On Aug. 2, Lewis County voters in district 3 of the Public Utility District (PUD) coverage area will cast their primary ballots for a new representative on the utility’s board of commissioners.
District 3 covers most of East and South Lewis County. With three candidates vying for the seat, the top two vote-getters will move on to the November election, when residents in the rest of the PUD’s coverage area — countywide besides Centralia, which is covered by Centralia City Light — will see the race on their ballots.
PUD commissioners make $30,804 per year from the position, which is a six-year term. The PUD commissioner seat is nonpartisan.
Tim Cournyer, 66, of Mossyrock, is the incumbent in the race for district 3’s PUD commissioner. Coming to the end of his first term in the job, he said the main reason he’s running again is because he loves it.
Before his role with the PUD, Cournyer held public office on the Morton School Board.
Asked what was the role of a PUD commissioner, Cournyer said it was to create long term strategies for the utility, hire and fire the manager, set budgets and vote on implementation of dollars. He emphasized the job was not to head the PUD operations, as that’s the role of the manager.
Cournyer helped create a 10-year strategic plan for the first time in the utility’s history, which it will continue to use to distribute costs across the decade, thereby keeping rate hikes lower.
“We’re trying to keep rates as low as we possibly can,” he said, adding later, “That's my whole role as a commissioner, (provide) safe, reliable power at the lowest possible cost to our customers.”
For what the PUD was doing well, Cournyer said he felt staff provided excellent service, kept up with technological changes and that the utility was increasing access to broadband internet in rural Lewis County.
“Crews get up in the middle of night and work in storms and blizzards and they do that because they care,” Cournyer said.
On the other hand, he said he didn’t think the commission was doing a good job representing the PUD’s story. With increased transparency, he said more people would likely be as proud of the PUD as he is.
“I don’t think people realize that we have to buy power that we can turn around and sell, and over 60% of our total budget just goes to purchasing that power from Bonneville. I think there’s a lot about the PUD people don’t understand and we just need to be more transparent in telling our story to the public,” he said.
Cournyer also mentioned, without specifying their creator, political ads currently circulating that claim the PUD has doubled rates over the last five years.
“That’s not true at all,” he said.
Mike Hadaller, 58, of Ethel, has emphasized fiscal conservatism as the main point in his campaign, with the goal of decreasing rates while increasing services including broadband internet. As a member of a five, going on six-generation Lewis County family, he said his main concern was providing an affordable way of life for the generations of the area yet to come.
Hadaller has never held public office before.
“I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I know how to run a company, I’ve been successful at it,” he said.
Hadaller has been a logger since reaching adulthood and started his own business 15 years ago.
He currently serves as the president of the Mossyrock Organization of Safety and Support (MOSS), a volunteer group that provides an extra hand to law enforcement and emergency responders. He said a great deal of their work has been establishing safeguards for the community in the event of the 9.0 Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake.
Asked the role of a PUD commissioner, Hadaller said currently they create budgets and long-term plans. However, he thought the commissioners needed more “checks and balances." He added that “no one man should be able to run a dictatorship over the whole PUD.”
For what he felt the PUD currently did well, Hadaller said the service was reliable and that lower-level staff were hardworking and dedicated. He also said that in district 3 specifically, staff have recently done a lot to improve the management of trees and limbs that are typically the culprit of power outages.
For what the utility should change, he said more work should be done to “find new avenues of cheaper electricity for us.”
“I feel that the PUD is overspending. I feel that they waste a lot of money. I feel they have higher management that is overpaid. They’ve added too many assistants. The PUD has grown in the last two years faster than the economy has,” he said.
As a lifelong resident, Hadaller said, he felt he can provide a great service to the community.
Kevin Emerson, 46, of Salkum, is running for the seat with a campaign focused on lowering rates. After the death of Lewis County Commissioner Gary Stamper in the fall of 2021, Emerson was the Republican party precinct committee officers’ top vote-getting nominee forwarded to the county commissioners, who selected former commissioner Lee Grose to serve the remainder of the seat.
Emerson has held public office on the boards of Lewis County’s Water and Sewer District No. 2 and Fire Protection District No. 1, both in Onalaska. He said in both those roles, he made decisions that brought those agencies “from their lowest point to their highest point in just three years. … That’s the kind of success that I want to bring to the PUD as well.”
Asked what was the role of a PUD Commissioner, Emerson said they served as representatives of their community, creating direction and goals for the utility “as well as they can to align with the desires of the people.”
Asked what the PUD was doing well, he said it provides great, reliable service. He said staff are professional and effective “all the way around,” from the power and fixes they provide to the way they interact with residents, plus the utility was increasing access to broadband internet in rural Lewis County.
However, if elected, Emerson said he has three major things he would want to address. Firstly, he called recent rate increases “dramatic” and said that’s an issue he wants to tackle. He said it’s not as simple as some may think, but it’s possible.
“I would like to say that I'm the only candidate with a proven record of actually lowering utility rates,” Emerson said.
Secondly, he said the PUD should have a donation system set in place specifically to help senior citizens. Currently, the utility has a low-income assistance program that Emerson said was on a first-come, first-served basis. Lastly, Emerson said he thought the PUD should pursue more of its own power generation.
“Just a long-term goal. I see a real problem with the current business model of the PUD … relying on federal agencies to control our power,” he said. “We would need to pursue local power generation sources.”
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the intention of a statement by Mike Hadaller.
