Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is ours | LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Published 11:30 am Saturday, May 14, 2016

To the editor:

One thing I love about Bainbridge is the “can do” attitude of so many islanders.

So it’s disappointing to read last week’s editorial shying away from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and expressing “slow down.” It seemed to say “we cannot do.” It dredged up a seven-year-old history of a formerly-pricey city water utility, but failed to mention that we took action and made its prices among the lowest in the region.

In so many other ways, it’s no surprise that our community has a “can-do” confidence. Compared to any other community I know, we have a higher average level of education and a higher percentage of us engaged in professional employment and creative work. Thousands of us take the ferry to extraordinary professional and leadership roles every day.

When the city recently asked citizens to step forward for a task force to examine public power opportunities, more than 20 local residents with extraordinary resumes and utility-related experience volunteered.

Last week’s editorial acknowledged some of the potential advantages of substituting not-for-profit Bainbridge community power in place of for-profit PSE power, yet it wimped out. It failed to voice the “can-do” spirit that we’ve embraced in so many ways — the scale and scope of the annual Rotary auctions, the remaking of a walkable prospering Winslow Way, the school district goals to be tops in the state, the parks goals to add and maintain open space, and more.

What are the opportunities we’d miss by yawning and assuming “cannot do”?

For those of us who care about an economically prosperous community, a local public utility will normally return to the local economy about 40 percent of what its customers pay each year for electricity. Here, that could be $10 million per year for our local economy. By contrast, PSE returns a tiny percentage to the community and sends vastly more to its Bellevue headquarters and operations, the outside contractors at Potelco and its foreign for-profit investors.

For all of us who care about reliability, a local utility would substitute our local control over policies to increase reliability, instead of PSE’s excuses for not undergrounding more of the wires and not achieving the reliability of most of our state’s 62 public utilities.

For the vast majority of us who care about climate change, a local utility powered by Bonneville’s 97 percent fossil-fuel-free power would replace PSE’s mostly fossil-fuel power, including the 35 percent of our PSE power from its massively polluting coal plant.

This is a can-do community. Let’s keep moving forward on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

BARRY PETERS

Bainbridge Island