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September 28, 2006

Remembering Anita Russel, 1922-2006

When I came to CUB in 1992, CUB was having a hard time. We had 1.5 full time staff. We were in debt. But we had one amazing committed volunteer who believed in the organization and came in nearly every day for the next 10 years in order to help CUB.

Her name was Anita Russel and she passed away recently. It is accurate to say that CUB probably would not be around if it were not for Anita. It is not clear how we could have handled the workload needed to rebuild the organization without her help. She did much of the work associated with our direct mail fundraising program. This allowed me to focus on CUB's program of fighting for utility consumers.

Anita became our bookkeeper, but she was always more than that.

She maintained our financial records, our membership records, stuffed envelops and whatever else needed to be done. Eventually, as CUB grew, we felt that we should pay her for her amazing work and brought her on staff. However, Anita did not like being paid by CUB. She did not want to see the money that CUB members contributed going into her pocket. She was retired and did not need the income, so she soon returned to being a volunteer -- a volunteer who came in every day and did a professional job.

At one point when she was considering retiring (she stayed a few more years), we put together a plaque that said: "The grateful staff of Citizens' Utility Board extend this Bear Hug as a token of our appreciation of, indebtedness to, and admiration for Anita Russell. For the past eight years and more, she has given freely of her time to keep the office doors open, its records organized and accounts accurate, added verve to office conversation and in general made the office hum like a top." True to form, Anita was moved by the tribute but uncomfortable being the center of attention. She was all about doing the work, and not looking for the praise that was her due.

Eventually, as her hearing and eyesight began to fail, she was forced to retire from CUB, but she continued to support the organization and continued to donate money to us every single month. She contributed to us financially for more than 18 years and worked as a volunteer with us for more than a decade. Few, if anyone, have contributed more to CUB than Anita.

I will miss Anita. I can picture the way her face would light up when I would bring in baby pictures of my daughter. Her family was important to her, and she cared about our families. Our hearts go out to her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Bob Jenks
CUB Executive Director

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Of the 6 staff who make up CUB today, I am one of only 2 people who did not know and work with Anita Russel. I met her at the 20th Anniversary dinner in 2004, a reserved and dignified woman seeming to be in her 70s, but we only exchanged a few words. And yet, I still feel a connection to Anita. You see, I took over her desk and much of the work she did here (as a volunteer!) at CUB.

When I was hired in August of 2003 to manage the business end of CUB, we had been without a bookkeeper since Anita had finally "retired" (her second retirement) many months before. Bob Jenks, our fearless leader, has knowledge of the utility industry both broad and deep, and does amazing work in many different venues, but organization of paperwork isn't one of them. I began the slow process of digging backward through boxes of bills, taxes, and miscellanous jumble until I got to the place Anita left off. What a difference!

I gradually came to know Anita through her small neat rows of figures, the thousands of handwritten checks, the spreadsheets she created to track our finances, and the mark of her hand is seen on folders that I still use regularly. She fulfilled an important role rarely seen by the public; she was the administrative mechanic who kept things on track, kept the wheels turning, so that CUB could remain a spokesperson and advocate for all residential Oregon utility ratepayers. With her help CUB survived some tumultuous and lean early years.

I don't know what it was about CUB, out of all the good causes in the world, that drew Anita. But she chose CUB, and stayed with a loyalty that kept her here many years, giving of her time generously and skillfully. I didn't know the woman, but I know and appreciate the legacy of her work here at CUB.

Shannon Floyd
CUB Business & Projects Manager

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In 1966, Anita took her barely-teenaged daughters on the train to Seattle to see the Beatles. I suppose other parents must have done this with their children, but the way she quickly embraced their music must surely have been unusual. (Forty years later, the Beatles were still her favorite.) She took her children to see lots of music: they saw The Who open for Herman's Hermits; they saw Janis Joplin in San Francisco as a second choice, after the Monterey Jazz Festival they had gone to see was cancelled. They saw the Lovin' Spoonful and Donovan ... and they went to at least one peace march together.

