🔌 The Utility We Create: A Field Guide to Skamania PUD

Enjoy the audio edition on Buzzsprout, or look for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.

🏛 Your PUD, explained

Agencies Covered: Public Utility District No. 1 of Skamania County, covering a backlog from the last 8 months.

The Bottom Line: We have spent eight months reading every meeting this utility held, and the useful finding is not any single decision. It is that most of what shapes your bill is decided somewhere else, and most of what the district actually controls is invisible until it fails.

The Vibe: A three-person board that reads historical trivia into the record, argues openly about data centers, and tells a customer to his face that it would like to fix his bill and can't.

---

This is a public records newsletter, which means sometimes we get the joy of backloading in a bunch of reports or recordings that were previously tangled up in technical issues, as some of our Skamania PUD recordings were for these last few months. So we figured, why not reintroduce ourselves to the often under-appreciated agency that makes the essentials of life happen here in the county and in our households every single day.

We have already reported the headline decisions: the Underwood moratorium and the August 4 meeting. This is the other thing worth doing with a year of meeting records. Not what happened, but what it tells you about the utility you own.

⚡ First, what a PUD is

A public utility district is not a city department and not a company. It is a unit of local government with its own elected board, created by voters, run under RCW 54. There are 27 of them in Washington. Nobody owns shares. There is no profit to distribute, which is why a PUD's rate conversation sounds so different from a private utility's: the question is never what margin to earn, only what it costs to keep the lights on and who pays which share.

Skamania's is unusual in one important way. It runs three separate systems: the electric utility, the Carson water system and the Underwood water system. They have different customers, different finances and, as this year proved, completely different problems. When someone says "the PUD," ask which of the three they mean.

Three commissioners are elected by district to six-year terms. They meet at 9 a.m. on the first and third Tuesdays in Carson, with a Zoom line, and they take public comment twice, at the start and again near the end. Attendance is usually a handful of people. As the association's executive director put it in July, describing why PUDs share so freely with each other: "we don't compete with each other, and so we can shamelessly steal great ideas from each other. We call it admiring and acquiring."

💵 Your bill: what the district decides, and what it doesn't

Here is the single most useful number we found all year, and it is not one the district advertises.

Of what a residential electric customer pays, roughly 32 percent is the base charge, the fixed amount that arrives whether you use a kilowatt-hour or not. On the water systems it is far higher: about 83 percent on Carson and about 89 percent on Underwood. As a commissioner put it while reading the monthly financials, "your base fee is covering 89 percent of the total bill. You're not paying a huge incremental cost for your water."

That is not an accident and it is not local. It is the result of cost-of-service studies, which push fixed costs into fixed charges, and it is happening everywhere. Staff said so plainly: it is "something every utility has seen more and more of, because everybody's raising their base rates because they're all having cost of service studies and it's proving out this concept."

What it means for you: conservation moves a smaller share of your bill than you would expect, especially on water. And if you have more than one meter, the arithmetic can turn punishing.

In March a customer came to a meeting to explain that he has three electric meters on one property: his house, a 40-by-60 shop, and his wife's two-horse barn. Each was metered separately because, when he built more than twenty years ago, the district told him the ground was too rocky to trench. "The meter rates were 10 bucks back then," he said. "Now I'm paying almost 200 bucks a month before I pay a payment towards my light bill." His shop and barn "have never been $60 a month." Consolidating now would cost about $50,000 in trenching. He brought an appraiser's warning with him: nobody wants to buy a property carrying "an automatic $200-a-month fee before you can pay your bank."

He asked for an exception and did not get one. The reason, given after he left, is worth understanding because it applies to anyone in the same position: "those three meters are effectively three different customers, it just happens to be one person paying them." A discount would be a gift of public funds, and a rule general enough to cover him would also cover the next owner, who might run a business out of the same buildings. Staff estimate about ten customers are similarly placed. His meters predate the cost-of-service study that made the base charge what it is.

What you can actually do: level pay, which spreads winter against summer, is the tool the board kept mentioning that customers underuse. The SmartHub app shows usage against temperature. And if your bill jumps in a cold month, that is visible in the district's own data: January averaged 37 to 38 degrees this year and staff reported "a good spike in utility bills" and "quite a few calls."

