PORT ANGELES — Two Clallam County PUD commissioners will interview four candidates next week for a vacant seat on the board.
The commissioners plan to meet at 8 a.m. Tuesday for the first of the interviews, which are set an hour apart, at 104 Hooker Road in Sequim.
The four candidates, all with Port Angeles addresses, are Phyllis E. Bernard, Kenneth P. Reandeau, Kenneth Simpson and Gary R. Smith. A fifth candidate, Paul J. Pickett, withdrew his application.
“We are seeing if we can get everyone together at the same time,” Clallam PUD spokeswoman Nicole Hartman said.
Bernard earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in American history from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a juris doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
Bernard served on the board of directors of Southwest Power Pool Inc. of Little Rock, Ark., a nonprofit regional transmission organization, from 2003-2019. She also served as a commissioner for the Oklahoma Merit Protection Commission and has served as a commissioner-at-large for Olympic Medical Center since July 2023.
Reandeau graduated from Port Angles High School in 1970 and studied automotive technology at Peninsula College for a year. He worked in various roles at Crown Zellerbach and its successors, including lead operator and elected officer of his union local, from July 1971 to October 2006, when he retired. He was a third district representative on the Clallam County Trust Lands Advisory Committee in 2016 and has been a Clallam County Planning Commission member since 2023.
Simpson earned a bachelor’s degree in public relations/business from Washington State University and graduated from Puget Sound Electrical (Joint Apprentice Training Committee) school. He worked as an apprentice electrician at Power City Electric in Spokane from 1992-1993 and as an apprentice electrician at Angeles Electric from 1990-1995.
He has worked as a journeyman electrician at Angeles Electric since 1995, an estimator since 1996 and president since 2012.
Smith earned a bachelor’s of science degree from Lawrence University in Southfield, Mich., and was in the MBA program at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He served as chief information officer at TSI, Inc./Golden Gate University in San Francisco from 1995-1996; chief information officer at Qualis Health in Seattle from 1996-1997; president of the Olympic Medical Center board of commissioners from 2004-2009; manager of telecommunications for Kwajalein Range Services, which provides mission and logistic base operations support to the U.S. Army’s Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, from 2009-2013; and executive director of Volunteers in Medicine of the Olympics from 2014-2015.
PUD Commissioner Jim Waddell, 70, died on Feb. 5 of pancreatic cancer. He had represented the Clallam PUD’s District 3 since 2019 after he defeated longtime commissioner Ted Simpson in the 2018 election. He also had served as board president in 2023 and 2024.
State law gives the two remaining commissioners 90 days from the date of the vacancy to appoint a replacement for the remainder of the unexpired term, which runs until the certification of the November 2024 general election.
The commissioners issued a call for candidates, after which they posted the required 15-day notice of vacancy with the names of those who were eligible and had submitted applications.
A Clallam PUD commissioner earns a monthly salary of $3,238, plus a per diem of $161 for meetings attended on the district’s behalf, to a maximum annual compensation of $61,396. Commissioners also are eligible for group insurance for themselves, their immediate family and dependents.
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Reporter Brian Gawley can be reached by email at brian.gawley@peninsuladailynews.com.
