Friday — April 23, 2004

Electricity for
Galena on-line

$500,000 campaign reaches goal

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"A quick decision needed to be made, and Dick (Hare) and Jenny (Busdon) just stepped up. It’s a tribute to these guys. They’re the lasting legacy of Galena Lodge."

— DAVE KIER, Blaine County Recreation District marketing and development specialist

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By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer

Wood River Valley residents galvanized their commitment to Galena Lodge this week when they capped off a $500,000 fundraising campaign that will pay for buried electricity lines to feed the popular north valley ski lodge.

The lodge, which was bought by the citizens of Blaine County 10 years ago, should be able to retire its two old generators early this summer at a June 13 flip-the-switch party and summer barbecue.

Jenny Busdon and Dick Hare, Power Galena! campaign co-chairs, jump for joy in response to another successful Galena Lodge fundraising campaign. The $500,000 they raised will pay for underground electricity lines to feed the lodge and enable the old generators to be retired. Express photo by Willy Cook

Including the original $550,000 lodge purchase price, nine annual fundraising events and the Power Galena! campaign, local citizens have raised nearly $2 million for the lodge since the original Help Save Galena campaign kicked off in 1991.

"There are not taxes. That’s really important. The community has paid for the lodge," said Jenny Busdon, one of the Power Galena! co-chairs and a member of the Galena Advisory Committee. "At the first Galena Benefit, we had about 250 people, and now it’s sold out—450 people every year. We’ve raised a lot of money over the years. The community has done so much for us.

Galena supporters attended their ninth Galena Benefit last fall, and about $100,000 is raised at each event.

Busdon said the lodge depended on its "dirty, unreliable, noise, expensive" generators for too long. "It was $25,000 per year just to run that generator," she said.

But even the Power Galena! representatives were surprised to reach their goal this week.

Busdon and fellow Power Galena! co-chair Dick Hare established a meeting with a local reporter on Wednesday to announce they were $50,000 away from their $500,000 goal. Kier arrived about five minutes after the meeting started and announced he had just secured the final $50,000 from an anonymous donor.

"This campaign was not all that different from the first one," Hare said. "There were more than 300 individuals who contributed. There’s a really good cross section of the community."

Hare pointed out that, like the original Help Save Galena campaign, those who contributed more than $100 during the Power Galena! campaign will have their names engraved on a plaque and hung in the lodge.

Those involved maintain that that the timing for the project and fundraising campaign was right.

"A quick decision needed to be made, and Dick and Jenny just stepped up," Kier said. "It’s a tribute to these guys. They’re the lasting legacy of Galena Lodge."

Since the community purchased Galena Lodge in 1994, the Blaine County Recreation District says it has dreamed of routing cleaner, more reliable power to the lodge.

It got its opportunity last fall.

Syringa Networks is installing an underground fiber optics cable through the upper Wood River Valley as part of a statewide program to deliver broadband to rural Idaho. Because Syringa had already jumped through the hoops of environmental review and had the equipment on the ground, the Galena Lodge project was able to piggyback on Syringa.

The conduit is installed, but the single-phase power line has yet to be pulled through. This spring, Idaho Power will install the electricity line from Russian John Guard Station to Galena.

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