The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

Two candidates for leadership of the public electric utility in Grant County laid out their cases for election last Thursday at the Grand Coulee Dam Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon at Siam Palace.

Nelson Cox and Judy Wilson both feel the Grant County PUD has amassed too much debt while serving large industrial users of power, such as server farms. And they take issue with some of the top management living out of county.

Cox, a Warden area farmer, said the PUD has done great things but its finances are out of control.

“I really don’t understand why we’re giving the largest companies in the world our power for the cost of production,” he said. “We’re taking a public company and running it like a private company with public money, and I just don’t agree with that.”

The PUD has issued $1.3 billion in bonds since 2017 to replace aging equipment and infrastructure.

Cox is running against Patti Paris for retiring Bob Bernd’s commission seat.

Wilson is running against incumbent Terry Brewer, who spoke to the chamber here in September.

Wilson said she has managed a farm implement store in Spokane and sat on the Vera Power and Water Company board in the Spokane Valley for 15 years. She managed an ag equipment store in Moses Lake for 25 years.

She said that the PUD has grown to meet the high electrical demands of server farms, adding $500 million in debt as they were built, and has now aligned rates around a cost-of-service study that claims they pay too much and are subsidizing agriculture-related users and home users.

“You’ve got to be a PhD in mathematics to understand those cost of service numbers,” Cox said.

Wilson said the PUD’s rate mix is “an accounting nightmare.”

She said the PUD’s debt-to-asset ratio is 60 percent. “Now, if a farmer walks into a bank and his debt-to-asset ratio is 60 percent, they’re probably going to tell him to get lost,” she added.

“I’ve been broke enough to know that when you run out of money, you don’t keep spending,” Cox said.

Wilson said the PUD has also stopped an apprenticeship program and has contracted out its power buying and selling function to Shell Oil. “In two years when that contracts up, how do you go back and recreate that?”