Voices: The CASE Against Cobb EMC

“The key word would be ‘transparency,’” said Tom Barksdale, chairman of the Cobb Alliance for Smart Energy (CASE).

Barksdale, 68, is a retired U.S. government analyst and has served as the chairman of CASE for the past two years.

“We (CASE) just want to introduce more transparency, more democracy and more accountability to the members (of the Cobb EMC board of directors),” he said of the initiative, which was founded in 2008 and touts a platform of reform.

“We think the absence of those features and elements have been a major reason why Cobb EMC has faced such serious problems over the last two years, culminating, of course, with the indictment of the now retired - just retired - CEO Dwight Brown on 31 counts of racketeering,” Barksdale said. “His indictment is just the tip of the iceberg for the serious problems that plagued, and still plague, Cobb EMC.”

Barksdale said the "genesis" of CASE was the Cobb EMC's decision to join a consortium to build what, at the time, was a new coal-powered plant in Washington County, Ga. "So, the seed for the Cobb Alliance for Smart Energy was laid in the environmental community,” he said.

However, Barskdale said CASE has since undergone major changes. “We came to the conclusion that getting Cobb EMC to change its policies based just on the coal plant or other concerns was not going to really achieve very much," he said. "We decided we needed a different policy, so we, CASE, decided we would adopt what we call a ‘reform platform.'"

CASE hopes to implement that reform by changing the governance of Cobb EMC by electing reform candidates to the Cobb EMC board of directors, he said.

Barksdale said that CASE has been instrumental in “nourishing” several contestants for board positions, explicitly endorsing candidates Eric Broadwell, David Lombrozo, Mike Simard, Kelly Bodner and William Sharp. However, he said, elections for the 10-member board have been suspended for over two years by court order, which has put a hiatus on the electoral process. 

“There is certainly a community of people out there that support the reform of Cobb EMC,” said Barksdale. “I think it represents a gross misjudgment on the part of the board of directors that they do want (Brown) back."

Barksdale said the current board is "out of touch" and continues to make the wrong decisions for Cobb EMC. The board’s request to reinstate Brown, he said, has turned local criticisms of the organization from “anger and disgust to outright outrage.”

“They’ve made a long series of wrong financial and administrative decisions that have cost the co-op greatly,” Barksdale stated. “The members are basically paying for (Brown’s) legal defense.”

Barskdale said one of the key policies CASE advocates is opening up board meetings to members. “It sounds incredible, but members are not allowed to attend Cobb EMC board meetings. County commissions, city councils, school boards - they allow their constituents to attend the meetings. We want to introduce more democratic voting procedures to see to it that more board members participate in the election process.”

Barksdale said that he would like to see Cobb EMC become more “forthright” with board members regarding information. “There’s a lot of foot dragging and bureaucratic obstacles,” he said. “Most members I’ve encountered consider Cobb EMC to be unduly secretive and holding onto information members need to make informed decisions.”

“Cobb Energy was a profit-making enterprise put on top of Cobb EMC,” Barksdale said. “That was what the original lawsuit was all about. That whole apparatus had to be dismantled, (and) that was demonstrative proof that Dwight Brown and the board made some very incompetent decisions.”

According to Barksdale, “Coal-powered plants are already the dinosaurs of electricity production." He fears that the new power plants "will turn out to be an even bigger boondoggle than Cobb Energy.”

“Only this time, we’ll be dealing with billions of dollars,” he said.

"Cobb EMC doesn’t just want to build two of these things, there’s yet a third co-op power plant that is supposed to be built in southwest Georgia. It strictly defies all human logic that Georgia needs three coal-powered plants online at the same time while every other state in the U.S. is finding that they don’t need to build one,” said Barskdale.

“We have a very extensive grassroots program,” he said, noting that CASE members attend public events throughout Cobb County and elsewhere to find Cobb EMC customers and spread the word about what they're doing. “Our main goal is expand that public outreach program - we sort of see ourselves as the Paul Reveres of this whole movement."

CASE, said Barskdale, is dedicated to “mobilizing" support from the public. "We want more debate and public involvement. We encourage anybody who’s concerned about clean, corporate governance to come join us. You don’t have to be a member of Cobb EMC to see what’s going on here isn’t good,” he said.

CASE meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month. More information on the Cobb Alliance for Safe Energy can be found at cobbemcwatch.org.