As The Post first reported in February 2007, government red tape and the decades-long water war between Alabama, Georgia and Florida have long slowed the Corps in its attempts to rewrite its Master Applications Manual, which outlines how the Corps operates and maintains the entire Coosa River basin.

Midway through Alabama Power's relicensing process, the Corps suddenly claimed the manual, first penned in the 1950s, needed to be rewritten.

“The manual is decades old and does not include a lot of situations that have changed over the years,” said Pat Robbins, Chief of Affairs for the Mobile District of the Corps on Engineers, in 2007. “It dictates how we operate the system, both during normal conditions and flood conditions.”

Robbins added that in order to allow the Corps to respond promptly and properly to any future flood event that might result from permanently higher wintertime levels in Weiss, the manual must be comprehensively updated.

But Alabama Power officials have long contended that it was unusual for the Corps to decide, literally in midstream of its relicensing process, that the existing manual required a major rewrite. That was almost four years ago.

“It's frustrating,” Crew said. “Our last filing, about a month ago, was a ten-page letter requesting FERC reconsider several Corps-related recommendations in the environmental assessment.”

Last week, a Corps of Engineers representative told The Post that new manual won't be finished for at least another year.

“We're probably looking at mid-2012,” said spokeswoman Lisa Coghlan. “This is typically a 3-5 year process.”

The language in the rewritten manual is important to people here because Alabama Power's renewal application includes a request to reduce the winter drawdown in Weiss from six feet to three feet.

Currently, Weiss rises to 564 feet above sea level at full pool every May. The water level is then is slowly reduced to 558 ft. above sea level by early December.

The request for the reduction, which would mean a higher winter pool of 561 feet above sea level, came after years of efforts by local groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Weiss Lake Improvement Association.

Those groups claim a less shallow Weiss Lake in wintertime would encourage tourists to hang around longer, increase lakefront property values, and provide more coverage for spawning fish populations in the “Crappie Capital of the World.”

Weiss Lake Improvement Association President Carolyn Landrem said she was under the impression Alabama Power had applied for a temporary variance, or permit, to allow for a reduced winter drawdown to begin in 2011.

“But there are a lot of politics involved, and that has already changed a hundred times,” she said.

Crew said there was never a request for a permanent variance that would allow Alabama Power to raise the winter level in Weiss Lake.

“We have requested temporary variances in the recent past,” Crew said. “But those were mostly in 2007 and 2008, because of the drought. Any permanent change in the winter level of Weiss Lake would have to be laid out in the new license.”