Showalter Named To Utilities Post

Gov. Gary Locke has named his senior policy adviser on energy and telecommunications to lead the state board that regulates public utilities.

Marilyn Showalter, 48, will replace Anne Levinson, who resigned this week as chairwoman of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission to become a Seattle Municipal Court judge.

Showalter, who will serve the remaining four years of Levinson’s six-year term, will earn $96,469 a year. She’ll start her new job in mid-February.

Showalter is a 1975 graduate of Harvard Law School. She taught juvenile law at Seattle University and worked her way up from a legal intern to senior deputy prosecutor in the King County prosecutor’s office from 1974 to 1981.