Activists call for KCEC “Audit” and “Cost of Service Study”

Coop Request For Rate Increase

Pull one thread: the community ethos unravels

The Public Regulation Commission of New Mexico (PRCNM) should require an independent forensic “audit” and “cost of service” study from the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative (KCEC) to justify the Trustees’ request for a rate increase.

Oh, we know the Coop is broke and can’t make TIER. But why should the members of the Coop pay for the Trustees, who have all but bankrupted the Coop? The Trustees should resign like Sec. of State Diana Duran. For the Coop record of failure is epic.

Here’s a list of ventures still being carried on the books, wherein investment and management by the Coop has co-mingled funds, derived from loans, guaranteed by the members from banks and the USDA/RUS. Oh, yes, the Feds, too, are guilty, like the CEO, of encouraging the Trustees to take on the indebtedness. How much did these botched misadventures cost the members and taxpayers?

1. The Call Center
2. Kit Carson Internet
3. Propane
4. Command Center
5. Broadband/Fiber Optic

According to Trustees, who have spoken off and on the record, the Coop owes approximately $100 million to their bankers. They have spent wildly while borrowing from Paul to pay Peter, figuratively and literally. Not only have the Trustees and management spent excessively and irresponsibly but they have engaged privately in “licentious” and “unlawful behavior?” individually and collectively in Taos, Questa, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Hot Springs, New Orleans, Washington D.C., Denver, cities on the west coast and east coast, according to the Trustees themselves.

(Mama don’t let your baby grow up to be a trustee. The Coop trustees used to have a “statewide” party room in Santa Fe where they carried “Bones” favorite beer. Service on the board of trustees is bad for our pocketbook and their own “morals.”)

From time to time the Trustees have accused each other of absconding with everything from firewood and power poles to used equipment or spending freely on fine art for the board room. They have failed to institute basic cash controls in Penasco and Taos, which resulted in robberies and cash crimes that remain unsolved and/or unprosecuted. By spending huge sums on legal fees and promotions, they have obscured their back-door doings and prevented members from looking at the books. Due to payoffs for advertising in the local press all we hear about is how wonderful is the CEO, Mr. Luis Reyes.

The CEO and the 11 Trustees long ago gerrymandered electoral districts. More or less in the Penasco district two trustees represent 800 meters each; in the Taos District four trustees represent about 3000 meters each; the outlying districts, Ojo Caliente and Carson, Questa, and Angel Fire amount to about 1 trustee each for 1200 meters.

Just as Taos Health System controls Holy Cross Hospital by appointing trustees from “geographical locations” in the outlying areas of the County, so KCEC allocates representation to the outlying villages where few members raise issues and the payoffs are cheap. Just as Holy Cross Hospital has tried to expand and is now failing to deliver quality health care, so the Coop expanded and is now failing to deliver affordable electricity. Like Holy Cross, the Coop ventured into areas where they don’t have a “monopoly.”

(Though, to be honest, Holy Cross is way worse for your “health” than the “Coop.” You don’t die when you enter the Coop.)

The Trustees, historically, like to refer to themselves as “businessmen” but as the CEO Luis Reyes has always said, “we are a debt driven organization and socialize the costs.” Any business can look good, given a monopoly on utilities and government/member backed low-interest loans. Most of us have no quarrel with “electric-side service.” We are plugged in to the grid and have made our deal with the devils of modernity: computers, electric lights, appliances, television, etc. We just don’t like paying for the misadventures.

Unlike my activist colleagues, I like and even admire Luis and his talent for microcosmic hands-on knowledge of electricity service as well as his genius for local politics. In his own way the man is not only a “genius” but also the smartest “operator in Taos.” He’s got a sense of humor and a gift for gab, along with a Machiavellian insight into local politics. He makes me laugh.

Why he’s had the Town of Taos under his thumb ever since the once and former manager, Slick Gus, left. I dare say that the Barrone, Bellis, Hahn faction at Town Hall hangs by a thread, courtesy of Luis. A sign to Andrew and it’s off with Bellis’s contract.

But the dark side of the so-called “Energizer Bunny’s” talent is his imagination. He has transformed a talent for engineering and politics into a mega entrepreneur, wherein he “imagines” he can do anything due to loans and his own “hubris” (false pride). Like the former Harold “Hub” Thompson of Tri-State repute, Luis has ushered the Trustees into a world of finance they don’t understand, except for Vegas style perks.

The laws of physics and finance set limits on what one artist and 11 unimaginative trustees can do. Oh, yes, Luis learned his lessons well from the Tri-State legend, “Hub,” and then he incorporated his personal knowledge of the Trustees’ private weaknesses into a peculiar brand of tried and true “methods.” Call it the “carrot and the stick” Taos style.

At one time the Coop’s “Internet Committee” was composed of individuals who couldn’t do email (without the help of their grandchildren). One guy, the Trustees say, even ran off with a woman and missed a meeting before limping back and returning her to her husband, the “Lineman of the County.” Another Trustee is as famous for calling out his bros to settle matters in the Parking Lot as he is for casting slurs on his neighbors: “You know how they (the Indians) are” or “do you want the Gringos to run the Coop?” