Frontiersman

PALMER — Matanuska Electric Association members unseated Lee Jordan, president of the cooperative’s board of directors, in favor of Janet Kincaid. Incumbent board member Peter Burchell also won his bid for re-election.

Ballots tallied at Saturday’s MEA annual meeting also defeated a proposed bylaw change. Jordan said he was sad to lose the election, but added, “The members have spoken.” A former newspaper publisher, Jordan came to the board five years ago when he was appointed to a vacant board seat. He said overall he is happy with the work he has done, but cited one failure.

“I wanted to do what I could with my experience and background to improve the image of the co-op. I failed there,” Jordan said.

Reached by phone at an impromptu victory party Saturday evening, Kincaid, a Palmer businesswoman and self-described community activist, said she is “excited” and “up to the challenge.”

She said she plans to look over the electricity co-op’s budget and attend every meeting between now and when she’s seated in July.

Burchell, reached at the same party, said he feels “just wonderful” about the outcome.

“It was a real team effort,” he said about his campaign, which was a joint effort to elect both himself and Kincaid. “There were a whole lot of people involved who agreed with what Janet and I were saying.”

Both Burchell and Kincaid said goals for MEA include sitting down and talking with other electrical utilities, increasing openness and transparency in the way MEA is run, and straightening out the utility’s bylaws.

Overall, five candidates ran for the two at-large seats. Members were asked to choose two candidates with the seats going to the two top vote-getters. The vote totals, which will be certified at a special board meeting Monday:

• Former Houston city councilman Tom Baird — 2,389 votes.

• Burchell — 4,344.

• Jordan — 2,705.

• Kincaid — 3.813.

• Perennial board candidate and electrical utility gadfly Tom Staudenmaier — 1,088.

Overall, this year’s MEA election had an 18 percent turnout, with 7,678 ballots returned of the 42,699 sent to the co-op’s member-owners, reports Norma Benson, a member of the MEA Election Committee. Most of the ballots were submitted by mail. In addition to the ballots counted, 204 were returned by the U.S. Post Office as undeliverable and another 134 had no signature on the ballot envelope. Also, 96 had invalid signatures and the signatures on two ballots could not be verified.

Bylaw change defeated

In addition to electing new board members, a proposed bylaw change, which would have had Kincaid seated at the next board meeting or within 15 days, failed 4,740 to 2,519.

Tim Leach, president of the MEA Ratepayers Alliance, which advocated the change, said, “I have to say I’m a little disappointed with the way the vote came out.”

Leach said he thought the vote would have gone differently had MEA printed a statement from advocates of the change in its election materials instead of printing only the anti-amendment views of the utility’s bylaw committee.

Kincaid, also advocate of the change, echoed Leach’s sentiments.

MEA spokeswoman Lorali Carter has previously said that the utility isn’t required to print anything for or against a ballot measure in its election pamphlets. She said MEA printed the committee’s opinion because management felt the change was a bad way to do business.

After the election, Kincaid and Burchell were whisked away to take their bylaw-mandated drug tests. That test was the subject of some testimony from co-op members at Saturday’s annual meeting.

Michelle Church, testifying as a co-op member and not in her capacity as a Mat-Su Borough assemblywoman, tried to make a motion from the floor to do away with the test. The motion was ruled out of order.

Church said she that since the initial change to the bylaws implementing the test happened through a similar vote, “I’m just assuming that it can un-happen the same way,” she said.

Though the utility’s plans to build a coal plant in the Valley have been shelved for at least five years, coal was still weighing heavily on the minds of member-owners Saturday. A handful testified for and against the plant.

Jordan said that voters, in unseating him, had been seeking change. While he said the plans for a coal plant were not a mistake, he thought the controversy over coal “triggered a lot of the adverse reactions” that culminated in the election.

He said that, in general, he hopes board members will act on the best advice they’re given.

“I worry about the direction of the co-op as these people attempt to make changes based on some of the wildly inaccurate information that’s been circulating,” Jordan said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiers-man.com or 352-2270.