Five file for pair of seats on MEA board

PALMER — A slate of candidates has filed for two open spots on the Matanuska Electric Association’s board of directors.

The two seats up for election are currently held by Catherine “Kit” Jones and board president Lois Lester. Both have submitted their names to run again.

Challenging them are Jason Kepler, of Wasilla; Marvin Yoder, of Palmer; and Crystal Nygard, of Palmer. The two seats are at-large seats, meaning co-op member in the service area, stretching from Eagle River to Talkeetna, can run.

At the utility’s annual meeting April 25 or on their mail-in ballots, MEA members will be asked to choose two candidates. After the votes are tallied, the top two vote-getters will be declared winners.

Jones is a contract pilot and flight instructor who came to the board when she was appointed in October to replace David Dahms. She’s also a past member of the watchdog group MEA Ratepayer’s Alliance.

She lists as priorities in her service on the board to give a voice to the member owners; to change the “atmosphere of distrust” between the co-op’s management, its board of directors and its members; to increase MEA’s use of renewable energy; to work with other co-ops; and to provide reliable and affordable electricity.

Lester is a retired chemistry professor from the University of Alaska Anchorage. In the statement she submitted with her application, she cites her nine years of experience on the board and advocates for transparency and greater communication with the members.

Yoder is currently a deputy administrator with the city of Wasilla and a former interim city manager of Seward. He’s worked as municipal manager of Craig, the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, Klawock and Galena.

In those positions, he said, he’s managed public utilities – water, wastewater and electric. In an interview, he said, contrary to the opinions of some, he was not recruited by anyone to run for the board but came to the decision on his own having decided his experience could be useful to MEA.

Kepler is a fourth-generation Alaskan and an assistant football coach at Palmer High School. He works as an aeronautical engineer at Merril Field. He says he hopes to bring reason and rationality to the board and notes that critical decisions have to be made now regarding the co-op’s future.

Nygard is a businesswoman, half-owner of Tutka, LLC, a safety and environmental business she helped start in 1999. In her application statement she promises to bring her business expertise to bear on decisions facing the co-op.

The board election will take up one part of a ballot substantially longer than last year’s. This go-round, a number of bylaw amendments will be voted on.

This week, Lee Jordan, a former board member, sent out a press release detailing a change to the bylaws he’s put on the ballot. Jordan co-sponsored the initiative along with Bill Folsom, Aaron Downing and Tiny DePriest, all former board members.

The change would toughen the co-op’s conflict of interest requirements for board members. Current rules preclude board members or those in their household from doing business with MEA.

The change would expand that requirement to preclude the co-op from doing business with relatives of board members “too closely related under state law for a legal marriage to occur between them, or the spouse of any such person,” Jordan wrote in the press release. Members doing less than $10,000 business with the co-op would be exempt.

That by-law change joins a host of other revisions proposed by the co-op’s bylaw committee. Those changes include doing away with drug tests for board members, changes to campaign disclosure rules, and changing the date on which newly elected board members are seated.

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