The gas company is city hall

Somewhere on the side of your house, behind a rhododendron that has been meaning to move, there is a gray box with a dial face and a shutoff valve. If you live inside the city limits, that meter belongs to the city. So do the service line, the main under the street, the fenced enclosure of painted pipe two blocks over that you have never once looked at, and the 13 miles of high pressure main that brings the gas in from Auburn.

The company that sends you the bill has no shareholders. It has a seven member city council that meets at 7 p.m. on the second and fourth Mondays at 1339 Griffin Avenue, and you elect it. The people who set the sewer rate set the gas rate.

Which is why yesterday's news from Olympia is a local story here and almost nowhere else in King County. On Thursday the state Supreme Court held that Initiative 2066, the natural gas measure voters passed in 2024, "violates the single-subject requirement contained in article II, section 19," and is therefore "unconstitutional in its entirety." Chief Justice Debra Stephens wrote for a six to three majority, Justice Sal Mungia dissented, and every newsroom in the state filed it as a Puget Sound Energy story, which for most of Washington it is.

Two towns and a thirteen mile pipe

The city's adopted Comprehensive Plan gives the founding in one sentence. Enumclaw "has operated a natural gas utility since 1957, when it partnered with the City of Buckley to install a 13-mile high-pressure main from Auburn through Enumclaw, ending south of the White River Bridge along Highway 410."

Sit with 1957 for a second. Two plateau towns, neither of them large, worked out that if anybody was going to run a gas line up the hill it might as well be them, and split the cost of thirteen miles of high pressure main. The main ends south of the bridge into Buckley, the 1949 truss covered in our story on every road out of Enumclaw. Sixty-nine years on, the city is one of only two municipally owned gas utilities in Washington. The other is Ellensburg, with over 140 miles of main and more than 5,000 customers.

What you own

The figures here are from the Utilities Element the City Council adopted in February 2025, at page U-8 and after.

As of 2023 the utility had 19 district regulator stations and 121 miles of distribution main serving 5,140 residential and commercial customers. Its certified service area is 44.3 square miles and reaches into Auburn and unincorporated King County, which is how a July purchasing card statement shows Enumclaw paying Auburn $19.94 for "Stormwater @ Gas Reg Station." Public Works runs the system, Finance bills you, and gas moves on through the pipes to Buckley under a twenty year agreement with Puget Sound Energy begun in 2014.

Staffing is roughly ten people: a gas utility manager, a gas supervisor, a gas engineer, a third of a utility tech, four gas workers and a utility worker. The manager is Nick Peelo; the Public Works Director is Brian Spindor.

The customer count is unsettled. The adopted plan says 5,140; the April 2024 review draft of the same document said 5,000, and 116.7 miles of main rather than 121; the city's natural gas page says "over 4,000 customers."

The cap, in plain English

The Climate Commitment Act, passed in 2021, caps carbon and makes large emitters hold an allowance for every metric ton they release. Gas distributors generating 25,000 metric tons or more are covered. Compliance runs in periods: the first covers emissions from 2023 through 2026, the second opens January 1, 2027.

Washington has six natural gas utilities on Ecology's allocation list. Four are companies. Two are cities. In June 2023, in Publication No. 23-02-074, Ecology allocated Enumclaw 21,147 no cost allowances for 2023, falling year by year to 16,372 for 2026, a ladder set by what the utility emitted between 2015 and 2019. Those allowances cannot be traded or sold privately. They are surrendered for compliance or consigned to Ecology's quarterly auctions, with the proceeds owed back to ratepayers.

All of that machinery reaches you as a line item: a Climate Commitment Act charge of $0.0669 per ccf, set by Ordinance No. 2741, if your house was connected before July 25, 2021, and $0.3369 per ccf if after.

What the record says, in order

Start with the city's own letter, which came first and is the clearest thing anybody here has written on it.

On August 1, 2022, the utility wrote to every gas customer to say rates were going up about 23 percent on November 1. Staff had "worked diligently with Ecology in an effort to be exempted for the first compliance period of 2023-2026," the letter said, but "these efforts have so far been unsuccessful, and Ecology has determined the City of Enumclaw Natural Gas Utility will be a covered entity in the program." The back of the page listed twelve state senators with their Olympia addresses and phone numbers, under the heading "Sponsors of Washington's Climate Commitment Act." No investor owned utility has ever mailed you that.

