There is Something Wrong in PUD-land

There is something wrong in PUD-land. It's not apparent to the general public because, as has been the case for over 75 years, electricity from public utility districts is available at the nation's lowest prices, the domestic water is clean and flowing, the fiber-optic backbones are carrying our 21st century commerce, and wastewater is cleaned beyond all standards.

What's wrong is that the PUDs aren’t sticking together. Let's get this straight. In this state there is a constant, subtle battle between the privately-held monopolies that sell electricity and publicly-owned monopolies. A half-century ago one of our presidents casually called this battle a “yardstick.” There’s a little of each in this state, giving the general public a way to measure one against the other. It is a good balance for the citizens of Washington State.

But, if the public utility districts, collectively the largest electric utility in the state, aren't acting together, the balance and the measuring stick is broken. And that is where we are today.

The Washington PUD Association has been the gathering place for all things PUD for decades. The meetings are not always pretty, and family fights break out. But the keepers of this vision of locally controlled, self-defining utilities, have lost the vision. In a time when wise choices about energy and water need to be made by the people, for the people, their collective force is not so collected.

Recently Snohomish County PUD, Clark County PUD, and Chelan County PUD have formally disengaged from the association, or announced they soon will. If the populace of these counties, and a giant hydro generator like Chelan, are no longer part of the association, the voice of those remaining is weakened.

If this is a failure of the social experiment, where does the cause lie? The operations of the systems rest with the management, but the keepers of the vision and the association are the elected commissioners from each county or PUD. The buck stops there, period. If want to be in charge of policy, they had better evaluate the policy of what happens if the smaller, less populated counties have to go on their own, without the SnoPUDS, and Clarks of the world.

The association needs to decide who it is, what it is, why it is, and how it can best serve the public in the 21st century. There is too much information and too many issues, all of them moving too fast for these utilities to be presenting 25 separate positions to any larger audience. Congress, the legislature, local regulators, interest groups, and the governor need and deserve to hear a common voice from PUD-land if at all possible.

For the PUD commissioners to fail to respond to this opportunity to “reboot” their collective-action mechanism is a disservice to their customer/owners. It is a neglect of those who have fostered local control and utility choice in the past, and frankly takes the “P” out of PUD.

It's time to be counted!