Politicking in PEC election is not in the public interest

When more than 100,000 Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) members received an email late last month for online voting, it came from a Minnesota company hired to ensure confidence that this year’s ballots for three directors would not be counted under the snouts of the organization’s management and leadership.

It was aimed at letting everyone feel safe in the belief that their utility company had risen from its history of wreckage of corruption and cronyism to become one that describes itself as “owned and democratically controlled by its members.”

Five days later members had reason to ask who actually was in control.

On May 27, a new email — this one from PEC headquarters in Johnson City — arrived in members’ mailboxes with the headline, “Here are the facts about your electric cooperative.”

Although unsigned, PEC Executive Chairman John Hewa told me he authorized the communiqué “to uphold an obligation to keep our members informed and to provide accurate information.”

Sounds innocent. But if he didn’t want to interfere, couldn’t this have waited until voting ended June 12?

Opponents of the two incumbents and others like myself — who had been rather indifferent to PEC politics — wondered about the urgency of a message beginning: “Pedernales Electric Cooperative would like its members to know where their utility stands on a number of issues” — especially when those are campaign issues. Some of what followed is undeniable. The PEC, like most such bodies outside Iran and Korea, puts its meeting agendas online and accepts Freedom of Information requests.

But its most prominent assertion — that its electricity costs less than Texas and national averages — requires a detailed calculation uniformly accounting for delivery charges, taxes and a variety of fees. It wasn’t explained how the PEC did its arithmetic, leaving its claim unsupported and arguable.

What isn’t arguable is that it was wrong for PEC management to blast a self-aggrandizing email during the vote, especially when it echoed key arguments incumbents have used in campaigns.

Hewa’s egregious action — for which he has offered no apology — raises the question of whether the PEC has become the pawn of a new group of power brokers and their cronies.

A day before he sent his letter, Tom “Smitty” Smith wrote a newspaper oped paean to the PEC leadership. Smith also is Texas director of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen group, and his commentary was centered on the same points Hewa used. A couple of days later, Clean Water Action, another Nader organization with a Texas branch, sent an email rallying support for the incumbents and a third candidate it approves.

Since 2008, these organizations have quietly and effectively promoted what they like to call “progressive” and “green” agendas through successful endorsements in campaigns in PEC elections that have attracted little attention.

That’s certainly within their rights in America. But against this background of vigorous electioneering, one incumbent’s cries that conservatives and Republicans have dumped a load of messy politics in their perfect “nonpartisan” world are laughable. The primary interest of these groups and those they’ve worked to elect is not lower prices and better service but increased use of expensive alternative energy sources.

They fear a truly democratic PEC because that might end the at-large election of directors that makes seating a sympathetic board more likely and open its monopoly market to competitors. While they fret that people might fall prey to tricky capitalists, their real concern is that consumers might be more interested in their own pocketbooks than the cause of environmental dogma.

A free market, of course, would let them buy all the “green” energy and mangle and roast all the migratory birds they want on wind and solar farms. Everyone else just wouldn’t be forced to join them.

This year, those who dislike the direction of the PEC board also have an opportunity to exercise their rights as Americans. They are trying to conduct an honest philosophical debate on the utility’s course, and they should be able to do so without distortion or interference by the PEC leadership and outside special interests.

In past elections, Smith’s lobby has distributed material that includes this quote from Sun Tzu’s famed work, “The Art of War”: “Know thy self; know thy enemy.”

That is also outstanding advice for independent-thinking Texans.