PUD, town spar over water contract

More than one player got caught up in anger and frustration Tuesday morning at the Wahkiakum County PUD Board of Commissioner’s meeting, where disappointed representatives from the Town of Cathlamet discovered that their request to be on the agenda was denied.

Undaunted, they took advantage of the public comment period to plead their case.

Howard Brawn, a Puget Island resident who was on the agenda, cautioned the commissioners to avoid abandoning the town’s “working infrastructure” and recommended a water catchment system to help supply island water.

Both sides seem to carry wounds and misapprehensions from earlier interactions. The town is under pressure from the Department of Health to ready a proposal for the next six-year water plan and would like to know where the PUD stands in order to move forward. The PUD would like specific information from the town, numbers that so far, they claim they have been unable to get.

“We don’t start with answers,” PUD Commissioner Gene Healy said. “We start with questions.” That statement may speak in simplest form to how each entity has approached the problem with the water contract and provide a possible reason for the current chasm between them.

In response to Brawn’s earlier caution, PUD Commissioner Dennis Reid said, “I don’t think we have any desire to build a new water system; we were just forced into exploring it by getting word from the town that they were going to cut you folks off, so now we’re forced to look into things to do.”

Mayor George Wehrfritz seemed to signal his willingness to part ways.

“I would like to correct a couple things that have been said,” he said. “First, the contract does require that all the water used by the Puget Island Water System is provided by the town. We’ve made it clear in our conversations with you through these negotiations, which have not been public, that we are very willing to negotiate an early exit of that contract. In fact, by our calculations we lose 50 cents per 100 cubic feet of water that we sell you. We’re making 18.3 percent of our revenue selling you almost 45 percent of our water. It is no skin off the town’s nose to enter into a conversation about leaving this early.”

Hannah Booth-Watts, a town council member, made the case for staying with the town, breaking down the costs of building a new water system and showing that it would be cheaper for all involved if they continued to work together instead of placing the cost on just a portion of the population.

“A cursory observation, you are trying to dissuade us from capitalizing our own system, and George is trying to encourage us to do so,” PUD Commissioner Robert Jungers said.

“I think that’s good cop, bad cop,” Booth-Watts replied in a moment of levity.

The sticking point for the PUD seems to be math. The commissioners referenced the contract repeatedly, asking for a certain set of numbers. According to the PUD, the figures the town have mentioned in the past do not aid the PUD in what they are trying to discern.

“If you provide data, verifiable data,” said Healy, “using the existing contract that shows that you are being harmed and are subsidizing the PUD bill, I will ask my manager to negotiate to fix that. One of the things that I’ve asked for is using the existing contract, in other words, water sold to us versus water pumped, it isn’t 40 percent at all, and your figures insist on using the 44 percent position. You have not been inclined to provide those figures.”

At one point, while Wehrfritz was speaking, PUD counsel Tim Hanigan could be seen visibly frowning and shaking his head.

“Our management team indicates to me,” Jungers said, “that you have made a statement that is not true, that you have availed us all of your cost figures for water production. My attorney, my manager, my auditor by gesture indicate that is not so.”

“We’ve given you budget line items for the entire water account,” Wehrfitz said. “It’s every cost.”

PUD Manager Dave Tramblie stood up and said, “I’m extremely disappointed in the PUD and the town’s inability to sit down and work out our issues. In a small community like this, I’m just dumbfounded. You’ve made the statement that you’ve supplied the data. If you have that, I would love to have it. We could sit down tomorrow. Bring it to me, I’ll look at it, I’ll share it with my auditor, I’ll make sure the commissioners are aware that I have it. I have not seen the summation segment in the format that has been delivered to us since I’ve been here for 18 years.”

Jungers defined negotiation as thus: two parties working together with mutual consideration to arrive at a conclusion that is acceptable and agreeable to both. He expressed frustration with what he defined the town’s approach to negotiation as “submitting a long laundry list of essentially unilateral demands,” putting a term limit on it and calling it a compromise.

To which Public Works Superintendent Duncan Cruickshank countered, “the town is asking for the resources to do our job for you and our customers. It’s not a unilateral demand, it’s for the benefit of us all.”

Before exiting the meeting with the other town representatives, Cruickshank shared that sewage is being diverted from the town old treatment plant to the new sewage plant as of Monday, and congratulations went all around.

Talk then turned to the coming budget and rate hearings, where the PUD has discussed the coming 5 percent rate increases for water and electricity.

Tramblie said that Bonneville Power Administration had implemented a 9 percent increase as of October 1. He also said that he had been contacted by the Department of Health to discuss concerns brought to them by the town. Healy volunteered to attend the meeting with him.

Tramblie reported that there was only one outage reported during last weekend’s storm.

After a long morning, the commissioners decided to table the discussions about the net metering policy and a water source alternative study.