Wally Haase, general manager, Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, spoke at the American Public Power Association’s National Conference on June 19, 2018, regarding a project for the city of Sacramento.
Wally Haas, APPA National Conference 5 from Public Utilities Fortnightly on Vimeo.
“Harland and others have been working over the course of years to try to develop projects, whether I could do them on the Nation and transmit the power to them, or could I do something local? It became apparent that the transmission costs would be too large of a burden for any project to be successful, unless they owned existing rights. So we took the approach of trying to acquire some lands in California, and to try to propose projects to various communities. I'm very, very proud to say we were able to provide a very cost-effective product to the city of Sacramento, very smart, and I was privileged and honored to be able to work with them the last few years to get APPA in place. And their board of business and finance folks were kind enough to allow me to come and talk to them on December 5th — I'm sorry, June 5th — and it was very, very well received through the process of that.
“So the reason that I'm rounding out on this is because again, I felt it was necessary that I needed to have some seed money. If I'm going to ask people to come, but I can't support their endeavor to come here and help me, that's going to reflect very badly on everything.”