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The age-old struggle to restructure and expand the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority has apparently ended. The redefiners won out over the traditionalists. The grand experiment in public power may not be over yet, but it’s becoming more and more an electric utility with corporate configuration and less and less a quasi-governmental agency.

It was probably inevitable. When the TVA 50th birthday was being planned more than 20 years ago, there was an agency-wide contest to come up with a slogan to commemorate the occasion. The TVA powers that were at that time roundly rejected the suggestion by one of its own publications’ writers that the catchphrase be: “TVA—Fat, Fifty and Fading.” (To be truthful, it was the suggestion of one Jim Dykes, who quit the agency later in a huff, literally, when it banned smoking in its offices.)

That would have fit perfectly. TVA then employed more than 30,000 in roles that were defined under the TVA Act of 1933 to include virtually total resource stewardship across the entire watershed. There were federal funds being appropriated annually, $100 million and more, to spur economic development, water recreation, forestry, and a host of lesser programs geared to bootstrapping a region while protecting its environment, all the while producing cheap electric power under favorable federal financing guarantees.

Almost contemporaneously, the nuclear-electric power program was going bust and plants were being idled or canceled around the valley, and the handwriting was clear on the face of the dams.

No more blank checks. No more employment for employment’s sake. Environmental worries were something to worry over, but not too much. Solving them could wait on somebody who cared. Electric rates had to remain competitive, and not much else has seemed to matter for the last couple of decades. All of the agency’s non-utility roles have been downsized. The $30 billion-plus debt it once ran up is still hovering around $25 billion, without much promise of its further reduction, except by selling off assets to private utilities or industries. The future looks pretty grim for the noble endeavor that TVA once was and for its survival as a protected public entity.

Privatization has been threatened since the 1960s. Scoffed off at first, the idea has new legs as interstate electric power sales are being deregulated, and private utilities are chomping, rather than just sniffing, at the edges of the power service area. The TVA power production and distribution facilities are starting to look like negotiable bargains to some of the area’s private utilities.

Add to that the newest congressional “oversight” change: the expansion of the board from three powerful, full-time, agenda-setting members to nine part-time policy-forming members. Still politically appointed, with presidential nominations and Senate confirmation, the new directors are supposed to be people with management expertise who will serve five-year terms on the board. They will be charged with selecting a CEO with a senior-level management background who should also possess financial skills and electric industry credentials. The CEO will run the show, if it all works out the way the structure is designed.

It sounds very solid and professional, with a clear Republican ring to it, as it should, since it was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and his junior Tennessee Republican senator, Lamar Alexander, who pushed it through Congress last week. With a Republican president, it coincidentally gives them six more political appointment plums, along with the headache of satisfying the claims to board representation of the congressional delegations of the six other states whose lands lie partly in the Tennessee Valley watershed and the TVA power service area.

The current directors, Chairman Glenn McCullough of Mississippi, Skila Harris of Virginia, and Bill Baxter of Tennessee, will continue to serve out their nine-year, staggered terms on the board, but will become part-timers as a quorum of new appointees is sworn in.

There will be those who praise the new structure as more modern, businesslike and potentially efficient. They should take care to note that the executive privileges and profligacies that have scandalized the agency in recent years arrived with the ever-more corporate model imposed in the years of the late 1980s and early ’90s when Marvin Runyon was chairman of the board and czar over all he purveyed.

Privatization is the aim. Restructuring the board is just one of the tools. The days of TVA as we’ve known it are limited. As a government-backed and controlled agency it’s fading faster than ever, its biblical three-score and ten well back in its wake.

It’s arguable, but we may not need all the economic assistance TVA once provided. Environmental issues must be addressed, but there are other options, state and federal, for addressing them. Flood control is a given, but maybe the Corps of Engineers could work the gates in times of peril. Privately produced electricity could be as inexpensive as TVA’s, even without the public power “yardstick” it provided. It might just turn out all right if TVA’s privatized. Or, really, when. We’re fixing to find out.

December 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 49 © 2004 Metro Pulse