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Washington member will chair Council; Oregon member elected vice chair
January 18, 2006
VANCOUVER, Washington -- Tom Karier, a Washington member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, will chair the four-state energy planning and fish and wildlife mitigation agency in 2006. Joan Dukes, an Oregon member, will serve as vice chair.
The Council elects officers annually in January. The Council met Tuesday and Wednesday in Vancouver.
Karier,
of Spokane, was appointed to the Council in 1998 by then-Governor Gary
Locke and now serves under Governor Christine Gregoire. Karier was an
associate dean at Eastern Washington University from 1995 until his
appointment to the Council. He had been a professor of economics at the
university since 1981. While a professor, he also served as a research
associate for the Jerome Levy Economics Institute in Annandale, New York.
Karier earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, with a
major field in natural resource economics. He holds bachelor’s degrees in
physics and economics from the University of Illinois. His research areas
included public policy, taxation, labor, international trade and
industrial organization.
Joan
Dukes, who lives in Svensen, near Astoria, was appointed to the Council by
Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski in 2005. Dukes resigned her seat in the
Oregon Senate, where she had served since 1987, to join the Council.
Dukes, who served a four-year term as a Clatsop County commissioner before
being elected to the Senate, has a broad base of experience in education,
transportation and fisheries issues at the local, county and state levels,
including having served as chair of the Pacific Fisheries Legislative Task
Force, an association of western legislators that works on regional fish
issues. She is a graduate of The Evergreen State College.
The Council is a compact of the states of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington and is charged by the Northwest Power Act of 1980 with developing a program to assure the Pacific Northwest an adequate, efficient, economical and reliable power supply while also protecting, mitigating and enhancing fish and wildlife that have been affected by hydropower dams in the Columbia River Basin.
Contact: John Harrison, Information Officer, 503-222-5161,