Grade: A-

When I think about this question, I actually think about the regulation in and of itself, because that is the impact that government has on many things. Local government absolutely should be a participant in determining where it goes, and how energy is used, and how they decide what sort of energy sources they actually have, because it directly impacts their communities. I’ve lived in a community that’s been directly impacted in a remarkable way.

I was in Whatcom County working at a juvenile correctional facility with an interesting additional responsibility. There was a button that I would need to press in the event  (It was really for the paper mills) that the toxins in the air became such that they were poisonous. That would recirculate the air within the building for the juvenile correctional facility and also all those wonderful county officials down below. Well there was a day while I was working when I looked out a window and I saw something I never thought I’d see. That was a mushroom cloud, and it was as tall as the building. I was eye-to-eye with it. It was at a distance and we had to make a decision. We couldn’t get hold of the county folks and we pushed the button. I learned a lot about what communities don’t have in terms of “say” because a six-year-old kid died that day. That was the [Olympic] pipeline and I went to the different meetings. I was just graduated from undergrad at Western Washington University, was working there, got to know the mom, and got to understand the powerlessness of that particular community because that pipeline was by their home, and their kid was playing in the creek.

So I think the cities absolutely should flex their muscle, groups should flex their muscle. I don’t like how deregulation actually has worked in the area of energy and utilities in general.

In terms of my own ideas, I think that it just needs to be said first and it’s not going to be popular because a lot of things just aren’t popular, especially if people are making money off of them.  In these cases with energy, with power, people are making money off them and sometimes people forget, because it wasn’t their child, or wasn’t their fear.  In terms of Bellevue. I’ve been here since ‘84-‘85 at Franklin Middle School and High School, but I have never spent that much time in the Eastgate area. As far as I went was the old Safeway and the Dairy Queen now at the car dealership, but now I live kind of up the hill.

And my son goes to Puesta Del Sol school, and I remember him first going to daycare, Jing Mei, right next to these giant power lines, and I was afraid. The truth is I won’t buy a house by a power line. I just won’t, for my own feelings.  Then driving to Puesta Del Sol, I was stopped at a light near Somerset, and I looked to the left and I saw power lines, with a yellow sort of circle that was telling you about the pipeline.  And I remember that kid. What a combination.

(see full question)

Utilities like Seattle City Light, Tacoma Power, and Snohomish County PUD are all forecasting flat or declining consumption of electricity for at least the next decade. These forecasts and Washington’s mandate to transition to a cleaner energy grid have implications for power planning. How might they influence your input to policies implemented at the city level?

Grade: B+

Well, I’m pleased that Washington has a mandate to transition to cleaner energy. I think that that’s of critical importance. I think that infrastructure development and maintenance in and of itself is sometimes something that can put us in some very weird places.

This is a slightly different case, but I’ll get to the point. One of the concerns that some of my friends have about the building of jails is that we will fill them. Basically, what that means is that if you build a jail, then you’ll use it, you’ll fill it.  Our concern isn’t necessarily whether or not it needs to be filled.  Sometimes it is what about all the different alternatives that we could have come up with, that would have been more successful.

So the concern about major allocation of resources is if you build things in one exclusive way, then you sometimes put yourself in a space where you stick with that, and you use your own personal biases or institutional biases to say that’s the route to go, without paying attention to what actually needs to be paid attention to.  In relation to climate change, in relation to whether or not that resource is actually available or dying, in relationship to whether or not that resource is in a place where it’s actually causing people to be sick, longer and longer, or more often in particular regions. So we want to be careful that we’re not so dedicated to one particular route that we end up in a space where we can’t be creative about what we actually do and recognize when we might be wrong.

Grade: B-

Regulate them, but that’s a whole different conversation. But it’s troubling frankly that they can call themselves Puget Sound Energy and be in a space where they are a private entity. “Puget Sound” would at least suggest that they’re actually representing a regional interest as some sort of pseudo governmental entity. So it’s troubling. It’s also something where I think that in negotiation, it’s difficult to negotiate with somebody that has absolute power. It’s interesting in terms of the energy side of this, but absolute power, as many know and has been said repeatedly, corrupts absolutely. In circumstances when you’re negotiating with someone that has absolute power you have to create alternatives in terms of who you go to, and who you work with.

Our trees should be a no-go because they’re our oxygen. It’s a difficult message, no, it’s a horrific awful rotten message to actually send to the folks in our community in relation to what trees actually mean to the population.

One of my grandfathers was a logger and I actually went logging with him when I was 16 or 17 years old, not thinking that he was 64, 65, and he out cut me everywhere on everything and it was pretty embarrassing. But there were some truths that he told me, and one of the truths that he told me was they were supposed to be planting trees and they didn’t because there wasn’t anybody there to really make sure that that happened. That was part of the power of the logging industry at that moment in time and as a result of some things that happened so many decades ago, we have to really highlight how important our trees are to our environment, to our subsistence.

We’re really at a tipping point frankly on the planet, and we’re moving in an awful direction. And I know that I don’t do everything that I need to do, and I’m trying to figure it out.  I’m the first one to admit that, but cutting down trees is not something that the city should endorse. It should be under the rarest of circumstances, like it’s a danger to somebody. These trees haven’t done anything.

Grade: A-

I would support a public utility. I would support governmental control in relation to energy.  I’m not sure exactly what the word “foreign” means in this particular case, but that same analogy that I gave you in relation to prisons also was present in those sorts of things. Because some of my many friends have concerns about privatized prisons. Why? Because it highlights an interest in making money rather than assisting and helping people grow and come back to a community. I think that when you privatize energy, the idea becomes profit over the utilitarian good and so public utilities makes sense, regulation makes sense.

Folks that are in city government, county government, state government, government in general, should recognize that their responsibility is to operate from a utilitarian perspective, while valuing the Constitution that we have, and protecting all.  And private entities are for profit. When the rubber meets the road, they don’t tend to protect all the folks.