Candidates, ratepayers prepare for MEA election

PALMER — With the MEA election just a month away, the field of candidates has solidified around a pair of incumbents and one 10-year veteran of the board of directors.

Three candidates are running for two seats. And the two who get the most votes will be seated. The incumbents are retired educator Peter Burchell and longtime Palmer business owner Janet Kincaid. Their challenger, Bill Folsom, sold and built fences before he retired.

The election is April 26 at Raven Hall on the Alaska State Fairgrounds. Anyone who pays an MEA bill is also a member and entitled to vote. Ballots should arrive by mail any day. Members can vote by mail or in person at the meeting.

PETER BURCHELL

Burchell said he would like to continue serving on the board because the co-op is currently in the middle of making some very big decisions that he’d like to see through to completion.

And what are those big issues facing MEA? They’re the same ones facing all of Southcentral Alaska utilities.

“We have a problem with fuel, generation and transmission,” Burchell said.

Which is to say supplies of natural gas to run generators are uncertain, the generators are aging and have to be replaced, and big lines to ship power from one community to the next — like the Alaska Intertie connecting Fairbanks to the rest of the Railbelt — are deteriorating. The problems, Burchell said, require Southcentral utilities to work together. MEA has started that process.

“The first time we met it was like kids arguing on the playground about who used the ball last,” Burchell said.

Alaska power utilities have long competed against each other for state money and in other arenas. Bad blood came from that. Burchell said his stance from the start was that everyone just needed to learn from it and move on, rather than refighting old battles. Also, everyone needed to realize that none of the utilities behaved admirably.

“Don’t sit there and pretend like you’re all the innocents,” Burchell said.

At any rate, building cooperation between utilities is just one thing he’d like to have another term to work on.

Two big factors have long been at play in MEA elections — rates for the consumer and contracts between MEA and labor unions.

On the rates question, Burchell said there are a lot of things MEA has to pay for. Members voted to have MEA build its own generators. There are costs there. And anyone who’s paid a natural gas bill lately knows that fuel isn’t getting any cheaper.

“I can’t with a straight face tell anybody that the rates aren’t going to go up,” Burchell said. “All we can do is do everything we can to hold costs down.”

As for the union contracts, Burchell had two things to say. First, he doesn’t think the relationship between MEA and its unions needs to be acrimonious and adversarial.

“My whole career was based on getting young people with the skills and attitudes to get good jobs, be they union or non-union,” he said. “Everybody’s got to do this together.”

And secondly, “The reality is and that’s just fact, the board of directors does not negotiate contracts,” Burchell said. He said MEA executives do.

BILL FOLSOM

Folsom served on the board from 1994 to 2004. The crowning achievement of the board at that time was bringing costs down below even those of Chugach Electric Association, from which MEA buys its power. He said MEA met that goal slowly, without causing any upheaval, relying on things like attrition.

“We fired no one,” Folsom said.

He said when he left in 2004 he thought MEA would be able to continue the way it had been. That wasn’t the case.

“In the last two years I have just seen things being turned around rather rapidly with kind of a slash-and-burn mentality,” Folsom said. “They’re not running it for the members. CEA is lowering their rates right now. There’s no reason in the world that MEA should be raising their rates except that they’re not running it like a business; they’re running it like a monopoly.”

He pointed to multiple recent hirings and costly lawsuits as expenses the co-op should not have had to pay. He didn’t want to run for the board.

“I’m 70 years old for crying out loud, and I’m solvent enough that I can pay my bill,” Folsom said. “My wife thinks I’m absolutely insane, but I can’t get anybody else.”

Young people are too busy to run for election.

He said he doesn’t have any magic formula to turn the co-op around. He knows that, if elected, he’ll be one voice on a seven-member body.

“Maybe I can stop some of the blood flow here and turn things around a little bit,” he said.

Folsom also talked about unions when asked about the election.

“There’s a word out there that I’m just a union buster. I’m not a union buster. We never did try to break the unions. We asked for something that was fair,” he said.

JANET KINCAID

Kincaid said she wants another term on the board for much the same reason Burchell wants one — there is a lot of work to finish.

“There are just so many things on the horizon that I’d like to see come to fruition,” Kincaid said.

She is very happy that the electric utilities along the Railbelt have started working together.

“It has never happened,” she said.

Kincaid serves as secretary of a new cooperative formed to run generation and transmission in the Railbelt. MEA General Manager Joe Griffith is the chief executive. A board member from Golden Valley Electric is the president of the board.

“We’re hoping that we will help run Susitna,” Kincaid said, referencing the hydroelectric project on the Susitna River that has lately found new life in the state Legislature.

Another Alaska hydroelectric plant, Bradley Lake, runs that way. Multiple utilities own it and Homer Electric Association runs it. Kincaid said the arrangement has worked very well.

On the subject of rates, Kincaid said much the same as Burchell — they won’t be going down due to price increases for Cook Inlet natural gas. But she said she feels the board has been a good steward.

“I feel that we have kept our rates as low as possible.

She said one thing she is proud of is efforts she spearheaded to straighten out MEA’s warehouse. Kincaid said that when she arrived at MEA the warehouse was in chaos. There wasn’t even a computer there, let alone a system to track inventory. Now, the inventory is all bar-coded and inventory is tracked in real time.

“When you make things more efficient you make money,” Kincaid said. “I’ve owned the (Valley) Hotel since ’76 and you’d think there would be nothing new under the sun. But we’re always finding ways to improve.”

She said the co-op has also had to pay for things like deferred maintenance, which, in her view, had kept costs artificially low, since needed work wasn’t done, but should have been.

“We had a line truck that the wheel came off going out to a service call,” she said.

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