FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK: A Return To Local-Style Politics

By VERNON ROBISON

Many Americans have begun to lose faith in the effectiveness of our system of representative government. With so much partisan rancor in the halls of power, our federal government representatives seem to have lost the ability to have a conversation, come to an understanding, meet in the middle on a mutually beneficial compromise and get anything at all done. Thus, at least at the national level, it has become hard to believe in this log-jammed system. Where have the leaders gone? Is there any hope for our republic to function again?

The late Massachusetts Congressman Tip O’Neill, who served many years ago as Speaker of the House, used to say, “All politics is local.” Even though O’Neil was a masterful, and even ruthless, partisan politician, he understood the important truth that it is in the humble realm of small municipal leadership that things get done. The smaller the realm, the better. Interestingly, two such examples of this truth, both occurring right here close to home, were reported in last week’s edition of The Progress.

The first of these was the unanimous decision of the Overton Power District (OPD) board of directors to make a major adjustment to power rates for local ratepayers.

Over the past few years the OPD board and staff has put tremendous efforts into bringing savings to the district. Chief among these was a new power purchase agreement with national energy brokerage Morgan Stanley. This contract took most of the guesswork out of the district’s energy purchasing, making it much more efficient and, thus, more economical. It has also resulted in significant savings to the district’s biggest cost center: the cost of power.

So what happened next? With excess revenues coming in, did the board go out looking for new places to spend money? If they were functioning in far off Washington, they might have. But this was not the case locally. Instead board members were eager to see those savings simply returned back to customers as soon as possible. They did the unthinkable and pushed hard for a rate reduction. Imagine that!

But they also knew that this action had to be balanced with another major OPD cost center, that of infrastructure. With a number of major system outages occuring in recent years at some of the weakest spots in the OPD system, you can bet that the board has also been looking to beef up reliability. Unfortunately, major infrastructure components for such a sprawling distribution system as OPD is costly.

Thus the board recognized a vital need to better separate the fixed infrastructure costs from the cost of power on customers’ monthly power bills. They realized that these costs should be transparent and equitable to each customer class. Customers needed to be able to see clearly what part of their bill was going to pay for infrastructure, and what was paying for energy.

At its June meeting, the OPD Board found a balance point for that difficult problem. Indeed, it was more of a rebalance than a rate reduction. Even so, most customers will likely see a small reduction in their bills. The board first approved a small increase to the flat monthly rate that every customer pays to cover fixed infrastructure costs. Then they made a significant decrease to the per kilowatt hour (kWh) energy use rate where the district has saved the most money since the Morgan Stanley agreement.

There are some who will say that this adjustment was just smoke and mirrors resulting in some clear winners and losers. These folks might argue that an increase in the flat rate will negatively impact customers who normally conserve and use less energy.

Where is the incentive toward conservation, they ask. But that view equates to looking at a glass half empty.

In the new rate structure, every customer is now paying a fair share of the infrastructure costs to secure greater system reliability. These system updates are needed, and they have to be paid for. But going forward, these fixed costs will no longer be propped up by inflated per kWh rates. They will be fair and transparent.

Plus, every customer will save on the energy that they use.

All of this is an excellent example of duly elected representatives working, without ulterior motive, to solve problems for the benefit of their constituency. When else have you ever heard of an elected body; first of all, trying to actually cut spending; and secondly, returning excess revenues from those cuts back to the public? Never! It’s unheard of these days.

The OPD board has innovated a way to balance the scales between reducing rates and ensuring system reliability. With this adjustment, it is not OPD vs. the customer. Rather the consumer comes out winning on both sides of the scale. And that’s how it should be. That is an example of good representative governance at work.

The second example of this local governance anomaly which was reported in last week’s edition took place at the Moapa Valley Water District (MVWD) with another locally elected board. On June 13, the ongoing saga of the “banked meter” resurfaced yet again at MVWD and was finally brought to a resolution.

To be sure, the MVWD board had held numerous public discussions over several months before making a decision on the matter. But they received very little public feedback on the issue throughout all that time.

In the end, for the good of the whole MVWD system, action had to be taken. So in April, the board forged ahead despite the lack of public input, and created a policy that would solve the problem. It phased out the grandfathered “banked meter” customer class entirely by the end of the year.

That’s all it took to bring public input. In May, “banked meter” customers suddenly came out of the woodwork, upset at what had been done. During a public comment period, these folks expressed frustration and concern, feeling that the board action was not treating them fairly.

Rather than holding rigidly to the previous action, the MVWD board listened carefully to all of these concerns. They discussed possible changes to the new policy that might suit this small class of customers. And they received feedback and suggestions from these customers on the ideas.

Then they opened the matter again in last month’s meeting, this time as an agenda item. There were key changes made that would both respect the “banked meter” owners’ rights and serve the interest of the bulk of MVWD ratepayers as a whole. A good balance was struck. Here again, was good representative governance in action, at the local level.

These two local examples illustrate that the concept of representative governance can indeed still work. But in order to work, it requires representatives who are close to the problems and are personally invested in the outcomes. It requires people who expect to answer directly for their decisions – not indirectly through the bureaucratic layers of a large staff in Washington, but in countless daily encounters with folks at the grocery store, the post office or anywhere else they move in the community. In short, in order for representative governance to flourish, as in these two local cases, it requires honorable people who love their community and want nothing more from it than to serve.

If we could somehow come back to that, there may yet be some hope restored for the American republic.