Wayne Carmony: Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

PALMER — With the Matanuska Electric Association Board of Directors apparently in the process of firing General Manager Wayne Carmony, some who may not have been paying attention might be asking — What’s so bad about Wayne Carmony?

To hear his critics tell it — plenty. But his defenders say the criticisms are overblown.

Mike Janecek spent a few acrimonious years on the co-op’s board of directors, a lot of it fighting lawsuits over his board seat. Since then he’s been an outspoken critic of Carmony’s administration and has worked on the campaigns of some of the board members in the majority who voted to begin Carmony’s termination proceedings.

“I tried to work with Wayne. I want to work with people,” Janecek said. “But he’s not workable. He has his own ideas and all he really had an interest in was developing a board that would do what his directions were.”

Those directions, Janecek said, were often to work against other utilities instead of working with them and to keep the unions out of MEA.

“That board hired the guy because his claim, his calling card, was, ‘I get rid of unions,’” Janecek said. “His history in Kentucky is just that.”

On the other side, Tuckerman Babcock, who was fired last week from his position as assistant general manager at the same meeting during which the board seemed to set its attorney to the task of firing Carmony, said Carmony is just a bulldog when it comes to standing up for MEA. That, he said, is what is interpreted as intransigence.

“There was a tradition before Wayne Carmony came to MEA of MEA being the doormat,” Babcock said. But, in his view, Carmony changed all that.

“He will not give up a dime, not a dime, penny or dollar, he will not give it up without a fight,” he said.

Babcock conceded that there was a time when MEA and other co-operatives, Chugach Electric Association in particular, didn’t get along very well. MEA attempted a takeover of Chugach’s board and Chugach did the same to MEA. The problems landed both sides in court.

But, lately, at least, Carmony and Chugach have begun to open a dialog.

In the meantime, Babcock said, Carmony has worked to build the utility into the most efficiently run co-operative in the state and among the most efficient in the country.

“There are costs to that,” Babcock said, not least of which are the, “costs in employee morale because you expect a lot and you don’t have any padding, you don’t have any feather bedding and you’re tight on every expenditure.”

Janecek said he’s heard Carmony brag about efficiency before but he thinks there’s something wrong with a utility that hasn’t grown its employment base much in the face of explosive growth in the Valley.

“The distribution has doubled in the time that he has been the manager,” Janecek said, referring to the number of customers, but staffing levels haven’t grown by the same percentage. “I don’t think that’s good bragging rights.”

Babcock said that a lot of what Carmony’s critics were mad about are issues common to a lot of co-ops.

“There’s always a tension between the relationships with the union and management. And that is the case at most of the co-operatives,” Babcock said. “But that part is toned down usually because most co-operatives will grant the union most of what it wants without much of a fight because the members won’t usually notice.”

Carmony’s different, he said, and will take the fight to the union. Still, even that relationship has undergone “a radical improvement. And the mutual trust and respect — I’m very proud of that.”

Hogwash, Janecek said.

“I almost threw up one day when Mr. Babcock said something on the order of, ‘We have good relations with the unions,’” he said, pointing out that the utility has been involved in lawsuits with its union.

“I’m not beyond paying good money to people that get up in the middle of the night and turn the power back on,” Janecek said.

Asked about what’s next for the utility if and when Carmony is indeed terminated, Babcock said he hopes the board doesn’t, as the bylaws say they can, decide to move ahead without a manager at all.

Janecek agreed, saying he’d want someone with an engineering background.

“Somebody with a solid understanding of how a distribution network works and a good willingness to be able to go to bat for where we get the energy and how much we pay for it,” he said.