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City presents Climate Commitment Act briefing as municipal gas utility sits near compliance threshold
Summary
City Administrator Chris Searcy briefed the council on Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, saying Uniontown’s municipal gas utility is "just marginally over" the 25,000‑metric‑ton threshold and outlining compliance mechanics, customer bill impacts (legacy vs. nonlegacy), potential multi‑year costs, and options including legislative alternative compliance or full cost recovery for new connections.
City Administrator Chris Searcy told the Uniontown City Council on March 9 that the Climate Commitment Act (CCA), Washington’s cap‑and‑invest program, already affects the city’s municipal natural gas utility and will require continued planning and likely budgetary responses.
Searcy said the city is "just marginally over the threshold" that pulls a utility into the CCA (25,000 metric tons of CO2e averaged over the compliance period) based on average emissions from 2023–2025. He explained the program provides some no‑cost allowances based on a historical baseline and that the share of no‑cost allowances declines each year while the percentage the city must consign to auction rises. "We are just marginally over the threshold of being pulled into the program," Searcy said, describing the baseline mechanics and why a small building boom around 2019 tipped the city over the threshold.
Staff outlined how allowances and auctions affect customer bills: legacy customers (connected before July 25, 2021) receive some benefit from auction proceeds and lower per‑CCF charges, while nonlegacy customers (connections after that date) generally pay the full compliance cost. Searcy said the CCA compliance charge appears as a per‑CCF line on bills and that the city uses auction proceeds to offset customer impacts where permitted by the rules.
On costs and projections, Searcy estimated the city’s first-year compliance cost at about $250,000 in 2023 and said recent annual figures have been in the low hundreds of thousands; he warned that under some price and linkage scenarios the compliance cost could exceed $1,000,000 in future years. "The first year was about 250,000 in 2023," Searcy said. Council member McClure pressed for longer projections: "Don't we get in the projections north of 1,000,000 at some point?" Searcy acknowledged scenarios in which costs could rise that high depending on allowance prices, linkage with other markets and declining free allowances.
Searcy outlined policy options for council consideration: seeking grants or state funds for decarbonization planning, coordinating with other municipal gas utilities such as Ellensburg to pursue legislative alternative‑compliance approaches, and considering whether to require full cost recovery for new development connections. He also said any program to reduce customers’ gas use (for example, supporting heat pump transitions) would require additional staff capacity and technical resources.
Searcy closed by asking council members to consider the tradeoffs and return to the topic for further direction in May. Council accepted the presentation for discussion without making policy decisions at the meeting.
Provenance: CCA workshop presentation and Q&A recorded between SEG 845 and SEG 1560 in the meeting transcript.
