The first slide in a presentation by Joe Basile of Wallowa Resources introduces the Community Energy Strategic Plan to local residents who gathered to express their views on the plan Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023, at Cloverleaf Hall in Enterprise.

ENTERPRISE — Proponents of a proposed Community Energy Strategic Plan didn’t get exactly what they wanted during a public forum Nov. 8, and the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners may put off its adoption for another month.

Some 150 people gathered at Cloverleaf Hall in Enterprise for what was billed as an informational meeting on the plan, which has been before the commissioners since Oct. 4 and in the works by Wallowa Resources and the plan’s leadership team for a couple of years.

The aim of the plan is to make Wallowa County energy-resilient and prepared for emergencies that could arise, such as wildfires or the August 2022 hailstorm that pummeled Wallowa.

(The plan can be accessed at this website: https://tinyurl.com/WallowaCountyenergyplan.)

The plan focuses on seven guiding principles.

The seven include conservation, energy efficiency, energy resilience and security, the development of local renewable energy, financial benefits for the community, environmental stewardship, and responsibility for the best interests of all members of the community.

The plan prioritizes seven energy projects, boiled down from a list of 34 possibilities that the leadership team identified.

Resiliency

The Wallowa hailstorm is one of the incidents in recent memory that stretched the limits of the county’s resiliency.

The storm knocked out power, broke windows and shattered roofs.

The Wallowa County community came together to bring generators, plywood and tarps for windows and roofs and to clean up debris from the storm.

Plan proponents said Wallowa was lacking in such basics as generators to help restore power and those had to be brought from elsewhere in the county.

Among other things, the new strategic plan calls for developing what it calls the Wallowa County Microgrid Resiliency Corridor Project, which would develop microgrids, powered by renewable sources, to serve the cities of Wallowa, Enterprise and Joseph in the event of a major power disruption. If such a microgrid had been in place in Wallowa in August 2022, plan proponents said, the city could have bounced back more quickly from the power disruption.

Another recent disaster was the Double Creek Fire, which burned much of the hillsides around Imnaha in late summer 2022. Although few people actually evacuated, many were urged to do so and lost power.

County Commissioner John Hillock, owner of Enterprise Electric, said he helped come to the rescue with what amounted to a small microgrid.

“I delivered five generators down there of my own and loaned them out to the people who did not have energy,” Hillock said. “It can be that small of a thing. It could be bigger.”

In the Enterprise area, solar panels are seen as the most viable source of power for a microgrid, while in the Joseph area, hydropower is planned. Biomass is planned for Wallowa.

Public comments

County Commissioners John Hillock and Todd Nash emphasized that the county has no money to move forward with the plan. But having an approved plan makes it easier to apply for grants to pay for some of the plan’s projects.

That triggered worries from some of the attendees that such grants could pave the way for increased government interference in the lives of people in Wallowa County.

One man from Joseph said that while he approves of planning, he wanted to know more about the funding of projects listed in the plan. He wanted to know if the grants are federal or state and if they have to be paid back.

Joe Basile, community energy program manager for Wallowa Resources, said the strings amount to complying with the requirements of the grants.

“The catch is that you have to do what you said you’re going to do or you go to jail,” he said. “That’s the catch.”

He also said he doesn’t expect Wallowa County will want major government intrusion.

“Some far-reaching government program into the county, I don’t think anybody’s going to sign up for that thing,” he said.

Another man was concerned about added bureaucracy he feared would be created by the energy plan.

“You read through that stuff, they do a really fine job of wordsmithing the budget garbage,” he said. “Where it appears to me is that this process is being crafted to create another layer of bureaucracy that will ultimately have a say where our power is distributed.”

But Commissioner Nash emphasized that the plan doesn’t require the county to do anything.

“This doesn’t have any binding mechanism whatsoever, either to planning or anything else; this is a pie-in-the-sky plan,” he said.

“It is a moving target, it gets reviewed every six months,” he said. He added that he is “content with the way it is drafted right now, in not having anything binding in it. But (it has) some aspirational things to work toward.”

Officials on handBasile took the limelight and was both the target of criticism and questions at the forum.

He was assisted by Gavin Collier, also of Wallowa Resources; Caryn Appler, of the Energy Trust of Oregon; farmer and irrigator Joe Dawson, a member of the plan’s leadership team; and commissioners Hillock and Nash. Susan Roberts, the other county commissioner, also was present, as were the mayors of Wallowa and Joseph, Gary Hulse and Lisa Collier, respectively.

The commissioners will next consider the energy plan at their Dec. 6 meeting.

Nash said he may move to delay adoption of the plan another 30 days to give the public more time to weigh in on it.

One man still wasn’t satisfied.

“I went to the commissioners’ meeting when they put it on hold for 30 days, and you guys didn’t have a lot of answers on the questions that we were asking,” he said. “Tonight you guys still don’t have a lot of answers on the questions that we’re asking,” he said. “So what is it the commissioners will be voting on? … A plan with a lack of resources.”

Nash encouraged the public to offer input.

“Ultimately, this is your plan. If you want to engage, this is your opportunity,” he said. “You can go back home, get a copy of this and mark it up. Come back in six months — none of it’s going to be implemented in six months — you and your neighbors and friends can decide how you want to change it. These guys built the framework. You can make it yours.”

Roberts said after the meeting that she would just as soon adopt the plan Dec. 6 and then seek more input from the public.

“I did not get the sense that the plan was their problem,” she said. “They wanted to argue. I would recommend we adopt the plan and then ask the public to work with us on it.”

And Basile said there isn’t any particular urgency to adopt the plan.

“It’s just a plan,” he said. “We haven’t done anything.”

More on the energy plan

More on the energy plan

The Wallowa County Community Energy Strategic Plan represents more than a year’s worth of work from a community leadership team. Joe Basile, the community energy program manager of Wallowa Resources, helped to spearhead the work.

In its final report, the plan’s leadership team identified more than 30 projects for the county.

“Of that, 34 energy projects were boiled down into programs based on a priority-ranking scale that’s outlined in here to about seven programs,” he told the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners at its Oct. 4 meeting.

Those seven are:

• The Wallowa County Microgrid Resiliency Corridor Program, which is in the works and for which some funding has been obtained.

• An irrigation-modernization program, beginning with a campaign to ensure that farmers are familiar with irrigation modernization and the benefits it could offer.

• An electric fleet vehicle/mass transit program to support vehicle electrification and fuel-efficiency standards.

• A weatherization program that could include a truck and trailer so that necessary materials can be delivered right to households.

• A city-crosswalk and street-lighting program for Enterprise, Joseph and Wallowa to install solar-powered crosswalk signals and streetlights.

• A school clean-energy program intended to reduce energy usage and increase energy resilience of school facilities. A key goal here is to install rooftop solar arrays at each school.

• Residential solar, to increase rooftop solar development across Wallowa County.

Basile said the plan’s leadership team essentially is disbanded and being transformed into an advisory group to take the plan from the planning stage to the implementation stage.

“Wallowa Resources will continue to facilitate the process,” Basile said.

One of the primary goals of the plan is to establish microgrids throughout the county. A microgrid is a locally controlled electrical grid that can connect with the larger grid or operate independently. Microgrids can offer improved customer reliability and resilience in the event of grid disturbances.

Basile said the microgrids are expected to burn biomass in the Wallowa area, use solar power in the Enterprise area and hydropower in the Joseph area.