ST. MATTHEWS, SC
Tri-County Electric’s embattled directors did not show up to face about 60 angry customer-owners at the co-op board’s monthly meeting Thursday, just two days before those customers hold a historic vote on whether to kick them out of office.
It is unclear whether the part-time board members will resign or, instead, attend Saturday’s specially called meeting to defend themselves. “I’m not at liberty to tell you that,” the board’s attorney, Lexington lawyer Jake Moore, told The State on Thursday.
The co-op’s customers used Thursday’s regularly called board meeting — absent the co-op’s directors — as a forum to discuss their plans to fire the six remaining trustees from the part-time board, which has paid its members more than triple the national average.
“It is such a pleasure to be here today and to see the board members are not,” said Barbara Weston, one of a handful of Tri-County customers who signed up to speak to the board Thursday before learning those directors were not attending the meeting. “It is awesome. I am very pleased by that.”
Sustained outrage among Tri-County’s customers followed The State’s reporting in May that the part-time board had paid itself about $52,000 a member in 2016 — more than any of South Carolina’s 19 other electric co-ops.
For years, Tri-County board members boosted their compensation with co-op funded health insurance plans and by racking up $450-a-day payments to attend an inordinate number of board meetings.
Over the weekend, The State also reported Tri-County’s trustees gave themselves:
▪ Co-op-funded retirement plans that paid out nearly $81,000 to each director in 2008
▪ $300 Christmas bonuses normally reserved for employees
▪ Expensive dinners at least three times a year, including a $939 dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in Columbia and a $744 dinner at Bourbon Street’s Red Fish Grill during a New Orleans conference.
At least one board member — Mary Brown — also filed reports that exaggerated the hours that she worked as a Tri-County director, saying she worked on days of the year — Feb. 30, for instance — that do not exist.
Moore, the board’s attorney, has said the trustees are “relatively uneducated … country people” who have done nothing wrong. Moore also said the directors acted only on the advice of the co-op’s chief executive, Chad Lowder, and its general counsel, John Felder, who Moore accused of stabbing the co-op directors in the back.
Felder brought up that comment Thursday. “I thought it was inappropriate. I thought it was unprofessional. I thought it was totally unwarranted, lacked merit.”
The customers — who pay some of the highest electric rates in the state — appeared to take Felder’s side, giving the co-op’s staff a standing ovation at Thursday’s meeting. They also took exception to Moore’s comment about “country people.”
“We are country folks, as someone recently alluded to us as,” said state Rep. Russell Ott, D-Calhoun. “But we are not uneducated.”
When some co-op customer-owners expressed concern the board could try to fire Lowder or Felder before Saturday’s meeting, Felder assured them that such a move would be deemed retaliatory and thrown out in court.
More than 1,600 of Tri-County’s customers in six Midlands counties signed a petition to force Saturday’s first-of-its-kind special meeting to vote on whether to throw out the co-op’s six remaining directors.
“This story is being told from New York to California right now, and how this story ends is going to be up to y’all,” Lowder told the crowd.
This story was originally published August 16, 2018 2:03 PM.