Contact: Emerald PUD General Manager Kyle Roadman, 541-746-1583, kyle@epud.org
January 23, 2023
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Springfield, Oregon – Emerald People’s Utility District (Emerald) was notified on Friday, January 20th that Lane County District Court Judge Erin A. Fennerty granted its request to dismiss a condemnation action brought by the Springfield Utility Board (SUB). The decision affirms Emerald’s legal right to serve every customer within its exclusive service territory.
“SUB has raised electric rates nine times in nine years in response to increasing costs and stagnant growth. Nonetheless, they chose a lengthy and expensive court battle attempting to poach Emerald’s territory and customers instead of investing their ratepayers’ money on safety, reliability, and modernizing their infrastructure,” said Emerald PUD General Manager Kyle Roadman.
“This isn’t the first time SUB has tried this,” Roadman added. “SUB’s first attempt to illegally seize Emerald’s territory was rejected by the Oregon Supreme Court almost 20 years ago and we are gratified that a judge has once again sided with us. Let’s hope this is the last time we have to take on this fight.”
In April 2022, the City of Springfield, acting through SUB, passed a resolution to condemn electrical infrastructure owned and operated by Emerald to serve its customers in the east Springfield area. This marked the second time that SUB had tried to take this territory and the related public property already dedicated to a public use.
Created by a vote of the people in 1978, Emerald is dedicated to serving residents, farms, businesses, schools and churches located in a 572-square-mile “donut” surrounding the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area. In the early 2000s, the City of Springfield annexed land within a rural area served by Emerald. SUB then moved to eject the utility from serving this part of east Springfield. Emerald vowed to protect its territory and customers and the battle made it all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court, which ruled that SUB and the City of Springfield had no legal right to eject Emerald from its exclusive service territory.
With the court case now resolved, Roadman said Emerald looks forward to once again dedicating 100% of its resources and focus to serving its customers and the local community. The utility has made significant investments over the past few years, including committing $35 million to reliability upgrades, aggressively trimming trees to reduce outages and fire risk, installing advanced metering that allows customers to manage their usage, as well as providing scholarships to local students interested in pursuing careers in the utility industry.
“This has been an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction from the great work we do,” Roadman said. “SUB has forced both sides to waste hundreds of thousands of customer dollars on this fight. It’s not right.”
Emerald People’s Utility District is one of six public utility districts in Oregon, and serves more than 22,000 accounts in Lane County.