One quietly good number: bad debt runs about a quarter of one percent of revenue and has held there. "Private industry would love that," a commissioner noted. "We used to budget 5 percent at places I worked."

The part the district does not control

Most of the pressure on your rates this year came from upstream.

In February, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon ordered more water spilled over eight federal dams, four on the lower Columbia and four on the lower Snake, through the 2026 juvenile salmon migration. He granted the spill and denied a request for minimum operating pool levels. Water over a spillway is water that does not turn a turbine, and the Bonneville Power Administration has to buy replacement power on the market, where it costs roughly twice as much.

BPA projects more than $100 million in 2026 alone and has opened a special rate proceeding. Regionally, consumer-owned utilities are looking at about $300 million over two and a half years. Skamania's commissioners were told the figure was $143 million in lost revenue and work on a rule of thumb that every $20 million costs about a point on wholesale rates, which puts it near 7 percent flowing through to local bills. One commissioner set it against the district's own housekeeping: "we fight over a quarter of a percent, and 7 percent is a lot."

If that surcharge appears, watch for how it is labelled. A commissioner suggested marking it on the bill as litigation-related, "so people know that this is not the PUD and this is not BPA." Whether that happens is worth asking about.

🤝 If you are struggling to pay

Energy assistance in Skamania County does not come from the PUD. It runs through Washington Gorge Action Programs, the community action agency for Skamania and Klickitat counties, which administers the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program here.

Three things about it are worth knowing now, in August, because of when the program actually works.

It covers every kind of heat, not just electricity. Propane, natural gas, oil, coal and wood all qualify, and wood customers are issued vendor vouchers. Households under 150 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible. The benefit arrives as a one-time credit to your energy account, sized on your household income and your heating costs over the previous twelve months.

The season opens in the fall, and it is first-come. In recent years WAGAP has begun taking appointment calls at 8 a.m. on the first Monday in November. You call, leave your name, phone number and town, and go on a waiting list that staff work through in the order received. Residents 60 and over are prioritised, and WAGAP has also run separate senior application events at community centres in both counties from late October into mid-November. If you are going to need help this winter, the thing to do is watch for this year's opening date and call early rather than wait until a bill is past due.

Have your paperwork ready before you call. ID for every adult in the household, Social Security cards for everyone including children, the previous month's income for everyone, proof of your physical address, and a copy of your heating bill.

Skamania County appointments: (509) 493-2662, extension 315. The general line is (509) 493-2662 or toll-free (800) 755-1192.

There is a second, separate layer, and the difference between them explains a lot of confusion. The Clean Energy Transformation Act requires electric utilities themselves to make assistance available, and it defines low-income differently: the higher of 80 percent of area median income or 200 percent of the poverty level. So the federal program and the state obligation draw the line in different places, which is why "how many customers need help" has more than one right answer.

Skamania's answer is high either way. Roughly 14 to 15 percent of the district's customers qualify for low-income assistance, against 1 to 3 percent at large utilities like Chelan and Benton. That is among the highest shares in the state, and it is the reason a bill in Olympia landed hard here. House Bill 2373 would require electric utilities to provide monthly bill assistance. State association estimates put Skamania third in the state for impact, with households above the threshold seeing roughly 15 percent, or about $380 a year. Those are association estimates, not a state fiscal note. The bill got its public hearing on January 20, the same morning the board was discussing it, and has not moved out of committee since.

The board's objection is that the cure feeds the disease: raise everyone else's bill and you push more households below the line. The association's executive director put the harder version in July: there is "tremendous sensitivity for those people right above that line where they're eligible for assistance. They're having to pick up that extra burden." Her summary was the fairest line anyone offered all year: "the biggest struggle with affordability is the definition of what it actually is."

Worth holding alongside it: the State Auditor examined this district and issued a qualified opinion on its CETA compliance, published January 12, 2026. A qualified opinion means it complied except for what auditors found. Finding 2024-001: the district "did not make programs and funding for energy assistance available to low-income households as required" for the whole 2022 to 2024 period. Auditors also credited it with fixing that, telling commissioners it "achieved full compliance" as of October 2024. Both things are true.

🏗 Can you build there? The most practical question of the year

If you own land in this county, this is the section that matters.

Underwood is closed to new commercial water connections. Resolution 2905, adopted August 4, pauses all new non-residential hookups. Residential connections continue. We covered the decision itself on August 20, including the awkward fact that the district's own paperwork gives three different answers about when it ends.

