Todd McBride Trades Miles for Minutes
By Karen Helm
For years, Todd McBride spent 3 hours a day in his truck. Out to Hermiston or Hillsboro before the sun came up and back to The Dalles after dark, he was an equipment operator on big construction jobs, and the pay was good. But at home he had a young daughter, Cameron, and a baby son, Reece, and every 1 of those hours on the road was an hour he wasn’t with them.
“I wanted to be home every night,” he says. “I’ve got family now.”
When a utility worker position opened at Northern Wasco County PUD, Todd did the math. Taking the job meant making less than he was used to. He talked it over with his wife, Nicole. He went back and forth. And then he decided.
“I just took a leap, and now we’re here,” he says. Today, Todd is an apprentice lineman at NWCPUD, which is exactly what he set out to become more than a decade ago and nearly didn’t. He first headed down to Northwest Lineman College in Oroville, California, back in 2015. Then he signed on with a company doing mostly underground work, moved up from groundman to equipment operator, and started making money that was hard to walk away from. The trade he’d trained for kept sliding a little further down the road.
“I was wanting to get in the line trade, but I was getting paid good, so I was kind of in between,” Todd says. It was his friend Cody Ricks, a journeyman lineman at the PUD, who told him about the opening and encouraged him to apply. Todd had no idea his mother, Kathy McBride, had heard from Cody about the job first.
Kathy has been NWCPUD’s executive assistant for more than a decade, and she knew what her son was earning out on those construction jobs. She was certain he’d never be willing to make less.
“He told my mom, and my mom was like, ‘He isn’t going to want it,’” Todd says, laughing. “She never even told me about it.” She was looking out for him. She just didn’t know how much he wanted to come home.
They work under the same roof now, although not for much longer. Kathy plans to retire soon. Some mornings, Todd will be in the operations area and hear a familiar voice down the hall. He’ll peek around the corner and give his mom a wave. When she comes back to where the crew is working, he tells her he loves her.
Todd is quick to point out that he’s still an apprentice, still learning every day, and that suits him fine. For now, he works the lower part of the pole, below the high-voltage primary lines. In August, he expects to advance a step and start working higher up, taking on more alongside a journeyman.
“I like getting up there and working through things I don’t always know,” Todd says. “You get caught in a spot, and you work harder to do it, but then the next time you already know what to do. You’re not trying to figure it out as you go.”
He was born and raised in The Dalles, spent years working everywhere but the town he lived in, and came back. Now he recognizes people around the community. The work feels different when the neighbors are the customers.
“I’ve never really worked a good job like this in the town I’ve lived in,” he says. “It feels good to be a part of the community and help people out.”
His kids, now 5 and 3, have started to notice. They look up at the power lines around town and ask about them. When a crew was working across the street from the house, they wanted to know: “Daddy, were you working out there?” They know the lines are dangerous. They know their dad works with the power.
“They’ll say, ‘You work for the power, right? The power lines,’” Todd says. “I mean, I don’t work for the power lines, but it’ll get there.”
What he’s most proud of has nothing to do with line work. It’s the place itself.
“It’s all about family, and I think that’s great,” he says. “Everybody
gets along, and there’s a lot of great people. I’m proud to be with a
good company that respects their employees and takes care of them.”
“It’s all about family, and I think that’s great,” he says. “Everybody gets along, and there are a lot of great people. I’m proud to be with a good company that respects their employees and takes care of them.”
He wants the community to know that the people who keep the power on are proud to serve their friends, families and neighbors. “We’re there to take care of you, keep you in power the best we can, respond to outages as fast as we can and keep the community safe,” he says. “All the guys in the back, we want to work hard for you. But we also want to go home to our families. So, keep everybody safe, happy, and hopefully keep the power rates down.
“I didn’t get paid to say that,” he says with a grin. The part about going home, he means literally. It’s only half an hour in the truck now, not 3. Most evenings, his daughter and son are waiting to ride bikes, and on weekends there are 4-wheelers to take out or a camping trip up to Mount Hood Village. At a family birthday party up at Pine Hollow not long ago, somebody pulled out a karaoke machine, and his 5-year-old took it over and sang for the whole party, 1 song after another, while everybody else waited for a turn that never came.
Todd got to see the whole thing. He was home.