MEA reins in ad campaign

PALMER — Matanuska Electric Association’s campaign against the Mat-Su Borough’s power plant ordinance has come to a stop.

Sort of.

MEA fought the ordinance as it was proposed and discussed last summer, but the regulations eventually passed last August. The ordinance requires utilities to submit reports and obtain a permit before constructing a plant that would generate 50 megawatts of electricity or more. The utility says the ordinance will tack an additional $11 million onto the cost of developing a 100-megawatt natural gas-fired plant in the Mat-Su Valley. An MEA-sponsored ballot initiative will give voters a chance to decide the ordinance’s fate in October.

At a meeting of the utility’s board of directors Sept. 8, the board, reacting to complaints from the public, voted 4-3 to direct management to stop spending money on the campaign. MEA had been running advertisements in local newspapers and on the radio urging Borough residents to vote to repeal the ordinance.

But, at least on the radio, the ads are still running.

“We are already under contract for certain expenditures and we can’t cancel them without paying cancellation penalties,” said MEA spokeswoman Lorali Carter.

That would, in some cases, mean the utility would have to shell out extra money in penalties above and beyond what was already spent.

In a memo Carter sent to MEA General Manager Wayne Carmony Sept. 9, she details what was canceled and what wasn’t. The utility, she writes, was able to get out of 11 scheduled newspaper advertisements and halt production on a television ad. A direct-mail letter from Carmony urging the ordinance’s repeal had already been sent out. A circular to be sent with utility bills was already printed and stuffed into envelopes for mailing Sept. 23. It would be the last such insert sent, she wrote.

The radio spots are the sticking point, Carter wrote. The station wouldn’t let MEA out of its advertising contracts without paying an $8,852 cancellation fee.

But if the utility couldn’t get out of that ad contract, could it have changed the message? Board of Directors President Lois Lester asked Carmony to do just that in an e-mail to the general manager dated Sept. 12.

Carmony, in his reply, pointed out that the board had directed him not to spend any more money. It had not, however, directed him to change the content of the ads. The board, he said, hasn’t formally changed its position on the ballot proposition, stated in a November 2007 board resolution calling for the ordinance’s repeal.

“Changing the radio message as you suggest would arguably be a complete withdrawal of MEA support for the remaining provisions of [that resolution],” Carmony says in his e-mail to Lester, advising she call a board meeting to vote on it if such a reversal is to be undertaken.

In a brief reply, Lester wrote that she would not like to call a special meeting.

Although Carmony could be viewed as parsing words, Carter said that’s kind of how the board told him to act after a July meeting in which the board re-wrote bylaws to prohibit the manager from using his own judgment.

“That requires us to take even more literal direction from the board,” Carter said.

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