Short Fuse: Jorge Carrasco's Polarizing Tenure at the Top of City Light

In October 2006, City Council member Richard Conlin received a curious and unsolicited e-mail from someone calling himself "Andy Cor."

"These extended, lucrative contracts seem to have disfranchised many longtime employees and failed to improve efficiency," the e-mail read. "It has become questionable what values these exorbitant contracts bring to the public utility....The repeated turnover and lack of commitment to public services, coupled with lack of responsibility and respect for employees, have contributed to a rapid decline of employee morale and an alarming increase of brain drain at City Light. This may leave City Light ill prepared for the next 'Perfect Storm.' The high costs and longer term detrimental effects to the public utility warrant immediate investigation by the City Council."

Two months later, the so-called "Hanukkah Eve Windstorm" hit, and the agency was indeed caught flatfooted; some residents went 11 days without power. But even before that, the mysterious e-mail, in which Andy Cor is spelled three different ways, caused a storm of its own in the halls of City Light. After receiving a copy, Superintendent Jorge Carrasco promptly called his power management staff— about 20 people who deal directly with the Lands Energy contracts and their consultants—into the executive boardroom. He handed out the e-mail and explained that there was no City Light employee with that name. (He'd also sent an e-mail to the City Council saying Cor's concerns were without merit.) What followed was the kind of verbal dressing-down Carrasco has become known for in the utility's ranks.

"We were all given the third degree, told we had no right to go over their heads," remembers one employee. "Everyone turned red and looked at the ground." That is, everyone but Philip Irvin, a power analyst with 29 years' tenure.

"I challenged him, saying we did have the right to talk to [the] council," says Irvin. "I also said the information was not inaccurate—if this was someone making a wild claim, it would be one thing, but this is very much in the realm of what is acceptable—and that I generally agreed with it." Furthermore, Irvin says Carrasco accused him of being Andy Cor, something he flatly denies.

Carrasco says he didn't ask who sent the e-mail, arguing that the purpose of the meeting was to let employees know that if they have questions about Lands Energy, or the way City Light does business, they should "feel comfortable talking with someone in the organization." Carrasco also claims he didn't lose his temper.

But Irvin says the superintendent was "excessively assertive." "He was upset," says Irvin. "In the worst-case scenario, a grand total of one person there was guilty of sending the memo, but he was like that to all of us. People were reluctant to speak up and get their head shot off."

A short, slight Texan, Carrasco has brought a certain kind of cowboy justice to City Light, unsurprising, perhaps, from someone who earned the nickname "Jorge Fiasco" while city manager in Austin, Texas, the first of three jobs he was ousted from before landing here.

Carrasco came in as a reformer after the 2001 energy crisis brought Seattle's proud public utility to its knees, fired most of the utility's upper-level management, and encouraged the retirements of dozens more employees. Unapologetic about looking for outside talent, he reversed the utility's long-standing tradition of promoting from within, and though top management makes more than ever before, he maintains that the agency still requires more money to afford the people he needs to get the job done.

While he's reorganized the management structure of the agency and brought it back into the black, some say Carrasco, who's up for reconfirmation this spring, has decimated employee morale and has yet to accomplish one of the things the council brought him in to do: implement a plan to manage the pitfalls and rate fluctuation that come from buying and selling public power on the open market, the absence of which helped lead to the 2001 disaster.

Created by Seattle citizens in 1902, City Light is one of few lucky utilities that gets the lion's share of its power from water. In addition to owning a cluster of dams on the Skagit River, a dam on the Pend Oreille River in northeast Washington, and one on the Cedar River near Seattle, City Light buys about half of its electricity from Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency headquartered in Oregon that also generates hydropower.

The great thing about water is that it's clean and relatively cheap. The dangerous thing about it is that it's unpredictable.