Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- Five candidates are squaring off for two seats on the Matanuska Electric Association board this month. But the bigger prize in play is control of the utility board of directors for the next year.

With the seating of board member Janet Kincaid of Palmer last July, the board switched from one where a majority of members generally supported utility managers to one where the majority has been largely critical of the way longtime general manager Wayne Carmony runs the utility.

The new board has passed rules limiting Carmony's actions and hired its own attorney for advice instead of using the cooperative's existing general counsel. The board members have also laid plans to re-evaluate the long-term power needs of the utility, including whether it should partner with other utilities to provide power instead of building a power plant.

The actions have drawn sharp criticism from a group of former board members, who are supporting the campaigns of two candidates in this month's election.

Board members do not draw any salary besides a small per-meeting stipend and are not responsible for day-to-day decisions at the cooperative. The position nonetheless carries a certain amount of weight as the seven-member board helps set overall policies for the utility, including determining where the cooperative gets its power in the future.

Running for seats on the board are incumbent board president Lois Lester and recently appointed board member Kit Jones, both part of the new majority. Both advocate reevaluating the utility's future power generation plans to look more closely at options besides the cooperative building is own its power plant. They also want to build better working relationships with other utilities between Fairbanks and Homer.

On the other side of the ticket are Marvin Yoder and Crystal Nygard. Both are backed by a group of past MEA board members called Friends of MEA who support Carmony and criticize the new board's actions as expensive and rash. But both candidates said they don't always agree with their supporters.

Yoder and Nygard say they want the utility run more like a business and want to focus on the cooperative's future, not on infighting between board and management.

Also on the ticket is Tom Staudenmaier, an Eagle River retiree who has run for the board several times in the past 20 years and served on it for four years in the 1980s.

Staudenmaier has long pitched a plan to consolidate electric utilities between Homer and Fairbanks, which he says would cut power bills significantly by reducing administrative costs. He opposes MEA building any power plant and advocates firing Carmony.

Lester is a retired chemistry professor and nine-year board member. She has maintained a consistent message in each of her three previous board campaigns: MEA is for the members. "The first order of business is making sure what we're doing is right for ratepayers," Lester said at a candidate forum hosted last week by the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce.

Jones is a pilot, flight instructor and former chief financial officer of a family-run aircraft sales company. She moved to Alaska with her husband four years ago and was part of the MEA Ratepayers group which campaigned in 2007 against building a coal-fired power plant near Palmer. She was appointed to the board in October when former board member David Dahms resigned. She said she is running for the board because she didn't believe the previous board listened to its members.

"I felt disenfranchised as an MEA member-owner because I felt like my voice was not being heard," Jones said at the candidate forum.

Yoder is the deputy city administrator at Wasilla and formerly served for 10 years as city manager of Galena. While at Galena, he served on the Alaska Power Association board, a statewide lobbying group for power companies. He also advocated bringing nuclear power to the town of Galena via a small plant. But lacking funding, the community expanded its diesel generation capacity instead.

Yoder said he doesn't oppose every action taken by the new board majority, but he differs from Lester and Jones' stance against using coal as a future power source.

"I think you have to start with a broad portfolio and look at the cost-benefit ratio for consumers," he said.

Nygard is co-owner of Tutka LLC, a construction and environmental testing company that does soil, air and water quality testing. She said she's running because MEA is on the verge of having to transform itself from a company that distributes power to one that also generates it.

"There's a price to change," she said. "We're going to have to work with others, but we're going to have to run like a business."

Nygard said "the coal question" is the one she's asked most often. With increasingly strict regulations on emissions, she said building a coal plant isn't feasible right now.

But Nygard said there's more at stake than what fuel source MEA gets its future power from. Because of the infighting and changes in its future power plans, MEA is sending mixed messages to other utilities and companies it does business with.

"What I really want to be is the independent voice of business, enterprise, industry and the community. I don't see a lot of participation (by MEA) in these markets. They need to be there," she said.

Election ballots are being mailed out, and members have until the April 25 annual meeting to return them. The meeting is being held at 2 p.m. at Palmer High School.

Find Daily News reporter Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.

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