Looking Forward to 2024

Less than two weeks into the new year and we’ve already made it through our first relatively large outage. The wind and snow January 8-10 caused outages to nearly 1,000 of our customers.

Thanks to the hard work of our line crews and staff, we were able to restore power to all of those customers pretty quickly.

Our goal, of course, is to keep the lights on, and to do so at the lowest practical cost to our customers. Those ideas were front and center in our minds as we crafted our Operating and Capital Budget for 2024, which was approved and adopted by our Board of Directors during their regular December meeting.

The $47.1 million budget will allow us to continue to maintain and improve our service to you. It will also let us keep our rates at some of the lowest in the state, as we do not anticipate any rate increases in 2024.

The adopted budget represents about a 9% increase from 2023. The main driver for the larger budget is an increase in fixed costs (power, taxes, and depreciation). These costs have gone up about 11% compared to the 2023 Budget.

In producing the 2024 Budget, we aimed to balance the necessary costs of maintaining, upgrading, and expanding our electric distribution system with our mission to provide quality services at the lowest practical cost.

Roughly $2.5 million is budgeted to construct transmission lines connecting our new Deer Island Substation to our distribution system. This will provide better reliability to customers in the Columbia City, Deer Island, Goble, and Rainier areas. It will also allow for more capacity and help us reroute power in emergency situations, which can help shorten the duration of outages.

Our outage prevention efforts also include converting overhead power lines to underground lines when practical. This year, we have projects planned on Apple Valley Road and Dutch Canyon Road in Scappoose. Roughly $1 million is earmarked for these conversions to improve reliability and safety for our customers.

We are entering the third year of our meter replacement project to ensure uniformity of electric meters throughout our service territory. Nearly $1 million is budgeted for this project.

Each year, we seek input from members of our Budget Committee in producing the budget. We have a 12-member committee with members representing residential customers, senior citizens, income-qualified customers, commercial customers, and industrial customers. Our Board of Directors has the final say on the budget process after careful consideration of the committee’s recommendations.

Our goal in creating this budget is that the improvements made over the year ahead help keep the power flowing to you.