Independent candidate challenges incumbent Republican for Montana utility board seat

A small agency with an important, if often unintelligible job, the Montana Public Service Commission tends to fly under Montanans’ radar, largely due to the exceedingly technical nature of its work. 

Headed by five commissioners elected by district, the PSC was first established over a century ago to oversee railroad companies. Now it’s best known for regulating the monopoly utility companies that serve two-thirds of the state’s electricity and natural gas customers.

For a dozen years, the commission has been dominated by Republicans, primarily those with political experience. According to Montana Free Press’ review of election results, Montanans last sent a Democrat to Helena to represent their interests in utility regulation in 2008, and the last time an Independent appeared on the ballot was in 2016. 

Elena Evans, a geologist by training who is currently working as the environmental health manager for the Missoula City-County Health Department, said it’s time for the PSC to be less political and more responsive to Montanans’ concerns — something Independent candidates are better situated to do, she said. Evans added that garnering the thousands of qualified signatures required to appear on the District Four ballot as an Independent was hard work, but it’s also served to generate momentum for her campaign.

Although Evans’ name is becoming more familiar to voters in her district, which includes parts of Missoula, the northern end of the Bitterroot Valley, and the far northwestern corner of the state, the feat before her is not an easy one. 

Evans is a political newcomer running against well-known political figure and current commission vice chair Jennifer Fielder, a conservative Republican from Thompson Falls who has a dozen years of political experience. 

Before securing a four-year term on the PSC by earning a four percentage-point victory over Democrat Monica Tranel in 2020, Fielder spent eight years in the Montana Legislature, where she served on the judicial, natural resources, and fish and game committees.

On her campaign website, Fielder highlights the agency reforms she spearheaded at the PSC, describing herself as a leader with vision and administrative talent. Fielder said she and commission chair James Brown have helped turn the agency into a “model of good governance” following a string of scandals that embroiled the commission in legal disputes and sparked a staffing shake-up and structural reforms.

“It’s a much, much better state agency now than it was four years ago,” Fielder recently told MTFP. “I was honored and privileged to be able to lead the strategic planning and the internal policy reforms and the reorganization of the agency, and it’s really rewarding to see it pay off.”

For her part, Evans has described the commission’s unanimous decision in October 2023 to authorize a 28% rate increase for NorthWestern Energy’s residential customers as key to her decision to run for the PSC. Evans said she had no intention of campaigning against Fielder until she saw that no one else would be.

Evans and a crew of more than 150 volunteers set about garnering signatures from qualified electors in her district to qualify for the ballot, a threshold she cleared by a wide margin. (According to a secretary of state spokesperson, Evans gathered more than 5,000 qualified signatures; 3,050 signatures were required.) 

Out on the campaign trail, Evans said she’s been struck by how much her experience resonates with the Montanans she’s met and how much support she’s found from voters across the political spectrum. If fundraising tallies are any indication, she’s built a considerable base of supporters, garnering more than 450 donations totaling more than $65,000 to Fielder’s 17 donations totaling about $3,200.

“People are excited that I have a common story,” Evans said. “I’m just getting upset about things in terms of how much they cost.” She often tells voters in her district that NorthWestern’s rate hike created enough of a financial strain in her household that she transitioned to budget billing, a program that averages power use over 12 months to reduce swings from one month to the next.

“[The rate hike] directly impacted my family, and that’s why I set stuff aside and did all of the work to get on the ballot as an Independent. I’m showing up and I’m doing the work on the campaign trail. I’d do the same on the Public Service Commission,” Evans told MTFP.

Fielder said she sympathizes with Montanans frustrated about rising utility bills but described it as part of a larger inflationary dynamic related to the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain bottlenecks. Fielder said the settlement agreement the commission authorized was carefully evaluated by the agency’s stafffers, who she said are “pretty darn good at” ensuring that “customers are only paying the legitimate costs that companies are incurring and a fair rate of return on their investment that’s in line with the risk that they have.”

“The critics would have had every opportunity to bring it to court if we had done anything wrong, and we really hadn’t. We made a decision that was based on the facts and the law,” Fielder said. 

She added that the Montana Consumer Counsel, a small constitutionally created agency that represents consumer interests in utility matters, also approved the settlement agreement that the commission ultimately authorized, “and they carry a lot of weight with me.”

Whoever secures the seat will likely be asked, along with the other commissioners, to decide the fates of a new NorthWestern Energy rate hike request and a rulemaking petition that arose out of a lawsuit challenging Montana’s role in permitting fossil fuel plants.

Montana Environmental Information Center has criticized the commission for dragging its feet on the petition, which asks the PSC to consider climate change in its regulatory oversight of the energy industry, the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, according to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

MEIC and 10 of its co-petitioners in a lawsuit accuse the PSC of unlawfully exceeding the 60-day timeline to issue a decision on the petition, which was filed by 41 nonprofits and businesses along with Lander Busse, one of the young plaintiffs involved in the Held v. Montana lawsuit.

Fielder described those accusations as “baseless,” pointing to the significance of the decision and the amount of interest it’s drawn. More than 800 individuals commented on the petition, she said, and that’s created a huge record for commissioners and agency staff to consider. Fielder criticized the plaintiffs in that case for pressuring the agency to make “a snap decision” on “maybe the biggest issue we’ve ever had on a rulemaking petition before us.”

Last month a district court judge sided with the PSC, finding that the agency was acting within its authority to gather more information before deciding whether to accept or deny the petition.

Asked whether she believes climate change is something Montanans should be concerned about, Fielder said it’s an issue that’s important to a lot of people, but it’s not her place to say.

“I’m a utility regulator,” she said. “I try to stay out of political debates and arguments.”

Evans said climate change overlaps with the commission’s work in demonstrable ways given how natural disasters impact utility infrastructure such as hydropower dams, power lines and telecommunications cables.

“They already need to be doing more when it comes to being prepared for drought and being prepared for wildfire and giant storms like we had in Missoula and in Mineral County,” she said. “It’s important to plan with all of those pieces in mind.”

Though the candidates have not formally debated, they’ve sparred over party platforms and political affiliations in media coverage of the race. 

Fielder has accused Evans of misrepresenting her party affiliation and describes herself as someone who doesn’t engage in vote-trading or curry to the political establishment. 

“It’s obvious [Evans] is a Democrat and she’s trying to hide that,” Fielder said. “I’ve seen the Democratic Party’s literature. They’re promoting her.”

Asked to respond to that critique of her campaign, Evans laughed, saying if she were a Democrat, she could have spared herself the considerable time and effort it took to gather thousands of signatures.

“I’m not nailing planks for a party platform. I’m running to work for regular people. The fact that the Public Service Commission is focused on party affiliations instead of the work at hand is a testament of the mess that the PSC is right now,” she said. “That’s definitely a lazier argument that arguing on the basis of what the PSC does or what it’s about.”

As of Oct. 1, no debates between the two candidates have been scheduled. The general election is Nov. 5, although voters will begin receiving ballots in the mail in mid-October.