Centralia’s City Light Department has several projects in the pipeline over the next four years, and Tuesday night the utility’s leaders laid out their plans to improve the aging system that serves almost 10,000 residents.

    The recent North Port Substation that was put online in June is one of the ways the department has tried to upgrade the city’s electricity system.

    “We’re playing catch up,” said Ed Williams, general manager of the City Light Department. “You can build a system up, and you can ride it for awhile, and that’s what the city has done for some time.”

    Williams said the city has not scaled back its efforts to maintain the utility system, but also has not done much in the way of upgrading it to meet some current and future needs.

    “We’re not as far as I’d like to be,” he said. “But we’re getting there.”

    The number of users increases about 2 percent a year, but the City Light Department has seen a 25 percent increase of peak usage over the past five years, giving the city and the utility department two options.

    One is to ask people not to do certain things at specific times, which Williams has not ruled out.

    The other is to increase the size of the system.

    Two substations, the Cook’s Hill Substation and North Port Substation, have been added to bolster the system over the past two years, and two more are set to be completed over the next three to four years.

    The Salzer Valley Substation and the rebuilding of the B Street Substation are what Williams views as the top two upcoming utility projects for the city. He noted that if the aging B Street Substation went down, 50 percent of the city would lose electricity, and it would take some time to fix the problem.

    Williams used the example of a recent cable failure under B Street that connects to Providence Centralia Hospital which went unnoticed. A situation that could have been a disaster, taking up to a week to repair, was avoided because the Cooks Hill Substation was there for backup, he said.

    Rebuilding the old substation would increase reliability, he said. Adding the additional substation would better distribute power as to not put all the city’s eggs in one basket.

    The second “Achilles’ heel” for the city is the 27-mile transmission line that runs from the Yelm hydroelectric station on the Nisqually River to Centralia. Still using the same cedar power lines that have been used since its construction in 1929, the line needs to be completely redone in the near future.

    No matter how good the projects look on paper, whether they work out financially is a different matter altogether.

    Rebuilding the B Street Substation, adding a replacement substation near the B Street Substation and constructing the new Salzer Valley Substation will cost just over $9 million. Williams estimated it could take anywhere from $6 million to $10 million to replace the transmission line from the Yelm hydroelectric station.

    “We didn’t get this way overnight, and we shouldn’t get out of it quickly,” Councilor Bonnie Canaday said. “We might not be able to get out of it in three years.”

    She said her main concern was with taxpayers whose rates may increase if a complete overhaul of the system is undertaken.

    Councilor Lee Coumbs said he was far more concerned about the impacts a failing system could have on the city.

    “For me the rate isn’t the bottom line,” he said. “It’s the idea of having a system to meet our needs. If we don’t have power and water, you don’t have anything to sell. You won’t be able to give land away.”

    Mayor Tim Browning emphasized no matter what course of action is taken now, the city has to look further into the future to make sure the system doesn’t get to this point again.