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- Category: Local News
- Created on Friday, 31 July 2020 16:23
By Sentinel Staff
Keeping up with regular maintenance in order to prevent large, costly problems down the line will be a top priority of the Sitka Electric Department, the new city electric utility director told the Assembly Tuesday.
“We prioritize emergency work and outages as our first priority,” Scott Elder said. “Second priority, we need to focus on the maintenance of our system and maintenance over time saves a lot of cost in our systems. Emergencies are very expensive. Planned outages and planned scheduled maintenance become very cheap over time. And that is part of that life cycle cost analysis that we will be talking about in the future ... Then we focus on adding new customers and developing.”
“We have to focus on prioritization, especially as we are a small crew,” he said. “Our staffing, we are fairly thin ... One of my short-term goals is obviously to bring on staff.”
He said that his department currently has five vacant positions.
Elder also stressed the need to lower long-term costs.
“Anything we can do to lower the costs of long-term ownership and to develop ways to increase our capital reserves is very much needed,” he said.
Scott Elder speaks at the Assembly meeting Tuesday. (Sentinel Photo)
“Everything we can do on planning helps mitigate the impact on our rate payers, the people in the town... We want to serve everyone in the best possible way, but in order to keep costs low we have to manage and prioritize,” Elder said in a later interview.
Assembly member Steven Eisenbeisz stressed the need to keep electric rates down.
“We need to maintain our rates as low as possible throughout all the upgrades and infrastructure repairs,” Eisenbeisz said.
Elder replied that he believes the best way to keep costs low in the long term is to conduct maintenance as needed.
Eisenbeisz said later, “Repairs, maintenance, and upgrades all cost money and if we look at them with a blank check the rates will inevitably rise. If we look at it with the mindset that the citizens are already being charged a fair amount for electricity, then we may be able to temper some of the spending to keep the rates as low as possible.”
Elder stressed to the Assembly the need for routine maintenance in order to prevent larger problems in the future. “If we put off the inexpensive maintenance of today, later on they become huge tragedies that we have to come in and bail out,” he said.
“There is good, fast, and cheap. You can pick two, but not three,” Elder told the Sentinel.
Elder took over as electric department director on June 1. An acting director had been filling in since the resignation of Brian Bertacchi nine months ago. Elder hails from western Oregon, and moved to Sitka with his family.
“I’m happy to be here, Sitka is absolutely gorgeous. We enjoy living in small towns in rural America,” he said.
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