What that coverage did not have room for is why, and the why is what tells you whether your plans are affected.

Water rights are not the constraint. As staff put it in July: "we have enough water rights. There's not a water right issue. It's the pumping, from Galligan, to get that water that's down there up the hill." Underwood's water is drawn at the bottom of a bluff and pushed more than 900 vertical feet to the top, by a station built in 1978.

There are two ways to run out. Average day demand is limited by how much you can store, and the new Huber reservoir fixes that. Maximum day demand is limited by how fast you can pump, and only the Galligan rebuild fixes that, with construction penciled for 2028 to 2029. The binding moment is one summer day: "the peak day during summer when people are using the most water, typically because they're irrigating. That is your problem time." A January application still counts against a July peak.

Why commercial and not residential: non-residential customers use "on average like 2½ times what a residential use uses. And some can use a lot more." Every connection is capped at a ¾-inch line, but as one commissioner observed, "you can get a lot of water out of [one] if you're running it 24 hours a day, and that's what some of the non-residential do." The worry named aloud was a winery or vineyard.

Nobody had applied. Underwood's last new connection was more than a year and a half ago; the historic rate is one or two a year. "We haven't had anybody apply. We want to get ahead of it." And staff were careful about the framing: "we're not slamming the door, we're just letting everybody know it's not right there right now."

For a homeowner the practical answer is that one or two new houses a year is fine and Underwood is hard to subdivide, because "they have large lots." The scenario that would change things is the county rewriting zoning. And there is no published number for how many residential connections remain, for an honest reason: pump stations are built with a spare, so "the numbers are based on having this extra pump, but that doesn't mean we can't use it and get extra capacity. So the numbers are just numbers. What we can actually accomplish is a little different," though squeezing more out "adds a little more risk."

Meanwhile, Carson has room. The Carson system is approved for 2,571 equivalent residential units and is running about 616 under that ceiling. One utility, two water systems, pointing in opposite directions on growth. If you are choosing where to put something that needs water, that is the single most actionable fact in this piece.

One caution before anyone acts on it. That 616 is from the district's August mailer, and it describes capacity on the day the mailer went out, not capacity reserved for you. Connections get issued. Confirm current availability with the district before you count on it.

A structural gap worth knowing about if you are a developer: cities can use latecomer agreements, where later builders repay the first one's infrastructure cost. Title 54 gives PUDs no such power, unlike water and sewer districts, cities and counties. The district's counsel raised it in February as something the association might pursue legislatively. Until then, the first person to extend a line pays for all of it.

🖥 Data centers, the levy scissors, and county money

If you have heard the PUD is "friendly to data centers," that might not be the whole story. What is on the record is an argument between commissioners, and it is more interesting than either side.

The case for looking harder is economic, not technological: "Our county cannot seem to figure out how to make any money for its people, or give many jobs. The timber industry, we keep trying, and it keeps getting smacked down. And I still think that's the right choice for here. But there are modern technologies that could bring money into our county and jobs." The example cited was Quincy, in Grant County: "brand new schools and brand new roads and on and on, because those folks are paying more than their fair share, and it's data center money."

There is real machinery under that, and it is worth understanding before deciding whether to want one. A Washington taxing district, the county, a school district, a fire district, may raise its regular property-tax levy by only 1 percent a year under RCW 84.55.0101, no matter what inflation does. The 2026 implicit price deflator is 2.44 percent. The ordinary levy loses real ground every year, and the gap opens a little wider each time, which is why we have called it the levy scissors.

There is one significant exception: new construction is added to the levy base outside the 1 percent cap (RCW 84.55.010). A very large new building is one of the few ways a rural taxing district grows its base in real terms rather than watching it erode. That, mechanically, is what "data center money" means. Two honest qualifications: the add-on is not unconditionally outside the cap, since a district's statutory maximum rate can bind first and the base is the highest of the three most recent years, and none of this is the PUD's call. Property tax is the county's lever, not the utility's, which is why a PUD commissioner was aiming that pitch at the county rather than his own board. Klickitat County is working through the same question right now, and we covered it this week.

A colleague pushed back on the spot: "I don't think that's what people are upset about. People are upset about the use of water and the use of electricity."

