MEA members pass bylaw propositions

PALMER - Members of Matanuska Electric Association voted Saturday in a special meeting to accept 13 propositions to the utilities bylaws last week, although voter participation was not particularly high.

Members also approved two management advisory questions, including an item which more or less gives MEA management the go-ahead to push to make the utility a right-to-work institution in future negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Election committee members counted 6,395 ballots at the co-op's special membership meeting.

Most of the questions were routine housekeeping measures, designed to bring MEA bylaws into alignment with state statutes. A few, however, were fairly controversial.

One of those measures, board member Rod Cottle claimed, was an attempt to force him off the board.

The proposition would have banned anyone from serving on the board if they were involved in litigation against MEA, MEA employees or members of the MEA board.

Cottle, with two other board members who have since left the board, was involved in a 1998 lawsuit against three other board members.

Recently, however, Cottle's name was dropped as a plaintiff.

MEA has agreed not to pursue the issue any further, according to Tuckerman Babcock, the utility's spokesman and government liaison.

Although that particular proposition, Article 6, passed 4,665 to 1,545, Cottle was off the hook.

The proposed bylaws became even more controversial after Cottle recommended that MEA members vote against all the proposals.

In a recent interview with the Frontiersman, Cottle said he had not seen many of the proposals until they were introduced at a Sept. 29 meeting of the MEA board of directors.

But according to Tuckerman Babcock, the utility's government liaison, Cottle did know about the proposals as far back as July.

Minutes from the July 11 meeting, when the proposals were first discussed and when an election date was chosen, show that Cottle was present and even participated in a unanimous vote in favor of the motion.

On Saturday, however, Cottle and fellow board member Lois Lester, said that what they had agreed to was further discussion of the propositions.

At that point, they had not yet seen the propositions in written form.

The proposed articles had only been read to them at that meeting.

"We never saw it," Lester said Saturday afternoon.

Both Cottle and Lester insisted they had not seen the propositions in writing until MEA mailed out the final versions to the co-op's membership at the end of September, less than a month before the election.