MEA board asked to reject contract

PALMER — The Matanuska Electric Association has negotiated a contract with its union but the co-op’s general manager has asked its board of directors to reject it.

Negotiations have been ongoing for a year, general manager Wayne Carmony said in his memo to the board.

The contract, the details of which were not publicly released, was distributed to the board at its meeting Monday as union members watched from the audience. Carmony said the board would eventually have to vote on it.

“It’s my belief that the board should reject this contract,” he said.

Board member Janet Kincaid said she’s not exactly sure why the contract was brought forward with that recommendation.

“I really believed at our February meeting that we had told the general manager to accept the language that the union had asked for,” Kincaid said. She said she believed, “We would be given the contract to vote on. I was stunned to see that we were asked to go backward.”

In essence, Carmony wrote in his memo, the compensation package offered to the union and the contract’s term of five years were both excessive.

“The compensation package contained in this proposal started out in a proposal intended to provide an economic inducement for the union members to accept management’s new terms and conditions,” Carmony said.

But the board has since reversed the utility management’s position on those terms and conditions, he said. Thus, there’s no longer a need to compensate the union for the changes.

Not only that, but the contract contains a certain “minimum staffing level” Carmony writes. Under the contract, MEA would have to stick to that staffing level for the whole five years of the contract.

But the utility is in flux right now, he said, and it may make sense to change the mix of the workforce as projects start coming down the pike.

The changes on the horizon include building a power plant and switchyard at Eklutna, the construction of several new transmission facilities and statewide moves to possibly bring all Railbelt utilities under one roof.

All of those changes, he wrote, could justify a change to the workforce inconsistent with the contract in its current form.

Carmony said he’d like the board to tell him to go back to the table to come up with a better contract.

Though he said the board would eventually have to vote on the matter, the board adjourned its meeting Monday without setting a date. As of press time, the co-op had not posted the agenda for the next regularly scheduled meeting of April 2.