Patrick Rose

W.W. ‘Bud’ Burnett has departed.  So has Bennie Fuelberg.  The rest of the board needs to follow suit.

At long last, the Bennie Fuelberg era at Pedernales Electric Cooperative Inc. came to an end Friday after his 31 years as general manager. On Monday, Juan Garza, who until recently ran Austin Energy, officially takes over as general manager, though he has been active for weeks preparing for his new job.

Fuelberg’s departure gives the co-op, based in Johnson City, an opportunity to remake itself as a much more open utility service. Garza has promised an open regime, and the 220,000 member-customers are entitled to full disclosure of the co-op’s finances. It’s their money.

But more departures are needed.

We have previously called on the entire board to follow the example of its do-nothing but highly compensated president, W.W. “Bud” Burnett, who recently quit. The board has made some welcome changes in recent months, but it took a lawsuit, this newspaper, political pressure and one embarrassing disclosure after another to make it happen.

The most recent disclosures involve paying people who apparently didn’t even come to work, including one board director, Charles Winters, who spent about six years in a nursing home until his death in 2005. During all that time, he apparently was paid – even after being replaced on the board.

As reported by American-Statesman staff writer Claudia Grisales, the board created a new “emeritus” position to provide lifetime pay and benefits for certain favored directors after they were no longer active.

At least one such beneficiary was Winters. Available Pedernales records indicate he collected $110,000 from the co-op between 2001 and 2005.

But the board never bothered to notify the co-op members that it had created the emeritus position and that it would use their money to keep paying some directors even after they were no longer active and not on the board. Given that board directors report only to the co-op’s members, not the staff, they were particularly obligated to report board spending.

The special treatment of Winters, as well as the disclosure of salaries paid to at least two staff people not known to do any actual work (one lives in Louisiana) shows once again why the board should drop its plan to pay its own auditor for a thorough scrubbing of the co-op’s finances. A board-hired auditor won’t start with much credibility.

Instead, the board should hire the state auditor, just as state Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, and Rep. Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs, suggested. Pedernales could pay for it, just as it will pay for hand-picking its own auditor.

One good thing the board has done is to hire Garza, who takes over Monday with a lot of expectations on his shoulders. The board’s next, best service to the co-op’s members now would be to leave – without “emeritus” pay.

The Editorial Board, Austin American Statesman