Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well. I will start this update at the end with the e-mail addresses of the PUD commissioners. mike.murphy@pudwhatcom.org, atul.deshmane@pudwhatcom.org, christinegrant@pudwhatcom.org

The PUD is finally hiring a new General Manager and we need to make sure this decision is made correctly! Allow me to explain why this decision is critical to having a responsive PUD that serves the interests of all of its citizens.

While staff are supposed to work with our elected officials to implement solutions that are in the best interest of the people obviously this has not always happened or we would not be in the situation we are in. It is also obvious that if this decision is made incorrectly that the PUD may not meet our needs for many years to come. Why? We, sadly, have seen some high level staff members block progress over the years on many critical issues including broadband and ignore the requests of our elected officials and therefore the people. This is hardly just an issue at the PUD, but I will move on for today as recounting the rest would take a long time and the stories are in my nwcitizen.com articles. 

So I am asking you to write to the PUD and ask that when they interview General Manger candidates over the next few weeks that they make sure that the candidate is community minded, believes in public infrastructure, is not linked to special interests like the telecoms, will get their advice from many sources including ones not linked to the telecoms, and is an IT expert so they can navigate the sea of misinformation that the telecoms will surely send their way and more. It would also be good if they understood the need for more accurate network connection testing, like RRUL (real-time response under load) testing vs. less accurate methods like speedtest.net or the State Broadband Office speedtester, so the PUD can participate in conducting a proper, accurate, county-wide network testing project.