Incumbent Arie Callaghan is an easy winner over challenger Allen Werth in the election for Grays Harbor PUD Commission Position 1.

Bidding for his second six-year term representing the eastern part of the utility district, Callaghan had 10,569 votes (64.59 percent) in the first returns over Werth’s 5,793.

Callaghan currently is president of the three-member PUD Board of Commissioners, and Werth has been a member of the Oakville City Council.

Callaghan said he considered it an honor to be re-elected and credited “friends, family and neighbors, and people who put their trust in you to make the right decisions.”

“It’s a work in progress, but I think we are headed in the right direction,” Callaghan said of the PUD.

Callaghan has worked for Mason Trucking in Aberdeen for the past two decades. Since becoming commissioner six years ago in his first bid for public office, Callaghan also has been selected to the board of Energy Northwest, which runs the Columbia Generating Station in the Tri-Cities that provides some of the PUD’s electricity.

In addition to his council position, Werth has served on the board of advisers for Pierce College, and is president of the state employees union for Grays Harbor and Pacific counties.

The candidates differed over the PUD’s recent decision to oppose state Initiative 1631, which would enact a carbon emissions fee on large emitters. Werth said he favored the initiative because “it is necessary to do something … about what we are doing to the world. We can’t destroy the planet.”

Callaghan, on the other hand, said he believes the initiative would “have an effect on everybody’s energy supply” and could impact rates, noting a previous initiative, Initiative-937 with mandates for renewable resources, costs the PUD about $14 million to comply with the requirements.

Tuesday night, he said the PUD has come through an era where it had to “make some hard choices we’ve had to make because of some past decision-making” at the district under the previous administration. “But we have laid a pretty good foundation and there is light at the end of the tunnel here,” Callaghan said.