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Report from Jeff Johnson on the Recent Trip to Attend the American Public Power Association (APPA) 2020 Legislative Rally and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) Meetings
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Staff Recommendation
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From Sunday 2/23/20 - Thursday 2/27/20 Philo Shelton and Jeff Johnson attended the American Public Power Association (APPA) legislative rally. The APPA is an association that represents the interests of community owned and operated electric utilities. The legislative rally is orchestrated around congressional initiatives that are important to the APPA.
Observationally, many of the participants are organized into regional organizations, similar to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS). The DPU attended in support of our association with UAMPS and specifically to express support of the DPU involvement in the Small Modular Reactor project.
While the bulk of our visit revolved around getting to know the UAMPS members and representatives who attended the meeting, and outreach to the New Mexico congressional delegation, Philo and I did attended several APPA presentations which included a discussion about distributed power impacts on local systems; pole attachments and easements; a general luncheon with guest speaker Mara Liasson who talked about the general election and a breakfast with guest speaker Representative Pete Olsen who talked about the diversity of Texas electrical generation and tied this diversity to free market forces.
The UAMPS team organized congressional visits for all the UAMPS members who attended the rally, these included visits to the Utah, Idaho and New Mexico delegation. Philo and I met with representatives from Senators Udall and Heinrich’s office as well as Representative Lujan’s office. In these meetings we were accompanied by Mason Baker (UAMPS attorney) at all the meetings, and variously with Mike Squires (UAMPS congressional liaison), John Radford (City C...
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