Thank you all for everyone who joined the King County Council meeting today!

And, thank you to those who spoke up!

As you may be aware, King County Council made a proposal to put some regulations in place for BESS and they will be having a discussion about the proposed regulations with the King County Permitting team on August 22nd at 9:30 am...

Unfortunately, the proposal primarily focuses on the BESS owner/operator having appropriate insurance for a catastrophic event. 

I'm curious, how much insurance is needed to cover 800+ students and staff's death and 100s of neighbors death? 

Why do they make it about insurance instead of appropriate siting/locations?  

Whatever the reason, our next efforts should be focused on contacting King County Council, King County executives, and State legislature/reps and Jay inslee about placing a moratorium on BESS until there are laws and regulations in place...

Looking out to August 22nd, we need to show King County Council and the permitting team that we can show up in numbers...

At the meeting today, we had about 9 people speak about the Covington BESS- vs 11 the previous comment period....  

I get it- the BESS permit is in a transition period where it is being changed from a Conditional Use permit to "Utility" permit application and an "Alteration Exception" to enable Tenaska to get approval much much easier and a lot faster as they DO NOT have to do all the impact studies as a "utility"...

But, we can't let our guard down... We must keep emailing and calling to let them know we wont' got away...  That is what they are hoping for!

They are hoping that we will go away and they can sneak their permit through like Tenaska did in Grand Terrace, CA- where not one single person made a comment during the open comment period...

They snuck it through- and were getting away with it, until Dan Beekman was doing research for his Seattle Times article and was the one who broke the news to everyone he spoke to... Not a single person was aware of the approved BESS...

Please!  Please!

Reach out to every one listed below and let them know that they need to put a moratorium on BESS until there are solid and complete codes/regulations/laws in place...

governor.JayInslee@gov.wa.gov
Senator Claudia Kauffman claudia.kauffman@leg.wa.gov
Representative Debra Entenman Debra.Entenman@leg.wa.gov

Representative Chris Stearns Chris.Stearns@leg.wa.gov
 

 Reagan Dunn Reagan.Dunn@kingcounty.gov
Renton/Kent Rep Dave Upthegrove dave.upthegrove@kingcounty.gov
Auburn/Kent Rep Pete von Reichbauer pete.vonreichbauer@kingcounty.gov
East King County Rep Sarah Perry  sarah.perry@kingcounty.gov