As a customer of Emerald People’s Utility District, I was disappointed to see EPUD general manager Kyle Roadman co-author the opinion piece in Lookout warning of higher electric bills and dirtier power in Lane County.

The authors drew attention to a court order that will cut generating capacity, but failed to mention that it also partially restores a collaborative agreement that was summarily canceled by the Trump administration. After decades of legal wrangling and two years of negotiation, that compromise recognized tribal rights and protected Columbia River salmon, a species of huge cultural and economic importance to the region.

The writers complained of “a policy choice made without any input from the people who will be most affected,” yet these electric cooperative directors issued an opinion piece without asking their public owners how they feel about the trade-off between salmon and electricity rates. It is disingenuous to blame protection for salmon habitat while failing to address the full range of threats to electrical capacity, including extreme weather, aging infrastructure, a federal retreat from renewables and the growth of AI data centers.

I suspect that many, perhaps most, rate-payers would choose collaborative compromise over executive edicts, and salmon over data centers.

John F. Helmer
Eugene