Those of us who worked with her at CUB never suspected that Anita had quite such a colorful past, because she was always so modest and unassuming. But these details of her life are perfectly consistent with the Anita we knew. Take, for example, the picture of her with her husband Roy from what appears to be the early 1950s: him charging down the street with his flattop haircut and a big cigar in his hand, and there's Anita beside him, hand hooked on his arm, laughing to beat the band. They look great together, happy and in love. Then come the years of photos of her with her children as they grow up, and then her children's children -- and in every one of them, Anita has the same bright eyes we knew, the sparkling eyes that always wanted to learn.

None of this, of course, did I know in March of 1998, when I met her for the first time. I was hired to write fundraising letters for CUB, to try to grow the membership. Anita was the woman who handled the money, the woman with the Depression-era attitude about spending money: a penny saved is a penny earned, and all that. Her job was to be frugal, and mine was to spend money on envelopes and printing with the hope that CUB would get it all back, along with a few more members. In her eyes, I was gambling with money that wasn't my own; fortunately, CUB won more than it lost, and when she called me "Mr. Moneybags," she meant it fondly.

CUB was the job she took after retiring from the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a federal contracting officer. She used to say she worked at CUB because it "kept her out of the taverns," which was funny, but funnier if you knew her. Taverns! As if. A liberal always, she was one of CUB's first members, and she was always passionate about its work. CUB was fiscally shaky when she started working there, and when she left 10 years later, it had become strong and robust. And though she would have pooh-poohed the idea, she was part of the reason for its survival. She was an ace of a money manager, methodical and canny.

She read voraciously, continuously. In fact, that's how we connected. I loved literature, and so did she; we'd talk about books we'd both read, and we loaned books to each other many times. She even kept up with the online literary journal I started, which really flattered me -- knowing she had trouble with her eyesight and thinking I was a special exception -- until I found out she was surfing the Net right up until the very end of her life. See what I mean about her love of learning?

I left CUB in 2000. Anita stayed several more years before retiring herself. She was important to CUB -- and to me. I'm going to miss her. We all will.

Benjamin Chambers
CUB Development Director 1998-2000

Posted by Oregon CUB at 09:57 AM | Comments (3)

September 20, 2006

Town Hall Focuses on Energy Issues

Just in time for fall and the recurrence of those rainy season heating bills, there is a Town Hall on energy issues on Thursday, September 21st....

And whether you are able to make it to the Town Hall or not, check out these links for more information on the quickly changing energy industry.

Tune up your home with an energy audit

10 waste-saving ideas under $10

Expo shows how to let the sunshine in

Look up for power boost - Homeowners are investing in rooftop solar energy systems

Please join Representative Jackie Dingfelder, Representative Diane Rosenbaum and Representative Chip Shields, for a Town Hall meeting dedicated to discussing energy issues. The Town Hall is on Thursday, September 21st, from 7:00-8:30 PM and will be at Portland's Hollywood Senior Center, located at 1820 NE 40th Avenue.

Several energy topics will be covered and there will also have a panel of experts (Kevin Considine, Oregon Environmental Council; Rachel Shimshak, Renewable NW Project; Barbara Byrd, Oregon AFL-CIO; Steve Lacey, Energy Trust of Oregon) to tell us how Oregon is addressing energy concerns today.

There will be an opportunity to ask questions, so come prepared with your tough energy questions.

The Town Hall is free and everyone is welcome to attend.

* What: Town Hall on Energy Issues
* When: Thursday, September 21st
* Time: 7:00-8:30 PM
* Where: Hollywood Senior Center, 1820 NE 40th Avenue, Portland

Posted by Oregon CUB at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2006

BPA Proposal Would Raise Rates for Most Oregon Electricity Customers

In 1980, smallpox was pronounced eradicated, Reaganomics was born, Caddyshack and The Shining were in theaters, and the Northwest Power Act was passed by Congress. This Act provided some important, and indeed, historic, decisions about power in our Northwest Region, aiming "to assist the electrical consumers of the Pacific Northwest [Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington] through use of the Federal Columbia River Power System to achieve cost-effective energy conservation, to encourage the development of renewable energy resources, to establish a representative regional power planning process, to assure the region of an efficient and adequate power supply, and for other purposes [such as protecting fish and wildlife affected by the Columbia and Snake River dams]." (FocusWest Price of Power Glossary.)

