Allowing only days for customer-owner feedback, Jefferson County PUD is proposing a significant hike in fees for those who opted out of smart meters.

In a letter dated September 3, 2025, the PUD just informed customers with non-transmitting electric meters of an impending cost increase — tripling their current $5 per month opt-out fee to $15 per month. Low-income customers who previously had no monthly read fee would see an even greater increase, from zero cost to $15.

The letter invites customer feedback:

“I am reaching out today regarding upcoming changes to our communicating meter opt-out policy. You are receiving this letter because you have been identified as one of our customers who has chosen to opt-out of a communicating electric meter.”

“In an effort to maintain full transparency and receive feedback from community members impacted by possible upcoming changes, I am inviting you to provide feedback to the PUD regarding proposed changes…”

“We want to partner with you. If you have any suggestions or questions, please reach out to us at customerservice@jeffpud.org with the subject line of “Opt-Out Feedback” on or before September 12th, 2025. We will take this feedback into consideration.”

We received this letter on September 6th, leaving six days for feedback. One opt-out customer contacted us today, September 10th, saying they had just gotten the letter, leaving two days to respond. Interestingly enough, at the most recent regular meeting (@139 min. mark) on September 2nd, new General Manager Joe Wilson said we would be given two weeks to provide feedback.

The PUD’s “effort to maintain full transparency and receive feedback” hadn’t materialized as a news alert about the opt-out rate in any of the PUD’s monthly newsletters. Nor can we find this proposed fee increase/invitation for feedback on the PUD’s website. The only notice regarding these proposed changes has come in a last-minute letter offering less than a week for responses.

Why this extra cost?

Scientific evidence remains clear that transmitting (“communicating”) meters affect biological systems, not just in humans, but flora and fauna as well. For those of us opting to avoid the dangers of transmitting meters by choosing either a relatively benign non-communicating digital meter or an even safer analog meter, a meter reader comes to our homes to read electrical usage every month. The $5 fee was established to cover the cost of this monthly read. It was based on what it cost the PUD in 2020 when manual reads were contracted out and the opt-out policy was adopted.

The PUD’s letter informs us that according to a 2025 consultant’s report, the actual cost of the monthly read is now $28.30. The utility’s proposal is to reduce that cost to $15 by cutting the onsite visits in half, “sending technicians to manually read the meters every other month” instead of every month. Six readings a year rather than twelve.

The authors of this article are two of the founders of SMOG — Smart Meter Objectors Group. We worked from 2017 to 2020 to prevent a smart meter rollout in Jefferson County and develop an opt-out from transmitting meters.

Through these efforts, in late 2019 a pause was put on pursuing a smart meter program and in January 2020 the existing opt-out policy was adopted. When Covid lockdowns hit, community input was decimated. The PUD’s Citizen Advisory Board (CAB) was disbanded, in-person PUD meetings ceased, and direct communications with our commissioners was compromised. In the absence of community engagement, the utility resumed its smart meter efforts, starting a rollout in 2022.

Previous articles we’ve written about SMOG’s history, about the smart meter replacement program, and about the dangers of smart meters include Smart Meters Coming to a Neighborhood Near You! and Will a Smart Meter Harm Your Health?

Simple Solutions to Meter Reading Fees Already Exist

According to a recent Public Records Request, there are 486 PUD customer-owners currently opting out of transmitting meters. For many of these customers, this proposed fee hike is significant. Going from $60/year to $180/year, that’s another $120 increase on top of the general rate hikes that began this July.  And for low income residents who have not had to pay any extra fees, it will create an even greater hardship, increasing their annual utility costs by $180.

From our research, this financial hit is easily avoidable.

Simple, low-cost alternatives to PUD employees reading meters onsite are already successfully employed by other utilities. These models do not require monthly or even every other month meter reader visits.

A Washington state PUD we spoke to when we first organized SMOG, which then had mostly analog meters, had its customers read their own meters every month — they are called self-reads. A customer could either call in or send their reading to the utility by a certain date. No technician was required onsite for 11 months. Once a year they sent a meter reader to make sure the customer was providing accurate readings. That PUD has since replaced all their analogs with transmitting meters and no longer uses that system.

