PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson County PUD General Manager Kevin Streett plans to retire on June 8, 2025. He is confident that the agency’s leaders and staff will be able to carry the utility forward.
“It’ll be nice to spend time with family,” Streett said. “The jobs that we all have at a PUD, you’re pretty much on call 24/7. It will be nice to sit back, and if the power goes out, I don’t have to do anything.”
“Kevin has really helped shape the utility into the well-respected organization it is today,” PUD Commissioner Kenneth Collins said. “His experience and dedication have been instrumental in our growth.”
From establishing the electric division to leading the utility through the early days of its broadband division, Streett has played a major role at the PUD during the last 12 years.
Hired late in 2012, Streett was the first employee of the then-new electric division, following the PUD’s purchase of the grid from Puget Sound Energy.
Early on, there were challenges in getting to know the infrastructure, Streett said. Linemen were all hired from out of the area and the grid map was limited.
“Our crews spent a lot of time driving around, trying to figure out the utility’s infrastructure in our system,” Streett said. “Then to be able to, at 2 o’clock in the morning on an outage, know how to switch, or to bring people on, all of those kinds of things were challenging.
“It was just outage restoration, normal maintenance, all of those kinds of things that normal utilities take for granted were extremely new to us.
Streett stepped in as interim general manager in 2017, when previous General Manager Jim Parker retired. Previous to that, he was the assistant general manager. Streett said his time as interim general manager was trying.
He became the PUD’s general manager in 2019.
“When I was made manager, it was good,” Streett said. “It allowed the PUD to kind of grow in a different way. I feel fortunate.”
Streett said he had a lot to learn early in his time as general manager and credits staff with being patient.
In 2012, when he was first hired to start the electric division, the utility only had eight employees, all water and administrative. When his tenure as general manager started in 2019, the number of PUD employees was in the 40s, O’Donnell said.
Now the PUD has 76 employees, O’Donnell said.
“It’s been a lot of growth and change,” he added.
In 2021, state law changed to allow PUDs to become retail broadband service providers, O’Donnell said. Soon afterward, the federal government started offering grants to build in rural areas, he said.
Streett credits O’Donnell with success in securing grants, although the grant awards came with challenges, he said.
“With the grants come a lot of regulatory compliance, a lot of challenges with everything from hiring people, to materials, to equipment,” Streett said. “Really the challenge the last couple years has been putting forth the broadband division.”
That division has grown from zero to eight employees in the last year, Streett said.
“South County is our first building area, from Quilcene to Gardiner,” O’Donnell said. “We’ve now built fiber to over 1,000 homes that didn’t have it before, and we’re going through the process of installing the service inside the home.”
The PUD is currently expanding to the last unserved addresses in its electric territory, O’Donnell said.
“If you don’t have access to broadband speeds today, we’re going to be able to build to everyone by 2028,” O’Donnell said.
Streett said the PUD’s water division continues to grow. The department finished the installation of a $3 million water tank in Quilcene a year and a half ago, he said.
The water division is currently re-routing water lines at salmon culvert projects throughout the county, Streett added.
“It’s very time intensive and very expensive,” Streett said. “At least right now, we have to bear the cost of all that relocation.”
Streett said the PUD’s electrical division is humming along, but it will receive a major infusion of project dollars in the next 10 years — $120 million. The board approved the 10-year plan earlier this year.
Much of that money will be spent on replacing components of the grid, which was mostly built in the 1950s and ’60s, Streett said.
The PUD board of commissioners has special meetings scheduled at 1:30 p.m. Dec. 16 and at 9 a.m. Dec. 17. The board will see presentations from four search firms vying for the job of finding Streett’s replacement.
The meetings are open to the public and can be attended online. Zoom links are available on the PUD’s website at https://jeffpud.diligent.community/Portal/MeetingSchedule.aspx.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
