Hughes: Cold snap proves God is in the details

McCOOK, Neb. -- We often take for granted some of the backroom inner workings of various public functions we’ve become accustomed to enjoying. When we turn on the light switches, the lights come on and we give little thought to what all needs to happen to make that miracle occur. February’s cold spell has brought to light some of those inner workings that cause water to flow from our faucets and natural gas to fuel our furnaces and heat our homes.

Sen. Dan Hughes spoke with constituents on his weekly chamber call Thursday and was discussing some challenges customers of some Nebraska utilities may be facing as a result of the extreme cold.

He said a recent article in the Lincoln Journal Star outlined the troubles Wahoo, Neb. officials will be facing because they were forced to purchase natural gas on the spot market at a time when prices were at record highs. Wahoo owns the electric and gas utilities for the city and city officials thought they had enough gas in storage and contracts in place to meet demand. But the cold weather saw usage soar, and the city was caught short.

According to the article, Wahoo spent about $500,000 on natural gas, half of its budget for the year. Ryan Hurst, Wahoo Utilities general manager said the city will have no choice but to pass some of that cost on to customers. They may also have to pull from city cash reserves to soften the blow to customers.

Sen. Hughes said there were some pretty devastating stories out there about what may happen to those customers or those small municipalities when they get their gas bills. He said the legislature is looking into any type of federal assistance that may be available to help out. He also said the Natural Resource Committee would have a briefing with public power officials to discuss the issue.

“This event exposed some weaknesses. We certainly will learn from this, I hope. To me, those things are always fascinating – how we keep the trains running on time and how we keep the lights on. There’s a lot of people and a lot of logistics that it takes to make it happen,” Sen. Hughes said.

City Manager Nate Schneider told those in attendance that locally the issue was more with water. “Jesse Dutcher was down at the water treatment plant making sure that we didn’t have any issues with freezing. He was telling me that there was a certain formula that he was running over and over again to make sure that we were sitting in pretty good shape.” Schneider went on to say that public works overtime for just the one storm was at 300 hours, so the budget took a pretty good hit. “I told Kyle, our Public Works Director, that we need to do rain dances and no snow dances for a little while.”

Another inner working that Sen. Hughes is becoming more familiar with in his role as Chair of the Executive Board of the Legislature is managing personnel issues. He is currently in the process of interviewing to fill the position of Legislative Research Director. According to Hughes, some lawmakers heavily use the research office and others choose to use their own staff. The office provides research for bills, and this year, the research office will provide a lot of assistance in developing maps for redistricting.

Sen. Hughes also discussed redistricting, explaining that the redistricting committee is made up of three senators from each congressional district with a split of five Republicans and four Democrats. He discussed the options of hiring a non-partisan group or a citizen’s advisory group to draw the lines, as opposed to having elected senators do the work.

“It’s pretty hard to make that process non-partisan because unless you are partisan, you really don’t care about it. So it’s pretty hard to get someone who is not engaged in our political process to want to do that job. The people who are going to apply to be on a citizen’s committee are people who are engaged. In some cases, they can be way more political than an elected official whose job it is to do that [redistricting].”

Sen. Hughes said he wanted to put people on the committee that would bring forth a proposal that would make it to the floor without a filibuster. He said he has no illusion that there won’t be part of the re-districting that will cause some controversy, because “it is a partisan issue”. But he wanted leaders on the committee who were not “hard-right or hard-left ideologues” and would work toward a compromise to get through the process as quickly and smoothly as possible.