But an even easier method is currently in use by Snohomish PUD. They began a smart meter rollout in 2023, and expect to complete the installation of 380,000 meters by the end of 2026. They offer two meter reading choices for opt-outs.

From Snohomish PUD’s website:

• Customer can have a PUD meter reader read their meter for a monthly fee of $25, or

• Customer can submit a picture of their meter and perform a self-read each month for a monthly processing fee of $5 per meter.

Snohomish PUD has 346,094 residential customers. It is the largest of the 28 PUDs in Washington state, the second largest publicly owned utility in the Pacific Northwest and the 12th largest in the nation. We spoke with one of the staff managing the opt-out program for clarification on their photo submission process.

In lieu of a meter reader coming to a customer’s property, the customer submits a photograph once a month showing their power usage through a convenient online portal at SnoPud’s website. Customers are given a 5-day window each month to make their submissions.

Simple.  Easy.  Snap a photo once a month, submit it electronically.

For Jefferson County PUD customer-owners, all that is needed is for our PUD to set up an online portal and/or provide an email address where we can submit the meter photo. A five-minute or less effort for the customer twelve times a year.

On the PUD’s end, no PUD meter reader is needed. No travel is required, no fuel is consumed, there are no complicated meter access issues.

That’s one consideration. But there is also an argument to be made that the current meter-reading program is more than fair — without increasing opt-out charges.

The True Cost of Opt-Outs Versus Smart Meters

Before Jefferson County’s smart meter rollout, we argued for a self-read option like the one described above as a NO-cost solution to minimize the need for monthly meter readers. Management felt that a $5 read fee was reasonable enough to bypass that approach. And low-income customers were given a break from that extra $5 charge.

The $5 figure was based on what the PUD was already contractually paying Landis+Gyr for reading a large portion of the meters that still had Puget Sound Electric transmitters on them. The cost they charged the PUD for reading each meter, many of which were failing, was actually slightly less than $5. While they were using a mechanical interrogation method for the transmitters still functioning, a significant number had to be physically read.

Now they claim we are not bearing the true cost of our choice to opt out. “Without these necessary changes,” the letter reads, “the option to opt-out of our communicating meters is not financially sustainable.”

But what ARE opt-out customers costing the utility versus smart meter customers? Are the opt-outs an unreasonable drag on the line?

To start, the $28.30 cost for monthly meter reads estimated by the consulting firm is debatable. On August 5th a special PUD meeting was held to discuss the opt-out policy (video here). The consultant presented their report and some discussion followed the presentation.

Of that $28.30, the expense for actually reading the meter — which the PUD paid less than $5 for in 2020 — is itemized as now costing $16.37. The remaining $12 includes items such as administrative overhead.

An example of administrative overhead given by the consultant at the August 5th presentation was the cost of “the commissioners spending time discussing this topic”! But these costs are already covered in our base rate, what one commissioner rightly described as “double dipping.” 

Whatever the true cost, it doesn’t begin to compensate for the increased energy rates that opt-out customers are already bearing for a $5 million rollout of smart meters we don’t use or need. And beyond this massive outlay which has driven higher rates that we are ALL paying, we are also subsidizing extra costs from failure of the smart meter technology to live up to its hype.

Issues we warned about like meters failing to “communicate” likely create more demands on staffing than 486 non-transmitting meter reads once a month. On any given day, according to our recent Public Records Request (PRR), 300 or more smart meters may need attending to because they are “experiencing connectivity issues.”  

As shown in this screenshot, on August 14 there were 310 smart meters offline (see blue bar, far right). Representing “a moment-in-time yesterday,” wrote the PUD Administrative Assistant who responded to the PRR, “310, this number fluctuates continually.” Sometimes it will be lower, sometimes it will be higher.

That figure is 64% of the total number of opt-outs! How much staff time is required to respond to hundreds of smart meters with connectivity issues that are not performing as needed?  No such problem plagues our steady, reliable “non-communicating” analog and digital meters.

At the September 2nd regular meeting, staff gave a PowerPoint presentation that included this verbiage on a slide:

Continuing to allow Jefferson County Customers to offset the cost of customers choosing not to have a communicating meter goes against our desire to have customers generating the cost pay for the cost.

