It’s last call to vote in REC’s director elections

A look at who’s running for seats on our electric coop’s board

Director elections are underway at the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, with seats open in three regions including eastern Rappahannock. A look at the candidates:

Director elections are underway at the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative (REC), with seats open in three regions including eastern Rappahannock County. The election period began July 1 and will continue until REC’s virtual annual meeting on Aug. 11. Member-owners can vote by mail by completing a paper proxy designation, online via MyREC Smarthub, or at the virtual meeting in August. In order to attend the meeting, member-owners must register between 7 a.m. on Aug. 5 and 5 p.m. on Aug. 6.

Here are the candidates:

Region II Rappahannock, Clarke, Fauquier and Warren counties

In some parts of its service area, REC is partnering with internet providers to expand broadband service via its power lines.

CHRIS SHIPE, CEO of Loudoun Mutual Insurance Company and a resident of Berryville, Va., was first elected to the Board of Directors in 2011. In a recent interview with the News, Shipe said his focus as a board member has been on improving the cooperative’s reliability, affordability and sustainability.

“We have three pieces of a triangle and I think we always need to keep it balanced. Reliability: Make sure that the lights stay on. Affordability: Making sure your rates are affordable [because] for economically disadvantaged people, electricity is a huge, huge part of their budget … [And] the third piece of the balance is … we need to be sustainable [with] things like [our recent] battery project and things like solar and wind.”

On the issue of broadband, Shipe said he believes REC should pursue partnerships with third party providers, emphasizing a recent collaboration with Firefly to provide service in Louisa County, and in the past the cooperative has worked with All Points Broadband and Shentel.

“We’re here to support anyone that can deliver that last mile,” Shipe said.

Region III

Albemarle, Madison, Greene, Rockingham, and a portion of Page County

DARLENE CARPENTER of Madison County was the first woman elected to the REC Board of Directors and has served on the board for nearly 40 years. “Our role [as directors] is to keep updated. And we represent the membership,” Carpenter said. “We try to make sure that ethically things are done right, and in all aspects of business.”

Carpenter, who left a 37-year career in banking to become a realtor, was also the first woman elected to the board of the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Financial Corporation, a nonprofit umbrella organization which provides financing to rural electric cooperatives.

Carpenter joined the REC Board of Directors before the cooperative adopted a term limit policy. The REC now allows directors to serve up to 15 years on the board. “The good thing [about a term limit] is it gives more opportunity for more people to serve,” Carpenter said. “And the bad thing is you lose all that experience. It’s not like you can step into that role, you know, it’s a long learning curve.”

As for her stance on broadband, Carpenter said that REC has invested $30 million for an 820-mile fiber network to assist with bringing broadband to its territory. “We are very grateful and happy that so many other counties are looking at joining the broadband wagon … it’s wonderful because it’s truly needed in our rural areas,” she said.

STEVE WALSH, who recently relocated to Madison County, is the managing director of global operations for Traxys, an energy company based in New York. “I’m uniquely qualified in that I’ve run distribution businesses, generation businesses, and portfolios of businesses,” Walsh told the Rappahannock News. “So I know how a business — whether it’s a forprofit or not-for-profit — should be run or can be run, to make sure that all the stakeholders are addressed adequately … and that’s where accountability comes in. People confuse a not-for-profit with not being accountable. And I come from a world where you’re accountable, everyone is accountable, to someone. And the rural electric coop is accountable to its members.”

Walsh, who has spent his career in the energy sector, said he believes that if elected, he would be the only member of the Board of Directors who is 100 percent capable of running the utility as its CEO. “I have run a utility that is 10 times as big as this one,” Walsh said. “[REC has] about 170,000 meters of connection points. The utility that I ran had 1.6 million meters, 10 times as large, with 4,000 employees. That said, I don’t want to be the CEO, I want to be a director … I want to be able to support the management team.”

Walsh’s priorities include balancing renewable energy generation with affordable utility service; improving vegetation management to reduce the number of vegetation-related outages across REC’s territory; and improving broadband access. “Every other utility that I’ve worked at [was] allowed to have broadband access. In other words, the right of way that is out there for the power lines, you can also [use to] put in fiber optic either above ground or underground,” Walsh said.