To the editor:

Please don’t do it!

The Bainbridge city council appears ready to spend $100K to $200K of taxpayer money to fund a feasibility study of purchasing/operating a city-run electric utility.

The decision to spend the $100K plus for a study whether to create a city-run electric utility is up to the council. The decision to spend $100 million to buy out Puget Sound Energy will be up to the residents of Bainbridge should this go to the ballot in November.

Council has good people on it with good intentions. Good intentions, though, can lead to unintended consequences. Owning and operating an electric utility is an expensive, complex and serious business. It requires detailed long-term planning, ongoing maintenance and management — not exactly strengths of any city council.

PSE has proposed creating redundancies in our electric systems, at their expense, to significantly improve reliability and lower outage times. The community has yet to give the green light.

If proposed improvements can’t be approved when someone else is paying for it, do we really expect our council to do better? Our city should talk with PSE to see what can be done to improve reliability and to handle their many priorities.

Just recently, the city manager appointed task force threw out one of the study proposals simply because it was too expensive even though they admitted that group was the most experienced. Maybe that is the one that will actually give us good numbers for the election instead of being a loss leader for the other consultants.

We need a city council focused on building a new police station and that will handle planning and zoning. Please let’s not create a new city-run utility and risk our future by adding $100 million in debt to our city finances in an area we have no experience.

JOHN OGDEN

Bainbridge Island