One of the central tenets of the Act is the assumption that the federal hydropower system (and this now includes one nuclear plant), managed by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), should benefit all "electrical consumers" of the Pacific Northwest. BPA recently produced a Regional Dialogue Policy Proposal addressing its resource management for 20 years beginning in 2012 (we've written about the Regional Dialogue process before), and this Proposal does not honor this supposition of equality among consumers.

CUB takes issue with several of the Proposal's terms, first and foremost being that this Proposal would penalize customers of investor-owned utilities (IOUs), giving an unfair majority of the financial benefits of the system to customers of our region's public power utilities. While 60% of the Pacific Northwest is served by an IOU, such as Pacific Power or PGE, currently only about 18% of the benefits of the federal system accrues to those citizens.

This Proposal would slash that meager level of benefits even further. This means that BPA's Proposal would raise the rates of most Oregon residential customers, and this rate hike would be used to support the reduction of the rates of other customers in the Northwest. This does not make sense and it is not fair.

We are not alone in this critique. Comments issued by the combined Public Utility Commissions of the four Northwest states affected said this: "BPA's proposed annual benefit of $250 million (2012 dollars) represents a significant, unjustified and unfair reduction in the benefits received by IOU-served residential and small-farm customers." (Comments of the Pacific Northwest State Utility Commissioners, August 25, 2006.)

Now, $250 million is a great deal of money, but everything is relative. One report calculated "that a properly determined REP [the value for the Residential Exchange, an amount which goes to the IOU residential and small farm customers to give them their share of the value of the federal system] would produce benefits of $610 million (2011 dollars) at the end of the current contract period." The historical average of the value of federal hydropower benefits has been computed to be $375 million. Depending on the parameters the BPA Administrator chooses to use in determining the value of the system for IOU customers (a process which is very flexible), the number could go as high as $778 million. Any of those numbers is well above the amount offered to residential and small farm customers, and using even the most conservative number, we figure the $250 million offer amounts to a reduction by about one third of federal system benefits for IOU customers.

Currently, electricity prices on the general market are hovering around 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) and have gone as high in recent years as 7 cents. Electricity customers buying their power at cost from BPA are paying only about 2.7 cents per kWh. That's a great discount, almost half off what others are paying. This translates to a savings of billions of dollars for the customers of our region's 130 or so public power utilities. The amount of value these customers are receiving will only increase, as the fundamentals (gas costs, plant manufacture costs, environmental regulation costs) of the energy market rise. The amount of value of the system allotted to the Northwest Region's IOU customers, who should have a fair share in the system, are being offered instead a relatively small amount of the system value, one that will decrease as years go by and other energy expenses rise.

This is a concern for all IOU customers in the Pacific Northwest, but particularly so for Oregon residential customers, 75% of whom receive electricity from an IOU. This figure is the opposite for our neighbor, Washington State, 75% of whose citizens receive electricity from a public power utility. Benefiting public power customers at the expense of IOU customers therefore also means benefiting the majority of Washington electricity customers at the expense of the majority of Oregon customers.

We want to state clearly that we are not anti-public power here at CUB. We love public power, and have worked to expand public power in recent years. In fact, some of our best members are served by public power utilities. However, we feel it is important to defend the terms of the 1980 Power Act that seek to ensure fair access to the federal system for all residents of the Pacific Northwest. This Proposal falls woefully short of that primary goal.

CUB finds BPA's Proposal wanting on other fronts as well. Regional planning is endangered, due to a big shift that would freeze BPA resource acquisition and instead substitute the expectation that individual public power utilities will now manage their own resource acquisition. For the same reason, resource adequacy, or maintaining enough power generation to serve everyone's needs, may well suffer, if no one is planning for the system overall. Also, according to CUB's Regional Dialogue Comments on August 9, 2006, "Conservation and renewables, the priority resources in the 1980 Power Act, get platitudes and promises in this proposal." A more detailed plan for implementing these important tools, including energy efficiency, is in order. And finally, "fish and wildlife cannot do worse," CUB believes, "than they are faring now ... We can view the Columbia River system as providing benefits in the form of low rates, flood control, navigation, irrigation, and recreation, but we must remember that the Columbia River also happens to be home for an abundance of fish and wildlife." Regional planning, system stability, conservation, renewables, fish, and most Oregon customers all suffer under this plan; we can do better.

