EVERETT — A Snohomish County PUD whistleblower says he has been harassed and endured retaliation at the utility district since bringing attention to a series of no-bid contracts given to a former district employee.
The whistleblower’s concerns prompted an independent ethics investigation this past spring, which found that the PUD and the former employee had broken district policy.
Since then, the Public Utility District employee, Anthony Curtis, has faced a “pattern of retaliation,” his attorney, Elizabeth Hanley, said in an interview with The Daily Herald.
She filed a claim Tuesday with the PUD Board of Commissioners, claiming that Curtis was recently passed over for promotion. He has asked the PUD to pay him lost wages from the denied promotion and attorney fees and costs.
“The retaliation against Curtis for reporting governmental misconduct has had a chilling effect on other reports of such misconduct, which ultimately, harms the public and the utility’s ratepayers,” she wrote in the claim.
The PUD said it is investigating the claim as required by its whistleblower policy. The district has not decided whether it will hire an outside attorney to look into it, district spokesman Neil Neroutsos said.
In March, Curtis wrote Commission President Kathy Vaughn to share his concerns that PUD management had steered lucrative contracts to a former employee’s company.
Since 2011, the district has given the company no-bid contracts related to energy storage and worth more than $17 million*, according to the district’s latest project cost estimates.
Energy storage technology could help utilities handle growing demand from consumers without simply generating more electricity, advocates say.
District policy requires whistleblowers to go through the PUD’s human resources office. However, the department was implicated in Curtis’ allegations. So he went directly to the district’s publicly elected commissioners.
Despite sidestepping district policy, the commissioners treated him as a whistleblower, Vaughn said at the time.
The commission also hired an outside attorney to investigate his allegations. The attorney found that PUD management and the former employee had broken PUD policy by failing to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
In the months following his whistleblower complaint, his desk has been moved several times and other PUD workers have been discouraged to talk with him, Hanley said.
Before bringing his concerns to Vaughn in March, Curtis had been encouraged to apply for the district’s distribution services manager position when it came open, she said.
Earlier this year, Curtis applied and was a finalist. But in October, he was told he had not been picked despite his high qualifications, she said.
“At a certain point, you have to say enough is enough,” Hanley said.
The PUD Board of Commissioners has 30 days to respond after a retaliation claim is filed, according to the district’s whistleblower policy.
If that does not resolve the matter, a PUD employee can go to the State Office of Administrative Hearings, where an administrative law judge would rule on the retaliation claim, according the district policy.
Earlier this year, the PUD’s former CEO and general manager, Steve Klein, filed several public records requests, asking the district for thousands of records relating to Curtis.
In his requests, Klein alleged that Curtis “conspired to purposely defame me and the clean energy accomplishments of the PUD while I was the general manager.”
On the day he asked for emails sent from the PUD to Curtis’ private email address, Klein also asked for records of emails sent and received by a computer expert at the utility.
That employee and a co-worker were placed on paid administrative leave last week by the PUD.
The district had previously seized their computers for forensic analysis by a Bremerton-based computer security firm, Critical Informatics. The PUD paid the company, which was formerly known as MK Hamilton &Associates, $18,000 for the work.
“The PUD is engaged in an investigation into the security of its computer and telecommunication networks,” Neroutsos said.
He declined to provide any details.
“This is an ongoing investigation, and it is not final,” he said.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
* An earlier version of this story misstated the worth of the contracts.
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