Growing the board is risky, but may be right
by Barry Henderson
The Tennessee Valley Authority has been moving away from its quasi-governmental model, toward a more businesslike corporate model, for more than a decade. Increasing the size and scope of its board of directors to nine part-time members, who are to elect a chief executive officer to put their policy decisions into effect, is simply another element of that shift.
Its significance is partly in the fact that it is the first such board change in TVA's 70 years, and that it came before Congress intact, without committee hearings or debate and without opening up the TVA Act of 1933 to further revision or amendment. The change has been pushed by Sen. Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican who is Senate Majority Leader and who sees it as making the agency more efficient.
Still, there is reason to fear that new board members, to constitute a majority in any event and all to be appointed by President Bush, may lead toward the Republican-inspired goal of privatization of the agency—the nation's most comprehensive experiment with public power production. That would complete TVA's failure with emphatic punctuation.
The mission of TVA has been pretty well corrupted in recent years, from its earlier "total resource development" aim for the seven-state valley region. Its environmental stewardship and economic development roles have dwindled until they are barely extant when compared with those TVA embraced in the past. Concentrating more and more on its electric power production role has been necessary, as a result of the huge lingering debt from its mostly scrapped nuclear power program and in the light of impending deregulation of electric utilities.
Maybe a CEO can corral the implications of debt and deregulation better than a three-member, full-time board could ever be expected to do, especially a board with no public or private utility experience in their backgrounds.
Of the current three, only Director Bill Baxter, the Knoxvillian, embraces the idea of board expansion. The other two, Chairman Glenn McCullough and Director Skila Harris, made no preference known. Both Baxter and Harris have indicated they wish to stay as part-timers, at annual salaries of $45,000 rather than the $134,000 they now receive as full-timers. The chairman's pay under the new scheme is $50,000, but McCullough would stay at full-time status and keep his $142,500 annual salary until 2005, when his current term ends.
One would hope the structural shift would work out well for the valley's citizens and electric ratepayers, rather than amount to "cosmetic" changes, as characterized by Knoxville's Congressman Jimmy Duncan. The very least public benefit that would seem to be in the offing is that no future board member will be flown home and back on a TVA plane at outrageously thoughtless ratepayer expense every week, as McCullough has been for years.
Common Sense
A bare majority of the Knox County Commission came to its collective senses long enough Monday to withdraw from consideration for the time being a resolution to recognize God as the foundation of our national heritage.
The swing vote came from Commissioner Phil Guthe, who suggested that people's relationships with God were too personal to be resolved in such an impersonal way. Too true. It may leave the Commission minority aghast, but some people have a relationship with another deity. Some have none at all. And they're all protected by the U.S. Constitution.
Freedom of religion is more than just the freedom to choose whether to be a Methodist or a Presbyterian, even if the Baptist preacher from Corryton who uttered the invocation intimated that those who don't toe the line of Christianity are headed to hell.
Those nine commissioners who voted to consider the resolution and who spoke favorably of introducing religious preference into government and anyone who agrees with them should consider taking a course offered this winter at the respected Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning. It's called the Foundations and Issues in the Separation of Church and State, and the instruction's to be shared by Carolyn Dipboye, who holds a doctorate in Christian ethics from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and has taught at Carson-Newman College, and Larry Dipboye, former pastor of the first Baptist Church of Oak Ridge.
The course addresses the question of "the appropriate role of religion in the religiously diverse nation and world in which we live."
It's possible that a careful examination of that question would lead to the belief that religious freedom, rather than God himself, is both the foundation of our national heritage and the underpinning of all the freedoms we enjoy.
It's true that spirituality, or lack of it, is, as Commissioner Guthe almost concluded, too personal for governmental intervention. It's the single most personal—and as such the dearest—freedom that we Americans hold.
November 20, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 47
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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