State regulators will decide the fate of Yakutat\u2019s municipal power company, but a large group of local residents wants the final word to be theirs.<\/p>\n
In a public comment submitted to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, former mayor Larry Powell presented the names of 277 Yakutat residents affixed to a petition declaiming the sale of the local power company to the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously in AVEC\u2019s best interests, but it\u2019s not in Yakutat\u2019s best interests,\u201d Powell said by phone. <\/p>\n
He and other town residents would prefer the power grid stay in the hands of a municipal company. \u201cWe have people here, we have the capability, we\u2019ve been doing it for 30 years, and it keeps us in control of our own rates,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The petition is a copy of one first submitted to the City and Borough of Yakutat Assembly this spring. It\u2019s the work of a group of local activists who supported alternative energy and Yakutat\u2019s existing power system.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just call it an alternative energy working group,\u201d Powell said.<\/p>\n
The group is concerned that AVEC will not back biomass energy or tidal energy to replace Yakutat\u2019s diesel-fired power plant, built in 2014. Yakutat\u2019s municipal power company has supported studies of tidally driven generators.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re totally diesel-dependent right now; we need somebody who wants to be innovative,\u201d said Jack Endicott, owner of the city\u2019s famed surf shop.<\/p>\n
Yakutat\u2019s power sale has been in the works for years, but it will reach culmination in April 2017, the deadline for state regulators to rule on a license transfer from the city to AVEC, which runs the power systems of 51 rural Alaska communities. <\/p>\n
Yakutat would be the first AVEC location in Southeast.<\/p>\n
Those who signed the petition and oppose the sale say they\u2019re frustrated that the issue didn\u2019t come before voters in a referendum vote. Earlier this year, the Assembly voted to proceed with the sale without a referendum.<\/p>\n
Jimmi Jensen, a member of the Assembly, said the belief among petitioners is that \u201cevery citizen here has an equal share in that powerhouse, and I don\u2019t feel every citizen had an equal say in the sale.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jensen was elected on a write-in bid in October, months after the Assembly\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n
In hindsight, Powell said it was a mistake to not make the petition a formal one. As an informal document, the list of names had no binding power on the Assembly. Members could choose to ignore it, and they did, he said, even though the list is more than half of Yakutat\u2019s 458 registered voters.<\/p>\n
Endicott, who is among those on the petition, said, \u201cIt\u2019s kind of frustrating to me. If the majority of people wanted it, they\u2019d vote for it; if they didn\u2019t want it, they\u2019d vote against it. The public really didn\u2019t get much of a say in the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
State regulators will decide the fate of Yakutat\u2019s municipal power company, but a large group of local residents wants the final word to be theirs. In a public comment submitted to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, former mayor Larry Powell presented the names of 277 Yakutat residents affixed to a petition declaiming the sale of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28359"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}