To our knowledge, none of the Oregon Congressional Delegation has yet submitted Comments to BPA regarding this flawed Proposal. Time is running out; the Comments period closes Sept. 29th. We urge CUB members and anyone reading this article to contact your Senators and Representative today and tell them that BPA's current Proposal falls short because: 1) it will raise the rates of most Oregon customers; and 2) it should devote more resources to implementing energy efficiency and renewables.

This is our opportunity to plan for a stable, fair and clean energy future in the Pacific Northwest. The current Proposal does not achieve that. Let's make some noise, and get BPA to take our concerns seriously. We want to see a BPA proposal that is fair to all Northwest electricity consumers, and offers a better plan for clean and stable energy.

Posted by Oregon CUB at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

Help Our Clean Energy Agenda Today

We began the CUB Online newsletter and website 18 months ago, and have used this forum solely to keep you informed about the issues we work on and why they matter to you. Today we are here for the first time because CUB needs your help. We need your contributions to help us make clean energy a priority in Oregon.

In the past 18 months many things have changed here in Oregon. We started the email newsletter ball rolling last March with the news of the PUC's rejection of the Texas Pacific application for ownership of PGE. Since that time, PacifiCorp's parent company has changed from ScottishPower to MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., PGE stock has been publicly distributed on the New York Stock Exchange, utility tax law has been reformed dramatically in Oregon, equal access to the Internet has come under attack from the big telecommunications companies, and wind power has surged into the mainstream of utility energy production. Whew!

Throughout all of this, CUB Online has kept you informed of whatever is most current in utility news and energy policy, including CUB's own work on behalf of residential utility consumers and the environment. We've also taken the time to talk about the systems we rely on more generally, most recently about transmission issues, and before that, the management of the federal hydropower system, the background of Internet issues, the state of the gas market, and the best way to maximize energy efficiency and conservation. We even provided a step-by-step analysis of the 2005 Oregon Legislature as they tackled solar energy credits, public ownership of PGE, and of course utility taxation.

Well, the time of opening session is fast approaching again. In only a few months the 2007 Legislature will convene, and you better believe CUB will be there. And this time, we are going in with an even more ambitious agenda. This time we want to move the discussion of Clean Energy onto the front burners and turn the following ideas into reality:

* Requiring utilities and other power producers to generate at least 25% of their electricity from renewable resources like wind by 2025;

* Expanding the already successful energy efficiency programs of the Energy Trust, since conservation is our cheapest and most powerful tool to fight global warming; and

* Allowing state regulators to consider greenhouse gas pollution in reviewing utility proposals to build new power plants.

With global warming heating up our environment, we don't have a lot of time to figure out solid energy alternatives. As our Program Director, Jason Eisdorfer, recently stated: "If we're going to rely on utilities to save the world, we're in trouble." So CUB isn't relying on them, but is instead moving forward with a plan.

We are excited about the possibilities for positive change under this Clean Energy Agenda. We only need a few things: a strong, knowledgeable and dedicated staff (check!); a broad, well-informed and passionate group of allies (check! [read more about the Fair & Clean Energy Coalition here]); and a statewide base of interested, caring individuals to form our grassroots support. That base is made up of you.

We are asking CUB Online members to give a gift to CUB today to support the Clean Energy Agenda for Oregon. We need to change the business-as-usual practice of shortsighted energy policy that depends heavily on greenhouse gas-emitting fuels like coal and gas. Switching to renewable energy sources and conserving wherever possible will make a world of difference for both our environmental and financial health.

Make a gift of $30, $60, or $90 today to CUB, and we will be that much stronger when we begin the arduous climb from having no clean energy policy for Oregon, to having a well-crafted, long-sighted, and fully functioning clean energy policy for Oregon.

Thanks for your support.

Bob Jenks, Founding Member and Executive Director

Citizens' Utility Board of Oregon

P.S. Know someone who cares about the environment and keeping utility bills reasonable who might not be on CUB's membership list? Forward our web address to them; introduce your friends to CUB today.

Posted by Oregon CUB at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)