Leader news staff
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Ken Collins will seek re-election for a second six-year term as PUD commissioner, representing District 2.
Collins, who first ran for his seat on the commission in 2014, announced his bid for re-election in a press release on Feb. 20. He hopes to continue his work on the PUD commission, where he has advocated for greater transparency of commission actions and hiring more crew to reduce customer wait-time for services.
“Since I started, I would say the staff has virtually doubled,” Collins said. “The organization moved from late childhood to maturity.”
Supporting the hiring of staff across all sectors of the PUD—from organizational staff, customer service representatives and line crew—has led to quicker response times for customers, he said.
Collins also highlighted his support for reducing rates for low-income customers, including seniors and disabled people.
But his first six years on the commission hasn’t been without its challenges.
“Probably the big challenge was trying to work with my fellow commissioners to create a unified team,” Collins said. Prior to moving to Washington state, Collins was a behavioral healthcare consultant to Fortune 100 companies, a manager at Chevron Corporation and a psychotherapist in private practice. He said his experience as a therapist has helped him listen and compromise with fellow commissioners, since they can get more done working together.
“One person can’t get anything done,” he said. “Most of the time, the commission is able to come to a consensus.”
Another major challenge the commission has faced during Collins’ tenure is the controversy around Smart Meters. While the PUD has not yet installed Smart Meters—electronic meters that record consumption of energy and communicates the information through radio frequencies to the electricity supplier for billing—many customers have expressed concerns about the radio frequencies from the meters causing cancer.
To address these concerns, Collins supported the creation of an “opt-out policy,” for a monthly fee of $5.
“I don’t know as of this moment whether the PUD will replace meters throughout the system with Smart Meters, but at the very least the people who don’t want the Smart Meters have a low-cost option,” Collins said.
Collins’ agenda for the future includes providing high-speed broadband to underserved and unserved areas.
“Broadband is a utility,” he said. “People depend on it for education, for their health, for the growth of their businesses.”
He also hopes to ensure that customers who report outages get through to a person or an automated system that confirms their notification. And he hopes to ensure the PUD retains resilience in the face of future challenges.
In 2019, Collins was elected as secretary of the Washington Public Utility Districts Association, which places him on the executive committee of the group, which represents 28 PUDs.
He and his wife Judith, a clinical psychologist and playwright, have lived on Marrowstone Island since 2006, where they founded Marrowstone Vineyards, which they sold in 2017.
