Chair
David Danner is the chair of Washington State's Utilities and Transportation Commission.
There is much going on at Washington's Utilities and Transportation Commission. Including implementation of the shiny new Clean Energy Transformation Act or CETA, requiring that state's electric utilities to transition to one hundred percent clean power by 2045. Signed into law last year, the devil is in the details, as here you hear Commission Staff grapple with the intricacies.
It was fun to find out Chair Danner plays keyboards in a band, aptly the UTCs, made up of Commission members, who perform at the summer BBQ. Because yes, the people who do the hard work regulating, well, are people too.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Talk about your background and how you came to the Commission.
Chair Danner: I was a telecommunications lawyer with a large firm in Washington, D.C. But I am from Portland, Oregon originally and I wanted to get back to the Northwest, so eventually I just made the move.
I came to work for the Washington State Legislature as counsel to the Energy and Utilities Committee. The Legislature was getting into telecom issues at the time and that was my background.