Nine days later, Public Works Director Ed Hawthorne explained the timing to the Courier-Herald. "Since we're a public utility, we don't have thousands of dollars sitting aside just waiting for something to happen," he said. And: "So we need to increase our rates in November so we can have cash available to go out and buy those allowances." The increase took a normal residential bill from $595 to $726 a year.

Then the odd document. The April 2024 review draft of the Utilities Element, at page U-8, said this: "Because the City is currently below this cap, it is exempted from the first compliance period between 2023 and 2026, however, the utility will need to be prepared to meet this regulatory requirement after 2026, as its emissions are predicted to exceed the cap at that point."

That sentence is not in the version the council adopted ten months later. No form of the word exempt appears anywhere in the adopted element. Where the draft said the act requires distributors, "including municipal utilities like the City of Enumclaw's, to offset carbon emissions," the adopted text has them "purchase allowances to offset carbon emissions."

Sentences leave comprehensive plans for dull reasons, and here a dull one is in plain sight: the draft sentence matches neither the city's own 2022 letter nor Ecology's June 2023 table, which lists Enumclaw for all four years of the first period. Read against those, the February 2025 edit looks less like a deletion than a correction, though the city has published nothing saying so and we found no memo explaining it. The record holds both sentences, and only one agrees with Ecology.

In a memo in the Public Works Committee packet of September 22, 2025, Peelo forecast purchased gas costs climbing from $1.95 million in 2025 to $3.07 million in 2027, and compliance obligations from $881,000 in 2025 to $2.34 million in 2030. Those costs, he wrote, "are volatile and could exceed assumptions if linkage with California and Quebec does not happen for the second compliance period." The rate study attached to it carries a CCA Auction Costs line of $1,130,760 against 2024 and a Consignment Auction Revenue line of $507,659.

Three things the public file does not say: how many allowances the city has bought at auction and for how much, where its emissions sit now against the 25,000 ton line, and whether the ruling moves the 2027 rate proposal.

Yesterday, and 64 percent

Enumclaw voted for the thing the court erased. In November 2024 the town approved I-2066 with 64 percent and Black Diamond with 61, while King County as a whole rejected it, 640,376 to 446,879, or 58.90 percent no. Statewide it passed with 51.71 percent.

What it did here was narrow. Section 3 amended RCW 35.92.050, the statute that lets a city own a gas utility at all, adding a subsection: "A city or town that furnishes natural gas shall provide natural gas to those inhabitants that demand, apply for, and are reasonably entitled to receive, natural gas under this section." That subsection was still in the code this morning, and it falls with the rest. Nothing in I-2066 touched the Climate Commitment Act, which is a different chapter of law and the thing actually on your bill.

The dates, which is the point

In October 2025 the council passed Ordinance No. 2821, which set a residential rate of $13.15 a month plus $1.3326 a therm, tax included, effective that November, and provided for "annual five percent (5%) adjustments in customer service charges through January 1, 2027." After that, the staff report says, gas rate schedules go into the city's annual fee resolution, which lets the council "review and adopt gas rates as part of the annual budget process."

So the calendar reads like this. The first compliance period ends December 31, 2026. The second opens January 1, 2027, the same day the last automatic 5 percent lands. The 2027 budget and the fee resolution carrying the gas rate are in front of the council this autumn. The Public Works Committee, chaired by Chance LaFleur, meets at 5:30 p.m. on the second and fourth Mondays at 1309 Myrtle Avenue; the Finance Committee, chaired by Corrie Koopman Frazier, at 6:30 in the finance department at City Hall; the full council at 7, at 1339 Griffin. The next of those is Monday, September 28.

The Public Works Committee also decides how much of next winter's gas to lock in: on July 13, 2026 it authorized hedging 25 percent at $3.10 and another 25 percent at $5.65, after a 25 percent block at $5.50 authorized on November 24, 2025.

Enumclaw has a long habit of collective ownership, and the oldest things still open in town are mostly a co-op, a congregation or a club, owned by the people who use them, and our guide to moving to Enumclaw gives the gas utility one line in passing. It deserves more, because ownership cuts both ways. There is no distant company to be angry at. There is a rate, a fund, a ten person crew and seven elected neighbors, and in about ten weeks they vote on what you pay to be warm.