The opt-out fee is being treated as though it’s an anomalous inequity within the system. But is it?  The fee is punitive, though not intentionally on the part of the PUD. It’s a misguided attempt to level a playing field that cannot be leveled.

• It is not fair that everyone is paying the same base rate that covers the cost of that $5 million smart meter rollout, when we who opt out aren’t using it.

• It’s not fair that when a few hundred of those meters regularly fail to communicate, those truck-rolls are considered the cost of doing business… but the truck-rolls for reading analog meters is considered a privileged gift.

• It is not fair that electric customers subsidized the build-out of broadband. How many hours (administrative overhead) did the commissioners spend in meetings discussing broadband? How will electric customers be reimbursed for that, applying the formula that was used to arrive at the opt-out cost?

• There’s unfairness in the higher cost of delivering services to all those spread-out homesteads in the south county.

These disparities cannot easily be remedied. That’s what the base rate is for.

Providing Feedback on Proposed Opt-Out Rates

The September 3rd unsigned letter quoted at the beginning of this article — “I am reaching out today” — appears to have come from staff, not from the PUD commissioners or the general manager whose names are at the top of the letterhead. It outlines the proposed rate hike discussed the day before at the September 2nd general meeting.

For those inclined toward number-crunching, here is the spreadsheet provided to the Commissioners by PUD consultant, FCS, to support their findings.

It was agreed at that meeting that a resolution on these proposed rates would soon be presented to the commissioners, possibly for a vote at their Tuesday, September 16th regular meeting, which takes place from 4pm-6pm.  The meeting room is at the 310 Four Corners Road office building, to the right of reception.

We have learned through calls to the commissioners that feedback to them does not have to be received by September 12th, despite that deadline being given to respond to customer service. But it is critical that commissioners hear from opt-out customer-owners both AHEAD OF and AT the upcoming meeting. They plan to vote on this resolution at that meeting.

Email and phone contacts for our three PUD commissioners are:

Jeff Randall, District 1 –  jrandall@jeffpud.org / 360-316-6694

Kenneth Collins, District 2 –  kcollins@jeffpud.org / 360-316-1475

Dan Toepper, District 3 –  dtoepper@jeffpud.org / 360-302-0448

You can cc emails to GM Joe Wilson at jwilson@jeffpud.org

Written feedback to the commissioners should be sent by Monday, September 15th to receive considered attention. At the meeting on Tuesday public comments are limited to three minutes. You can comment in person or via Zoom. More information about the meeting and about joining Zoom can be found here.

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Addendum / Friday, September 12:
A Violation of Trust

At the PUD’s September 2 general meeting, when GM Joe Wilson said that a letter to opt-out customers would be going out with a two-week window for responses, he explained that after that two-week collection period, staff would go through a process of incorporating the feedback into a proposed resolution he would bring to the commissioners:

“After a two-week period hearing feedback, staff would attempt to incorporate that feedback into a proposal and bring it back to the board as a resolution for consideration.”

No such process took place. Not only was the stated two-week response time reduced to a matter of days, NO public feedback has been incorporated as part of the proposed rate changes.

Wilson did not even wait for the truncated Sept. 12 deadline to pass before putting the resolution that had been recommended on Sept. 2 in the Sept. 16 agenda packet. This morning, a full working day before the feedback deadline, the opt-out resolution was posted as an agenda item for Tuesday night’s meeting with the “Recommended Action” that the commissioners approve it as previously presented:

8.2 Opt-Out Presentation, Resolution & Calculations
Presenter: Joe Wilson, General Manager
Recommended Action: Make a motion to approve the Opt-Out Program Resolution as presented.

The resolution (p. 69) is exactly as discussed on Sept. 2 — no consideration or inclusion of customer feedback. The accompanying materials in the packet show the same staff recommendations made at that meeting where GM Wilson assured the commissioners a proposal would be drafted after gathering customer feedback and incorporating it. His actions demonstrate an effort to advance a predetermined outcome while his words professed otherwise.

How can the public believe staff was sincere in their letter requesting input and their stated desire to “partner” with us when our feedback has been ignored? 

How can our new GM — completely disregarding a process he claimed would be followed — be trusted?