On electricity, the board answered directly in May. Asked what a large new customer does to everyone else's rates: "If we brought on a new lumber mill or a crusher or whatever, it'd be more likely to be beneficial to our residents, because that's what the cost of service study does, make sure everyone's paying their equitable share." And on being squeezed out of cheap federal power: "if one comes in, it's going to be a contracted rate. It's not going to have what our customers get, which is Tier 1, which is a beneficial rate. A data center coming in isn't going to squeeze them out of that. That's still guaranteed for our customers." Followed immediately by: "I don't know that everybody in our county understands that."

The caution came from public comment. In April, John Goodman told the board that AI facilities behave differently from older ones, citing a retired Microsoft data-centre engineer: "the AIs are up and down. They take a whole bunch of power and then they require very little. So what does that do to a utility? It was just murder." He also noted the largest new builds increasingly generate their own power: a 3,200-acre Arizona campus with its own gas turbines and batteries.

On water, the answer is the moratorium. A commissioner tied the threads together in July: "somebody wants to build a data center in Underwood, they better talk some cash at us so we can pump some water." Nobody has applied to build anything. What the board has done is keep a large-load rate policy on the books without an applicant in sight.

🌲 Why your lights go out

Buried in every meeting packet is a monthly outage report nobody reads. Put a year of them together and one cause dominates:

Trees. Through June, tree failure caused 27 outages, against 21 for equipment failure and 9 for animals. It is the largest unplanned cause on the system, every year.

There is a reason beyond "we have a lot of trees." As the general manager explained after a storm that dropped more than 8 inches of rain in 48 hours: "our trees, when they grow, they get the east wind more often than not, so they adapt to that. And then they get these strong west winds," and the ground is saturated. Stevenson's own gauge recorded over 11 inches in five days that week.

That is what the vegetation budget buys. In January the board awarded its tree-trimming contract to Xylem I, LLC, and the payoff shows up in overtime: the year ran about 1,400 hours against 2,500 to 2,600 the year before. "Tree trimming has definitely helped."

The part some neighbours don't like. Xylem trims but does not spray, so PUD crews follow behind and spray. The general manager was direct about it in July: "it's spray season. We don't have any way really around it to maintain our lines. We just can't economically brush and spray everything. A lot of these areas we spray and they don't look the best, but it has proven to be effective."

Then a small piece of governance worth printing in full. A local beekeeper called to say crews were spraying while the blackberries were in bloom, "directly where the bees lick those flowers." The general manager phoned him back. "He said there's like a three-week window. If he knows in advance when that three-week window is, we can do our best to coordinate our path." And: "I'm glad he called. It was an interesting conversation." His advice to anyone else: cut the blossoms inside the right-of-way before spray season, and there is nothing left to spray. If spraying near your property matters to you, the ask is to call in the fall, not in June.

The longer answer is undergrounding. The system is roughly 60 percent underground, up three or four points, and the next stretch is the hard one: "the next 5 percent should probably be harder and more expensive than the last 5 percent," because slide-prone ground is easier to fix overhead and some of it is simply rock. So the district goes opportunistically, waiting for other people's trenches. When the water line at Girl Scout Lake gets rebuilt, "if they dig a ditch, we'll jump in there."

🕯️ The Empty Chair

We'd like to take a moment to honor Commissioner Liz Green, who passed away on July 10. She was 64 and had served twelve years. Born in Colville in 1962, the third of seven children, she came to White Salmon with her family in 1972 and built her life there. She had chaired her last meeting three days earlier by handing the gavel across: "Liz asked me to chair the meeting this morning," Dave McKenzie said on July 7. "I do what I'm told."

She was also president of the state association, which is why on July 21 its executive officers drove down from Olympia. Bruce Pollock, the association's vice president, had written something himself. "Liz Green was more than a commissioner. She was a force and a friend." As past president, "Liz carried the voice of all 27 PUDs with clarity, conviction and grace," working "to ensure that every district, large or small, urban or rural, had a seat at the table." Then the detail that made her real: "Liz used to have this funny expression when she was ready to speak. She'd raise her hand, look up from her notes, look around at everybody, and then she would softly speak her thoughts. And when she spoke, we all listened."

Two weeks later a former Whatcom County PUD commissioner, Atul Deshmane, dialled in to the August 4 meeting to add one thing. He had been friends both with Green and with another commissioner whose strong positions most of their colleagues disagreed with. "I remember Liz coming to me and saying: even what makes us different brings us together." McKenzie's reply: "that sounds Liz-like."

