To the editor:

Some citizens want to replace Bainbridge Island’s provider of electric power, Puget Sound Energy, with a “do-it-ourselves” alternative called Island Power. Please, the electric power we have got now, is more than interruptible enough.

Personally, I am very grateful for the incredible effort PSE and its employees make — to get me and my family powered, again, when nature makes her inevitable call. They work storms from before they begin, with an obvious commitment to our community that is personal and professional.   Will homegrown Island Power have the same resources to unwind a good hit of Mother Nature’s damage, without its city of Bainbridge Island sponsor asking us to mortgage our homes a second time, in any given winter? How does the capital investment part of the deal work, pray tell? Is the homegrown plan, “Don’t pray, just write the check.”?

Our Bainbridge Island City Council is actually thinking of writing a $100,000 or so check, just for Island Power to study the idea! God help us, if they ever have to replace a power line. If you believe there are more important things — streets, sidewalks, bike paths, potholes, housing, parks, maybe a stop sign in your neighborhood — on which to spend even that money, I ask you to also consider this, admittedly personal, story about how in the utility business, a little bit of bad money can end with an awful lot of good money tossed away:

In 1983, I served as clerk to the Energy Committee of the Washington State House of Representatives, assisting committee legal counsel with research on the looming default of $7 billion in municipal bonds that had been issued for the construction of five nuclear power plants, by the publicly-owned Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS). The default ultimately came, at no small cost to utility investors, and ratepayers. It was triggered by the bankruptcy of a very small Oregon city that could not pay its WPPSS-related power bill, which had become bloated due to the unforeseen extraordinary cost of generating plant construction, for which as a public co-op it was obligated to pay a small but nevertheless proportionate part. Proportionate to the amount of bonds issued.  Bankruptcy was the only option.

The ultimate cause of the WPPSS debacle was a combination of naiveté and incapacity on the part of many local elected officials, who comprised the WPPSS governing and oversight board — the inherent limitation on local government officials, as regards expertise — this is damned complicated stuff. But moreso than inadequate oversight, it was greed, on the part of public ratepayers, the many of us who were fooled into thinking, then, that WPPSS was a means to cheap and abundant electric power. Cheap power advocates at the Snohomish County PUD, chambers of commerce throughout the Pacific Northwest — even Puget Sound Energy—electricity nirvana was nigh.  You could count on one hand, the elected officials in the entire region, who tried to warn us.

Here on Bainbridge — we do not need relearn the lesson.  Do not spend one bloody dime of public money, on studies or dreams of cheap electric power.  Let the proponents of Island Power spend their money on fantastic studies and analyses showing that homegrown power pencils out. Spend public money on public problems that actually need fixing.

Remember the waterfront sewage leak, millions of gallons spilled, before our city could fix a long-anticipated problem? Remember the battle over the city water utility a few years ago — how our fair city was found charging certain water ratepayers two times what other Island residents paid for water? You want slow electric utility repair response time? Hell, those water ratepayers are still waiting for a refund! Will it take the filing of a lawsuit to get that city utility ratepayer problem finally acted upon?  (Say, what’d you say about fixin’ last winter’s downed power line out there on Miller Road, eh, Mayor What’s Your Name This Month?)

Puget Sound Energy screws up – and you get a refund, pronto. Why not with the city of Bainbridge Island water utility? Because there is no Washington State Utilities & Transportation Commission watching over the city, and its utility function, as there is with PSE.

In fact, the same city officials withholding refunds from the water ratepayers, for years now, would be the same city officials building, operating, and not refunding overcharges for Island Power — the net gain from access to incrementally lower-cost BPA public power, by a municipal utility, is not worth the risk taken.

I like being warm, in winter, knowing there is a reasonably probability that I will be warm this coming winter, all other factors notwithstanding, so long as PSE is around.

Though I don’t like paying the power bills any more than anyone else, PSE does provide me and my family with conservation options — replacement water heaters and efficient refrigerators and heat pumps — options that are real, that are not pipe dreams, that have lowered the amount of money my family spends on electricity — and it seems to me, any alternative from Island Power proponents should most decidedly be just as real, before any public money gets spent on even the study — don’t you love the way they pay for studies, the winter warmth from which likely only ever comes from their burning in a fireplace?

CHRIS VAN DYK

Bainbridge Island