MEA powers up for board election

MAT-SU — With a new year comes a new board of directors election for Matanuska Electric Association.

With today marking the first deadline for applicants, three people have filed for candidacy to fill two seats coming open this year.

Janet Kincaid is a local businesswoman and self-described community activist who hopes to oust incumbent MEA Board President Lee Jordan. Jordan, a resident of the Chugiak-Eagle River area, is a retired newspaper publisher and editor and has served on the board for four years.

Peter Burchell is a retired school principal serving his third year on the board of directors and is running for another three-year term.

All three turned in application materials ahead of today’s deadline for candidates hoping for nomination through the nominating committee. Lorali Carter, MEA’s manager of government and corporate communications, said the deadline for people seeking nomination through petition is Wednesday. Those candidates will need to gather 50 signatures from co-op members.

Carter said co-op members will elect the new board members at the co-op’s annual meeting March 1 at Colony High.

Kincaid and Burchell said they plan to run as a team hoping to win both seats.

“The short, plump folks are going after it,” Burchell said.

They’re also circulating a petition trying to change the electric cooperative’s by-laws so that incoming board members would take office 15 days after elected at the annual meeting in March. Under current by-laws, board members are seated in July.

Kincaid and Burchell both cited openness as a part of their campaign platform. Jordan summed up his platform with three words, “Local power generation.”

Local generation isn’t only an issue of breaking the utility’s bonds with Chugach Electric Association, from which MEA purchases all of its power, Jordan said. It’s also a question of reliability. The lines that feed the Mat-Su Valley are vulnerable to floods and avalanches.

“I’ve got 100 members of my extended family in the MEA service area,” he said. “I don’t want them to have to freeze in the dark because the lines are down.”

The utility decided earlier in 2007 to not renew its contract with Chugach.

The issue of local generation was front and center last year as the utility tried to move forward with plans to build two 100-megawatt power generation plants fired by coal and natural gas respectively. The utility eventually decided to move ahead with the gas plant, but amid protests from vocal community groups and a the Mat-Su Borough enacting regulations governing the building of new power plants, it shelved the coal plant for at least five years. The co-op cited as reasons for tabling its plans the rising cost to build a coal plant and uncertainty about the Borough’s new regulations, Carter said.

Burchell and Kincaid spoke of a need to work better with other local energy cooperatives, citing frosty relations between MEA and Chugach Electric.

Jordan said that with the decision not to renew MEA’s contract with Chugach, the board hasn’t decided not to work with Chugach and could conceivably contract with the utility to make up some or all of the additional energy needed after MEA’s planned gas plant is on line.

Jordan acknowledged that part of the reason the utility doesn’t want to remain tied to Chugach was that the utility is facing problems with debt coming due.

“We don’t want to be affiliated with Chugach’s debt,” Burchell said. “[But] can we be affiliated with a new venture, building something new together?”

He also pointed out what he sees as pressure from the governor’s office urging utilities to cooperate.

In their applications, candidates were asked to include answers to seven questions asked by the nominating committee. Most were similar to questions asked during the previous board election.

One new to the questionnaire is question No. 7, Carter said, which reads, “What percentage increase, if any, in cost for electricity would you be willing to accept and impose on MEA ratepayers in order to promote renewable energy?”

Carter said the question was included because “we have a fiduciary responsibility to provide affordable energy,” and the committee thought it prudent to ask candidates to quantify what renewable energy could conceivably cost ratepayers.

But the answers all three candidates provided seemed vague.

Kincaid likened it to a question of “when did you stop beating your wife?” There’s just no good answer, she said “Without all the generation options on the table, pulling percentages out of the air is pointless.”

Burchell said the question asked him to look into the future, something he didn’t feel qualified to do.

Jordan said answering the question would be imprudent.

“To say what percentage of increase is acceptable to me is out of the question,” he said, adding, “The members of MEA have long said that they want to keep costs down and that that’s their main concern even more than reliability.”

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