By BECKY THOMAS
Staff Reporter
Cheney Mayor Tom Trulove has worn several different hats through the years.
At last week's Cheney City Council meeting, he donned one he doesn't usually wear: he was taken aback, bowled over, at a loss for words as city staff told him he was the recipient of the Paul J. Raver Community Service Award from the Northwest Public Power Association. The award is given to an individual or a group that has worked toward the betterment of cities, states or regions, and Trulove said he feels unworthy to be named among its past recipients.
“They give it to people like Sen. Mark Hatfield and former administrators of Bonneville Power Administration. People like that get it,” he said later last week. “I never expected to be in that company. I'm a midget among all those giants, so to get this it just sort of takes my breath away.”
Despite his humility, Trulove has been a major player in the Northwest power game for decades, serving on numerous boards and commissions and as the Washington representative on the Northwest Power Planning Council (NPPC) for eight years.
Understanding power, especially in Washington with its grab bag of private and public utilities running a complex system of hydroelectric dams and wind farms, can be difficult for the average citizen. But for Trulove, it's always gone back to economic development.
“I got into economics because I care a lot about economic development,” he said. “Jobs were important, local jobs, because I wasn't raised in a rich family.”
Soon after he began studying economics in the Pacific Northwest, Trulove said he realized the impact that power, specifically hydroelectric power, has had on the region's economy.
“The reason we had economic development was because Grand Coulee Dam got developed,” Trulove said. The dam facilitated irrigation and agriculture in central Washington, while producing cheap electricity that drew industries to the state. “We were able to do marvelous things in terms of economic development because we had that advantage of cheap power. That was a key, so I thought I ought to know something about this power stuff.”
While he gained knowledge of power in the region, Trulove was led to advocacy. In the 1970s, when many cities were signing on to agreements that would fund construction of nuclear power plants, he became concerned about the numbers that showed a need for new power generation.
“I couldn't see any way that they could use that electricity or ever pay for (the plants). So I came down to the City Council in Cheney,” he said. Trulove's testimony led the council to turn down the agreement, he said, “which saved the city of Cheney from some really high costs.”
Soon after, Trulove ran for mayor and won the seat in 1978. He focused locally, and worked with Cheney's light department on various issues related to the city's publicly owned power utility. But he remained interested in regional power issues, and in 1986 he left the mayor's office and took a leave from his day job as an economics professor at Eastern Washington University after he was appointed as the Washington representative on the NPPC.
Trulove said the job enabled him to take the time to study power issues in the Northwest and discuss those issues with the “heavy hitters” in public and investor-owned utilities, a group he didn't feel he quite belonged to. He also led an exchange program with the former U.S.S.R., in which groups of American and Russian scientists and power experts exchanged information and tours of their energy programs.
After his time at the Power Council, Trulove stayed involved with power, both in Cheney and across the region. Now in his second full term as Cheney mayor, he's looking toward the future, and said Cheney will soon face policy issues as the city must look to buy “tiered” power from wind energy, which is more expensive, as continued development and environmental limits on dams cut down the availability of cheap hydro power.
“Do you give the existing customers the good deal of that low-cost hydro power and any newcomers you charge them a higher price that reflects the higher cost of generation, or do you meld them all together and everyone gets that price?” he said. “There's a lot of policy decisions to be made and that's going to be interesting.”
When asked about his personal power philosophy, Trulove goes back to the economic development issue, and hails the wide variety of organizations that have worked together to coordinate the hydroelectric system that supported Washington's development. He said the existence of publicly owned utilities alongside private companies have kept prices low, while also spurring growth from the startby bringing electricty to rural areas.
“There wouldn't have been the economic opportunities,” he said. “So for me that's the big deal.”
Trulove will accept the Raver Award at the NWPPA annual meeting in Reno, Nev. on May 25, when he will take his place among the heavy hitters. He'll likely be wearing his most comfortable hat, the modest one.
“I'm excited by this. I don't like to toot my own horn,” he said. “It's just one of those things that makes you grin.”
Becky Thomas can be reached at [email protected].
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