Chapter One What is DMEA's Board of Directors? And What is it Good For?

Summary

Those are questions we ask ourselves a lot. The easiest thing is to list what we can’t do. We can’t read meters. We can’t turn the power back on after lightning or a fallen tree knocks it out. We can’t enroll new customers or turn the power off to non- payers. And we wouldn’t know where to begin to run the Association’s computerized bookkeeping system. . Despite that, we nine elected people are ultimately in charge of DMEA: its 120 employees, its $43 million budget, its 29,000 meters, its $40 million in debt, and all the rest. How can that be? How can such an unlikely system work? There's a 70-year long answer that starts back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt figured that if the country were ever to come out of that economic pit, the rural parts of the.country would have to be part of the recovery. , . So the Roosevelt Administration made low-cost loans available to cooperatives willing to electrify the countryside through the Rural Electrification Administration. In response, the people in the rural parts of Delta and Montrose counties formed a cooperative, elected a board of directors consisting of seven men and two women, and told them to get to work. Their first meeting was August 27, 1938. They regularly met on Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., probably while their families were at the movies. That first board didn’t know much about electricity either. How could it? If farmers

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