Remembering longtime Council staff member John Harrison

Earlier this month, the Council learned the sad news that John Harrison, a member of the Public Affairs Department for 31 years until he retired in 2022, had passed away after battling lymphoma. He was 70. At February’s meeting, General Counsel John Shurts and Council Member Jeff Allen of Idaho gave remarks honoring Harrison. Both recognized his intelligence, warmth, humility, writing ability, and the desire to learn as many facts and as much history as he could about the Pacific Northwest’s natural resources, geography, environment, energy systems, people, and communities.

“Public information could very well have been John’s middle name,” Shurts said. “His personality and the Council’s personality match so much so that I think John is basically embedded in this organization. Intelligent and deeply knowledgeable, especially about just basic facts – physical, historical, geographic, people, and communities. Inquisitive - quietly and pleasantly but doggedly insistent on finding out information. Friendly and open. A sense of history and the importance of that history. Optimistic about the future, but practically so and always with caution. Respected and yet self-effacing. That describes John, and it could very well describe the Council culture that I know, too."

Simply accumulating this wealth of knowledge and information wouldn’t have been enough for Harrison. He had to share it by telling the stories he’d found. The Council’s website is a repository of Harrison’s writing on power planning as well as fish and wildlife, but his greatest and most popular contribution was the Columbia River History Project. Over the span of roughly 400 chronological entries and 140 articles (arranged alphabetically), Harrison tells the story of the Columbia River Basin’s history beginning 6-16 million years ago up to 2021.

At the end of his life, Harrison was still telling stories from the Basin. He recently finished a book about the history of Grant County Public Utility District, which is being distributed by the PUD to schools, libraries, and museums throughout the county. “You have a remarkable history, just incredible,” Harrison told the PUD Commission in December 2024. “I will always be amazed at how a small rural utility in Eastern Washington built two giant dams on the Columbia. How you pulled that off…you got the federal license, you beat out the west side utilities. It’s a real tribute to you. It was really fun to write.”

New York Power Authority and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power lead the list of the Top 12 largest American public utilities, but Grant County PUD (the county’s population is 102,000) ranks No. 10 with 10,278,983 MWh of owned electricity generation. No. 11 is Energy Northwest – whose story is another Harrison did impeccable work in telling.

Watch a video of the remarks by General Counsel John Shurts and Council Member Jeff Allen