Grade: A-

I do believe that city government should be more involved. Although energy and privately-owned energy are governed by the Washington UTC, there are a lot of pieces and parts and advocacy that we can be doing at the city level.

I’ll give you an example. I’m currently reading House Bill 1110 because I was asked about signing on to that house bill related to clean energy and carbon neutral and transportation. To me, one of the biggest things we can do is learn about how we can best advocate. Because even though perhaps at the city level there are certain pieces that we don’t have control over, like how they set the rates and which projects they themselves might work on, because there are certain things that are governed at the state level, there are pieces that we can do.

For example, the 2050 vision is currently out for comment. So one of the things we can do is let our citizens know that, as we look at Vision 2050, there are pieces and parts to that that we might want to make sure is in there. Looking at energy and how that feeds into our community and smart cities and climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be parts of that.  When I think about K4C and King County trying to get more cities engaged so that we have a louder voice when we go down to Olympia to advocate with our legislators around clean energy and moving towards renewables quicker, making sure that we actually are going to get off of the Colstrip [coal plant].

You know dirty fuel in our community is certainly things that we can do as a community. If you look at Bellevue, one of the things we are doing, if you look at our Smart City and our Smart Energy, what we’ve actually put up on our website is that in 2020 we want to increase our customer access to real-time energy usage information so that we can put information in the hands of our community. Then they can make better decisions about their own energy usage. I think that’s huge. The other one it talks about is working with PSE so they can execute demand response programs and get more renewables as part of their mixture as well. So those are just a couple of examples.

I think the other thing we could be doing is looking at what other cities are doing. So for example, Bellevue is updating our ESI (Environmental Stewardship Initiative). The one we currently have is 5 years old. It had 57 actions in there – some of them to do with all different kinds of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which energy is one of them. What we learned when I went to listen to Susan Anderson from Portland come and speak, Portland has 142 actions. They have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions significantly in the last 20 years. Bellevue says that for the last 6 years, [we achieved] 19% reduction in municipal and only 7% for the community in terms of greenhouse gas emission reduction. So there’s a lot we can do and I think the more we can actually educate our community about what’s happening from the standpoint of giving them information and also aspirations about what you can do, then we can do it together. I don’t believe cities can do it alone.

I think we also need to bring in our business community because buildings are 40% of our greenhouse gas emissions as well as energy use. So we want to reduce energy consumption as well as using cleaner energy. We need to be coming together to do that.

(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+

We should be benchmarking against what other utilities are doing. And so one of the biggest things we can do is look at what is Seattle City Light, Tacoma Power, Snohomish PUD doing? What are other municipalities doing in terms of their strategies, their ideas, for moving to renewable sooner. How are they looking at reaching out to the community in terms of reducing people’s usage or using their energy in a different way? So absolutely I think that these are very important pieces, because in my mind, regardless of whether they are publicly or privately run, the governance structure from the WUTC [Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission] should be the same.

So from the standpoint of what they’re actually trying to accomplish, we should be looking at what they’re doing and I would say it’s both best practices as well as lessons learned. So what are the things they tried that hasn’t worked and let’s make sure we don’t go down that same rabbit hole of things that other people have tried that haven’t worked.

As part of my work, I was the chair of the project Review Committee for a year. That’s a Statewide committee that [considers] if a public agency comes and they want to do design-build or GCCM or how they contract for work, we would approve those. So Chelan PUD has come a couple of times to use design-build as the delivery method for upgrading some of their turbines and power generation facilities. So I think that’s another thing we should be looking at: are we actually delivering on the kind of improvements and projects in the most efficient and effective way? We should be looking at whether what other PUDs are doing, not just within our county region.

Grade: B+

Well, I would say this has been a really tough one, because I came on the council after the permit had already been issued and the appeal had already been rejected, and we were left with voting on an easement to allow the project to happen. One of the challenges I think we have is that when we’re planning, the projects are sometimes 7, 10, 15 years down the road. And I don’t know that everyone can completely picture what’s happening at the time to be able to do good advocacy.

I say it like that because I think one of the challenges about negotiating a better solution is that it is not a legislative one. It is not a policy one. It is not a permitting regulatory one. So what we’re left with then is very much a reaching out to PSE and finding ways to softly influence about whether there’s any other options that they can foresee because of their desire to be a good business partner to the community. And so I unfortunately don’t have any magic pixie dust to sprinkle on this to make it better. And I think that is the reality of this particular item. I know the community’s come out many, many times and the company is clear about the frustration the community has. I don’t see a path forward that is any kind of a hammer at all. All I see is one where public opinion and coming out and continuing to suggest that they look at alternatives. That’s the only thing I can see, so I don’t have a good answer here.

Grade: A

I have not done any study on this. The only thing that I do know is that it is a process to actually get all the way from a private utility to a publicly owned one. I always believed that we should be looking at what are the pros and cons and understanding what we’re getting into in order to embark on this. So my thinking about a ballot measure would be to really understand the process and what it takes.

And because other utilities have gone through this, we should study it thoroughly before we jump into it. Having worked at the Port of Seattle for 15 years as an employee, I understand when policies get implemented that are well-intentioned, and yet we have not fully vetted out all of the pros and cons, then in the implementation, it is really, really bumpy. So I am always very cautious in terms of actually saying giving an emphatic yes or no to something until I’ve studied it thoroughly. So just like the House Bill 1110 that I received an email about. The thing is like 10 pages long with a lot of  new sections in it, and I really want to understand before I put my name behind it.

So when you ask, would I support a PUD? I would say yes, once I understand all the permutations and what we’re talking about, because I always believe that it’s much harder once we’ve launched, to then say, “Oops!” We ran into all these things from an implementation standpoint. You know, systems are very interesting. Because what I see is that a lot of times the issues that we have with the outcomes are exactly what the system chunks out because we have created systems that are inefficient, ineffective, and have inherent flaws in them. And so I’m just always cautious.

I do believe that when you look at a private utility, their job is to make money. In government, it’s about making sure that we’re serving the community and that the revenues and the expenses balance out, so we’re not a burden on the community. So that would be one of the things I’d want to understand. If it becomes publicly-owned PUD, is there a cost implication for the community and the government and what is that? Let’s make sure we understand it before we actually jump in and say yes.