Prepared April 1, 2005:

For the past two years, this has been a "do nothing" board. There have been no contested votes of any significance to distinguish one member from another.  In the past, Chris Birch has clearly established himself as a Consumer Hero and Boucher, Cason, Cottrell, and Jasper have distinguished themselves as Consumer Zeros.  But for these two years, the whole board has suffered from some sort of complacent malaise.  They go to meetings, they listen to a General Manager who has repeatedly deceived them, and as if under a spell, they vote in unison for whatever is placed before them.  They eat their lavish catered dinners, collect their recently doubled director fees, and go home.  Their fees and travel expenses are going up and up while nothing is happening.  No one is doing their own homework.  Everyone seems so inured to the way things are done at Chugach that nothing inspires them to change.  The inefficiency is still there.  The waste, the bloat.  The opportunities for improvement are ripe enough to excite any entrepreneur to roll up his sleeves with delight at the challenges awaiting him each day.  But instead, everyone is just punching a time clock without adding value.

The board has done some pretty bad things in the past two years, often of the nature of increasing their comfort while distancing themselves from accountability:  removed term limits, raised their fees, increased their travel, reduced the frequency and dumbed down the content of the Outlet, moved to destroy tapes of their meetings so members can't learn what the board said, jettisoned their goal to be in the top 10% of utilities in economic efficiency nationwide, kept hidden results of benchmarking studies that showed them to have lots of room for improvement, stopped benchmarking against industry leaders.

When torpor and ennui sets in, it is time for change!  We need to replace the incumbents with new, excited pro-consumer candidates who are want to make a difference, i.e. Alan Christopherson, Uwe Kalenka, and Liz Vazquez.