Two OPD5 staff members joined with more than 2,000 electric utility leaders at the annual National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) Legislative Conference held in Washington, DC, on April 27-29.
OPD5 General Manager/CEO MeLisa Garcia and Government Relations staffer Vernon Robison attended the three-day conference. They teamed up with a dozen other Nevada Rural Electric Association (NREA) members to engage with congressional leaders and to advocate for smart energy policies.
“It was a well-orchestrated and valuable experience,” said Garcia. “We spent a full day during the conference traversing Capitol Hill, meeting with each and every member of the Nevada Congressional delegation and their staff. Each of them were very accessible and receptive to our message.”
That message focused intently on the unique challenges of small, not-for-profit electric utilities in providing their essential service to rural communities across the state and the country. The NREA group emphasized the need for bipartisan energy solutions to ensure that their ratepayers continue to have access to reliable, affordable power.
NREA executives spoke to their representatives about the need for relief from red tape and onerous federal permitting requirements in the rural energy sector. This included unreasonable rules which have made it difficult to build and operate new baseload power generation facilities. But it also involved long delays involved in obtaining necessary rights-of-way across public lands for transmission lines and other essential infrastructure.
In addition, the Nevada group emphasized the vital importance of hydro-power resources to rural communities across the West. They specifically talked about their entities’ dependence upon power generated from dams along both the Colorado and Snake Rivers.
“Those of us in southern Nevada thanked each one of our delegation for their support of the Help Hoover Dam Act,” Garcia said. “Especially Rep. Susie Lee, who was the lead sponsor of the House Bill, Rep. Mark Amodei, who is its co-sponsor, and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto who sponsored the Senate bill. It is an important measure for entities like ours that have allocations from Hoover that average down the cost of power for our customers.”
The Help Hoover Dam Act frees up $50 million in already-allocated, unused federal funding for needed updates, maintenance, and improvements to the dam.
Other topics discussed by the NREA representatives included the need for re-opening the pipeline of federal grant funding to help pay for needed infrastructure and reliability measures in rural areas; and the importance of passing the Fix Our Forests Act, a bipartisan measure which would allow utilities greater leeway for clearing vegetation from public rights-of-way, thus mitigating wildfire risks.
Garcia concluded that the meetings provided an opportunity to forge relationships with each member of the Congressional delegation and their staff.
“It was an opportunity to remind each of them that our business is nonpartisan,” she said. “While the political winds shift in Washington, DC every few years, our message hasn’t really changed. Our focus and our priorities stay firm on what is best for our customer at the end of the line.”