The Raymond PUD met Tuesday, January 5 for their first regular twice-monthly meeting of the year. The PUD Commissioners began by approving the minutes from the previous meeting and moving to correspondence.
General Manager Doug Miller read the correspondence that the Raymond PUD had received since the last meeting, "correspondence from the last few weeks included periodicals from the American Public Power Association, Bonneville Power Administration, Department of Energy, News Data Corporation, and the Washington PUD Association."
For the manager's report Miller talked about the holiday toy drive that the staff at the Raymond PUD participated in: "Willapa Operations Center Employees decided once again to adopt under-privileged families during the holidays by participating in the Christmas for Needy Families Drive, Organized by the Crisis Support Network," said Miller. "Thanks to the staff for doing that," chimed Commissioner Thompson.
After the manager's report Commissioner Hatfield voted to approve the Contracts for Service Extension. There were three service extensions, two of which were residential and one that was residential in development.
Miller reported on an Olympia power outage that happened on New Year's Day, "you probably heard about an Olympia Power Outage that took place on January 1. This one happened to be on New Year's Day and it started at about 6:30am, and it lasted until the next morning. 90% of the windy storms come from the South West, but what we fear most is a high East wind, and so we had one that morning."
It was time in the meeting for the "Other Business" segment, where Commissioner Thompson raised the following point, "I do have one thing that I wanted to bring up, there's been some discussion about the impact of raises and concern about how they tax the community so I decided to do some research on some of this and I know that we voted for an increase for union members that was a 3% raise, and there were several categories that got an extra quarter of a percent raise.
There seemed to be some concern about the non-union staff getting a 3% raise so as far as staff there's about 40 union members and about 16 non-union members. So when we decided that union members got a 3.25% raise that impacted 40 people and that works out to about $7,000 a month increase and they're eligible for overtime so that would add additional into that. 16 non-union members; their 3% increase works out to about $4,800 a month and they are not eligible for overtime. When you take that to an annual number, that's about $58,000 for non-union and $84,000 for the union not including potential overtime. I'm not suggesting in any way that one group deserves a raise and the other one doesn't. I was just a bit concerned about there being a willingness to allow a raise for one group and not the other but when it came up for the non-union members the conversation was about 'well we can't raise wages because of the impact on the community,' but if one group impacts the community so does the other, but I voted in favor of both raises."
Dick Anderson spoke for items from the public not on the agenda, "I'd like to thank the crew from the North and South who did the work in Menlo on the 23 of December. Within the time frame it was kind of difficult for some people who didn't have power. I just think they did a good job in some pretty adverse weather," said Anderson. Anderson went on to ask a question, "I have a question about planning on being in Tokeland at the end of 2016, how much money do we have set aside for that project, roughly?" Miller answered that there was somewhere between 13.5 to 15 million set aside for the Tokeland Line Extension project. After items from the public, the meeting was adjourned.