PORT LUDLOW — The Jefferson County Public Utility District has hired a new chief financial officer.
Susan Carter was selected out of roughly a dozen applicants.
Carter will take over CFO duties April 3 and will make $127,000 per year, according to a press release from Jefferson PUD.
According to Debbie Lund, the human resource and communication manager for the PUD, Carter was one of the candidates brought in by an outside recruiter after an internal recruitment effort in September didn’t produce any candidates.
Lund said Carter’s years of experience working for the Sawnee EMC in Cumming, Ga., a suburb just outside of Atlanta, made her an ideal candidate.
Sawnee EMC provides electricity to more than 150,000 people in a seven-county area.
Carter held multiple accounting positions in the 30 years she worked for Sawnee EMC and most recently held the position of director of accounting services.
She also is in the process of taking a Rural Utilities Services Borrower Accounting Course.
“Her years of experience and understanding of [Rural Utilities Services] rules the PUD has on the loan we took out when we purchased it from Puget Sound Energy made her ideal,” Lund said.
“Coming in with knowledge of those requirements and that system is a huge plus for the PUD.”
Rural Utilities Services is a U.S. Department of Agriculture program and comes with an additional set of accounting rules on top of the state requirements already demanded of Washington state municipal corporations.
The PUD is a Rural Utilities Services borrower and, according to Lund, someone with expertise in that program is hard to find.
Since the PUD was purchased from Puget Sound Energy in 2013, it has been through five CFOs that have either quit or been let go. Three were permanent employees and two served as interim CFOs.
The previous CFO, Bob Caprye, was hired in 2015 and was terminated in May 2016 during an audit of the PUD’s financial record from 2012 to 2014.
During that audit, the state recorded “findings” or issues to be addressed on those records, but the PUD announced in February that it had a clean audit of its 2015 financial records.
“Controlling a $30 million budget is a huge task for anybody,” Lund said. “We need to make sure our house is in order and that’s what this person will be responsible for.”
According to the PUD press release, Carter has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from North Georgia College &State University.
“I enjoyed my visit to Port Townsend earlier this month and look forward to serving the community as the PUD’s new CFO,” Carter said in the press release.
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Jefferson County Editor/Reporter Cydney McFarland can be reached at 360-385-2335, ext. 55052, or at cmcfarland@peninsuladailynews.com.
