PUD Commissioners Corner – holding the line on rates

Published 1:30 am Monday, July 6, 2026

The Grays Harbor PUD is a public utility, and that means something. You elect the commissioners who set policy and direction — we answer to you, not to shareholders.

Your commissioners are your neighbors; we shop at the same stores, drive the same roads, and pay the same electric bills. And one of the most important things we can do with the trust you’ve placed in us is keep electricity affordable for everyone in this community.

That work isn’t flashy — there are no ribbons to cut — but it matters every month when the bill arrives.

Over the past five years, the cost of just about everything has gone up significantly. The national CPI rose about 28% between 2020 and 2026. Here in Western Washington, prices climbed even more — roughly 32%. That’s a real squeeze on household budgets across the county.

During those same five years, Grays Harbor PUD’s cumulative rate increase was 5% — and we have not implemented a rate increase in 2026.

Look back over 10 years — from 2015 to 2026 — and the picture is even more striking. Both the national CPI and the Western Washington index rose by around 38%. Grays Harbor PUD’s rates increased 22% over that same decade.

That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the staff and commissioners at the district have consistently asked a hard question before any spending decision: is this necessary, and can our ratepayers afford it? We fund our operations with revenues — not grants, not windfalls — so every dollar we spend is a dollar our customers must cover.

That discipline shows up everywhere. Our team is constantly looking for ways to stretch your dollar further — recycling transformer oil, rebuilding transformers rather than replacing them, and always asking whether there’s a smarter way to get the job done.

It’s a culture of not wasting what ratepayers have entrusted to us. That same mindset carries into how we manage power costs, schedule capital projects, and approach staffing and equipment.

The electricity we deliver to your home starts with power purchased primarily from the Bonneville Power Administration, and those wholesale costs don’t always move in our favor.

Add in the reality of maintaining hundreds of miles of power lines across rural terrain — rivers, hillsides, coastal shoreline, logging roads — and the cost pressures are real. Holding rates down despite those pressures takes deliberate choices, year after year.

We know that’s not the whole story. The pressures on any utility don’t disappear — they accumulate. Grid infrastructure ages. Federal power costs fluctuate. The work of keeping the lights on in a county as geographically challenging as ours doesn’t get cheaper. We’re watching those trends closely and managing our resources responsibly so that when adjustments do become necessary, they’re as modest as we can make them.

I’m proud of the record our team has built, and I’m committed to protecting it — because that’s exactly what you elected us to do.