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March 28, 2024 6:54 am
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MEET THE CANDIDATES: OPD5 Mesquite Seat

Jacob Noll                        Mike Young

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

Jacob Noll
Jacob Noll has been living in Mesquite for about 15 years now. He moved here from the Bay Area in California in May of 2005.
“But I had been coming here to play golf since 1999,” he said. “I fell in love with the area. So when we were looking for a place to move after I retired, this was a prime location.”

Noll has been involved in the Mesquite community since   moving here. He has been active in the local Rotary Club serving as its President three times and as Assistant Governor for four years.
When he first came to the community, he was newly retired and not working, so he volunteered in a program which marshalled community resources to build homes for needy families.

“I built four homes for that program down behind Ace Hardware,” Noll said. “The recipients were required to provide so many hours of sweat equity into the project to be eligible. I volunteered my services so that they wouldn’t have to put so many sweat equity hours into them.”

Noll is a retired telephone engineer. He worked as a liaison between a telephone utility and the public utility commission that regulated it.

“I got involved in the divestiture of the Bell system late in the process,” Noll recalls. “I think that the commission had a misunderstanding of what they thought the divestiture should be. They were about to make life very miserable for the general public. I was able to stop some of it, but not all of it. And now it is what it is today.”

Noll says that a priority for him in serving on the OPD5 board would be to develop more redundancy in the district’s system.
“Coming from California, there was a time period where we were plagued by blackouts,” Noll said. “Here it hasn’t been as bad as that. It is typically a matter of hours and not days. But if the system took a major hit, you know, it could be days. So working towards getting a redundant power system here in Mesquite would definitely be on my agenda.”

Noll says that he likes the idea of renewable energy and the use of solar power. But he believes that high cost of solar sources makes it not quite ready for prime time.
“It is just so expensive!” Noll said. “I just don’t see the savings there. I think that many folks are deceived about it, only for the sake of the rebates that are given by the government. Unfortunately, those rebates aren’t always guaranteed.”

Noll is also concerned about the mandates being instituted to require energy utilities to carry a higher percentage of renewable energy sources.
“I know that the government is pushing for higher requirements on utilities for renewable energy,” Noll said. “In fact, that is one of the things that is on the ballot: to reduce the original requirement for the percentage of renewable energy. I’d be in favor of that because it would make it much easier on power companies to meet that obligation.”

Mike Young
Mike Young has served as a Mesquite representative on the OPD5 board for the past six years.
“I came onto the board at a time when most of the board members were locals who were not always familiar with the utility industry,” Young said. “I thought that I could help because I brought some skills from the utility industry.”

Before retirement, Young spent his 40 year career working with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He started out as a utility worker, and “with the help of great mentors,” rose up in the organization to be in charge of operations for a system that had 2,000 employees and served about 16 million people.

“They had both water and power systems including power from Hoover Dam and other smaller hydro systems throughout their water distribution systems,” Young said.

The company’s power resources generated about 75 megawatts of power, Young said. “By the way, that is about the entire load of the OPD5 system today,” he said.
Young said that, upon being elected to the OPD5 board, he began to help the board to meet the challenges faced by the district. Some of these challenges were significant.

“They had lost a major lawsuit to Shell Resources and owed over $50 million, which is a huge debt load,” Young said. “And their credit ratings were in trouble and were just about to downgrade their bond ratings.”

Since that time, the board has worked together with staff to improve that situation, Young said.
“Staff did a wonderful job in renegotiated our power contract, which was huge,” Young said. “We have been able to use the savings from that to pay down the debt very significantly.”

Next the board has set its sites on the infrastructure needs of the district, Young said.
“One of the big things is we live in a desert and in the summertime air conditioning is an absolute necessity,” Young said. “If we have a major outage, that could be detrimental to a lot of people’s health.”
So the district is currently working on a second supply line for power into its system. This, and several other improvements will bring greater redundancy and fewer outages, Young said.
“That second line isn’t cheap,” Young said. “It is going to cost about $23 million. But we are able to pay for that through what we are saving.”

During Young’s term of office, the district has been systematically updating the aging portions of its infrastructure. That has involved replacing old wooden power poles with ductile iron poles.
“Some of those old poles were put in 50, 60, sometimes 70 years ago,” Young said. “They’ve been very reliable, but eventually you have to change them out. That will increase reliability.”

To develop its workforce, the district has also improved a tuition reimbursement program which encourages employees to get additional education, Young said.
“Let’s face it, where we live it is difficult to recruit people,” Young said. “So we have found that we have to develop our own people from within.”

Young said that he has worked with the board on making the flow of information from the district more transparent and rate-payer friendly.
“The business of a small utility has changed dramatically,” Young said. “We have to have some extra skills to make sure that everything is in the public’s view. We have to be able to let our customers know what is going on, because they expect that information. I think we are doing better at that all the time.”

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