High times at MEA

PALMER — If Proposition 2 on the Matanuska Electric Association election ballot passes, newly selected members of the board of directors will be required to fail a drug test.

Yes, you read that right.

The drug test requirements, often a bone of contention among groups of MEA watchers, has been on the books for years. The bylaw change proposed this year includes an attempt to, essentially, change the grammatical constructions in the bylaws in order to state the rules in the positive rather than the negative.

But in doing so, said Anthony Guerriero, one of the attorneys contracted to advise the co-op’s board of directors, MEA’s bylaws committee and everyone who reviewed the changes missed one tweak they needed to make.

Which, though the resulting bylaw section barely holds together grammatically, appears to make the section read that directors must submit a hair sample that tests positive for drugs.

So, what’s the co-op to do? Robin Brena, attorney for the board of directors, said at the board’s meeting April 5 that he’d examined a couple of options. The problem couldn’t be fixed with a supplemental ballot this go around because changes like this have to be included in the notice of MEA’s annual meeting.

Brena said he looked at the possibility of calling a special meeting, but decided that the issue doesn’t rise to that level.

So, he advised the board to do pretty much what it did last year when a bylaw change seemed to conflict with another section of the bylaws: the board should essentially ignore the changes if the proposition passes and not enforce those rules. Ironically, the new unenforceable proposition is part of the co-op’s attempt to fix last year’s unenforceable bylaw change.

“We will offer our legal opinion that this is a proofreading error and that the board should not enforce this,” Brena said.

Board member Larry DeVilbiss said he doesn’t like that the board is facing this issue in the first place.

“What I said from the beginning — it’s obviously an unintentional error, it is an error that doesn’t make us look very good as board members,” he said, adding he would like to see these kinds of proposed bylaws at an earlier point in the process rather than having to read changes on the same night he is asked to vote on them.

“When we’re passing stuff of this gravity, we need it ahead of time. We asked for it, but we never got it,” he said.

Eventually, the board decided unanimously to take Brena’s advice and refer the matter, if the changes pass, to MEA’s bylaws committee so it could be fixed in next year’s election.

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