Matanuska Electric Association mulls bylaw changes

PALMER — The Matanuska Electric Association election will come to its conclusion at the annual meeting April 23, but with only members in one of three districts getting to vote in a contested race, the real action for most will be further down the ballot on proposals to change nine MEA bylaws.

Luckily for everyone outside Sutton, Palmer and the rest of the so-called Matanuska District, there are plenty of bylaw changes to chew over. The first couple of changes aren’t earth-shaking:

• Proposition 1 shores up the bylaws to allow for the use of electronic voting rather than only paper balloting.

• Proposition 2 changes language relating to dual memberships and business memberships, recognizing that dual memberships could belong to people other than spouses and that there are many business types.

• Proposition 3 deletes a stray reference to a type of balloting members chose to discontinue last year.

• Proposition 4 is where it gets interesting. This one splits the Susitna District — covering the Susitna Valley including Big Lake, Kink, Wasilla, Talkeetna and elsewhere — but doesn’t grow the board, instead eliminating one at-large seat in favor of the new district seat.

This one got quite a bit of favorable reviews at an MEA candidates’ forum on Thursday.

“It’s just a lot less expensive to run a campaign,” said Susitna District director Bob Doyle, comparing costs to run for a district seat versus an at-large one. “If you’re sending out information to 10,000 versus 50,000 people, the costs go down.”

Marvin Yoder, who is running for the Matanuska seat and is a member of the By-Laws Committee, agreed, saying different areas of MEA’s service area have different concerns.

“Last year up in Big Lake, we ran into some issues about some underground, underwater lines that was very controversial,” he said. “I don’t expect the people in Eagle River or down here to have those same issues.”

• Proposition 5 would erase the long-contested drug-testing requirement for board members and tweaks the conflict of interest bylaws, deleting language saying that no board member’s spouse could have $250,000 in business with MEA to instead say the spouse couldn’t have financial interest in the association. The drug test has long been seen as unnecessary and mean-spirited by one group of MEA watchers and conversely viewed as just by others who say it is fair to require the same of drug testing for directors as employees.

• Proposition 6 gets rid of the nominating committee, replacing it with a committee to oversee elections as a whole and drastically changes the way candidates can run for the board. Currently, candidates can start a campaign with a nomination from the nominating committee, through a petition with more than 50 signatures of MEA members, or through a nomination from the floor at the annual meeting. All those routes under this change would go away in favor of a simple application and a review from the election committee to make sure the candidate is qualified. Yoder said at the forum that he believed that it’s a good idea to give more duties to the nominating committee, which hasn’t lately had much to do.

• Proposition 7 requires the MEA Board of Directors to adopt a code of ethics that each board member would have to sign and adhere to.

• Proposition 8 gets rid of all of the disclosure requirements for candidates for MEA office and groups attempting to influence the election. Candidates in the past have chafed under disclosure rules, decrying them as difficult to follow, cumbersome and simply a source of ammunition for political opponents. In more contentious MEA elections, items discovered in disclosure reports have been used to fuel attempts by one board member to censure or even oust another.

“I’m of the opinion that people, that the electorate, needs to know who’s putting money in why and what they get from it,” Yoder said at the forum. “We haven’t gotten to the point where the people have a good opinion of who is doing what and why.”

His opponent, Jamey Duhamel, disagreed.

“This is not a political race. Politics should have nothing to do with it,” she said, adding that she trusts the opinion of the bylaw committee that recommended the change.

• Proposition 9 gets rid of an inactive committee, the Member Advisory Committee, whose job had been to prepare questions to ask the board of director candidates.

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