What happens to this seat:

At a special meeting on August 13, Commissioner Dan Boyes moved and McKenzie seconded to nominate Dev Bell to the vacant District 3 seat. It passed unanimously. That starts a 15-day public notice window in which anyone may nominate someone else, including themselves, before the appointment is made at a later public meeting. The appointee must be a registered voter of District 3.

There is a genuine legal puzzle behind it. Green remains on the November ballot, because filing does not reopen for this kind of vacancy. If the other candidate wins, they serve six years. If Green wins posthumously, there is another vacancy, and the district's counsel reads the statute as letting the appointee serve until the November 2028 general election, with the 2028 winner then finishing the term. He was checking that reading with county elections and the prosecutor. Two commissioners cannot lawfully discuss the choice with each other outside a public meeting, which is why this has moved in visible steps.

🧭 What this tells you about PUDs generally

Four patterns in this year's record are not local at all.

• Fixed charges are rising everywhere, because cost-of-service studies keep pushing fixed costs into fixed charges. Skamania is not unusual in this; what is unusual is hearing a board say so plainly at a public meeting.
• Assistance need is concentrated in small rural districts. One in seven customers here qualifies, against one in fifty at the big utilities. Any statewide assistance mandate lands hardest where the ratepayer base is smallest.
• The big loads increasingly bring their own power. The Arizona campus with its own turbines is the pattern, not the exception, which changes what "attracting a data center" actually means for a utility.
• Court orders and legislation now move rates more than local decisions do. A judge in Portland is likely to move your bill this year more than anything three commissioners in Carson voted on.

And one that is local, and quietly the most important: this is a small utility running three systems with, as a commissioner noted while half the staff sat in the room, "half of our office staff are in here, almost half." Most of what it does well is invisible. The reservoir that does not run dry, the line that does not fall, the audit that comes back with two findings instead of ten.

⚠️ Editor's Notebook: Broader Context

• A PUD cannot refuse to serve a lawful customer in its territory, but it can set the terms: rate class, line-extension cost, and, for water, whether capacity exists at all. That is why the Underwood moratorium is a water decision and not a land-use decision.
• The county, not the PUD, decides what may be built. Zoning, permits and property tax are county levers. A utility can say whether it can serve you, not whether you may build.
• The 1 percent levy cap applies to the regular levy, not to voter-approved bonds or levy lid lifts, which is why school and fire districts go to the ballot.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• ERU, equivalent residential unit. The water a typical single-family home uses. Systems are sized and permitted in ERUs, which is how one number can cover houses, wineries and a school.
• COSA, cost-of-service analysis. The study that decides which customer class pays what, and how much of it arrives as a fixed charge.
• Tier 1 power. The cheaper federal hydropower a PUD gets for its existing load. New large loads buy at a different, contracted rate.
• Max day demand. The single busiest water day of the year, usually a hot July day with irrigation running. Systems are permitted against it.
• Base charge. The fixed part of your bill, owed whether you use anything or not.

📍 How to Join & Learn More

The board meets at 9:00 a.m. on the first and third Tuesdays at 1492 Wind River Road, Carson, with a Zoom option. Public comment is taken at the start and reopened later; comments are limited to five minutes.

• Next up: a 2027 budget workshop at 8:00 a.m. on September 1, before the regular meeting. The September 15 meeting has moved to September 22.
• Heating help, and when to ask for it. Energy assistance runs through Washington Gorge Action Programs, not the PUD. It covers electric, propane, gas, oil, coal and wood heat for households under 150% of the federal poverty level. The appointment line opens in the fall, recently at 8 a.m. on the first Monday in November, and works as a waiting list, so call early. Residents 60 and over are prioritised and have had separate application events at community centres from late October. Skamania County: (509) 493-2662, ext. 315, or toll-free (800) 755-1192. Bring ID for every adult, Social Security cards for everyone in the household, last month's income for everyone, proof of address, and a copy of your heating bill.
• Planning to build? Ask the district about capacity before you ask the county about permits, especially in Underwood.
• Spraying near your property? Call the general manager in the fall, before the season is set.
• Agendas, packets and minutes are posted at skamaniapud.com.