Public deserves a medal for great participation

By Norm Gutzwiler, PUD Commissioner

12/1/2006

To those of you who have been to our public strategic planning sessions, we can’t say thank you enough. It’s so refreshing to look out at the audience and see a hundred faces instead of the meager two or three who show up for our regular board meetings on Monday afternoons.

Thank you for coming. Ours is a public utility, and participation by the caring members of our community is a crucial ingredient that keeps it running. We wish we had a lot more input throughout the year.

Now that we have had two strategic sessions and learned much of the detailed financial background of the PUD, we are approaching the next important step in our process – solutions for the future. In the next two sessions we will be looking at a variety of ideas on what this PUD can do to improve the long-term financial outlook.

We have great assets in the three dams we own. We have important services to deliver to our customers. We need to figure out the best way to combine our assets and our services to keep rates as low as possible and still meet the needs of a growing region.

I have no doubt that we can do it with your help. And with good work by our management team.

We hired new General Manager Rich Riazzi in May to bring his exceptional analytical business skills to the PUD and to communicate with our community about where we stand. He is doing precisely what we have asked and doing it in a way that appears to be well received by our customer-owners.

Many of you have sat through five or six hours of background to reach this exciting point of opportunity – figuring out the best course for the future. This is the fun part! We hope even more of you will join us early in 2007 as we take step three down our path of change.

Let me add a few final thoughts.

Two commissioners are departing at the end of 2006 who have given a combined 20 years of service to the PUD – Bob Boyd and Gary Montague. Bob served for 12 years and had an important hand in many accomplishments such as the Habitat Conservation Plans, relicensing and modernizing our dams. Gary has served eight years and was one of the strongest voices pushing for our fiber-optics network, as well as being closely involved in the relicensing of Lake Chelan.

Now we welcome two new commissioners in 2007: Randy Smith (a six-year term) and Dennis Bolz (a four-year term). We look forward to working with new enthusiastic leaders at a time when important decisions about the future of our utility are being made.