PORT TOWNSEND — A man praised as having built the Jefferson County Public Utility District’s electrical service from the ground up has left after six years of service.
Kevin Streett was the district’s assistant general manager and electrical superintendent during a transition from providing only water and sewer service to adding electrical service.
Streett’s last day in the office was Thursday, the PUD said in a news release.
Streett, who has been in the electrical business for more than 40 years said that “it was time” to leave.
He plans to spend the next few weeks helping move his mother and taking a road trip to visit his sons.
When he began at the PUD in November 2012, Jefferson County’s electrical service was owned and operated by PSE, which subcontracted service and maintenance to the Puyallup-based Potelco.
The former PSE yard, which the PUD now uses for operations and customer service, was, according to District 3 Commissioner Wayne King, “empty,” containing “not even a screwdriver.”
As the PUD’s first electrical employee, Streett was responsible for building the division: ordering equipment, supplies and vehicles; and recruiting, hiring and training new employees.
“Kevin Streett built this utility from scratch,” King said in a statement. “There’s not a lot of people who could have done that. We were very lucky to get him.”
The son of a nuclear engineer and a lifelong electrical worker, Streett began his career working on line crews during summers off from college at Boise State, the PUD said.
He traveled the world working on transmission and distributions projects for various contractors before settling in as operations manager first at Overton Power District in Nevada and then Navopache Electrical Co-op in Arizona.
During his tenure at Jefferson PUD, Streett worked to update the county’s aging electrical infrastructure.
“Some of the equipment I came across here, I had never seen before, and I began in this business in the 1980s,” Streett said. “We had, we still have, switches and transformers and meters from the 1960s, earlier even. We’ve replaced a lot, but there’s still more to do.”
General Manager Larry Dunbar said that one of Streett’s biggest upgrades to electrical service in Jefferson County was the installation of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to improve electrical reliability and allow the crew to restore service rapidly and remotely from the operations center during outages.
“It’s a really impressive system for a district of this size,” Dunbar said.
Streett served as interim general manager for the PUD between Jim Parker’s departure in October 2017 and Dunbar’s hiring in April of this year.
Streett’s tenure as interim general manager was difficult, according to PUD officials.
Not only did Streett have to deal with what became a contentious and controversial meter replacement campaign, as well as electric and water rate increases, he remained in charge of keeping the county’s lights and power on, officials said in the release.
“Most days he came in before 6 a.m. and on good days he went home by 6 p.m.,” said Annette Johnson, executive assistant and public records officer, who was hired the same year as Streett.
“If there was an outage, Kevin would be here around the clock. He was absolutely dedicated to this PUD and will be sorely missed.”
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Reporter Jesse Major can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56250, or at jmajor@peninsuladailynews.com.
