Idaho Power Co. wanted to try something new, and that was to get the community involved from the beginning in developing a long-range electrical plan.
Basing operations on a model put to work in the Treasure Valley, Idaho Power convened the Wood River Community Advisory Committee.
Starting in January 2007, the committee went on an eight-hour bus tour of Idaho Power facilities in the region. That tour began a series of educational meetings held monthly through March 2007.
The effort ultimately resulted in the Wood River Electrical Plan, which proposes a new 138-kilovolt transmission line between Hailey and Ketchum and additional transmission capacity in the Wood River Valley.
The committee included an array of Wood River Valley and south-central Idaho interests, from Picabo rancher Nick Purdy to Sun Valley Co. General Manager Wally Huffman. In all, 19 people were represented on the final committee that made the recommendation.
"If you look at the people who were involved in this, you have a good cross-section of the community, both in terms of their knowledge in how things operate up here and in environmental realities," said committee member and former Blaine County Commissioner Len Harlig. "You could have had a committee of 500 people, but I don't know that you could have had a better cross-section than the 19 or 20 that they ended up with."
Harlig said he was pleased with the methods.
"This was a really good process," he said. "I was impressed that Idaho Power had learned their lesson and had not only gone out of their way and looked for people to help them but to look for alternatives to just using Idaho Power's process and lines to bring in energy."
Idaho Power representatives, too, were pleased.
"It's new to us as a utility to do this, but we're doing it," said Community Relations Representative Dan Olmstead, adding that the committee was "invaluable to us."
"It was really interesting to hear their debates, the things they thought about that we didn't even think about," Olmstead said. "Engineers look at things differently: the shortest line between two points, for example. The least expensive is the other way they think about things. They don't look at routings and things."
Len Harlig
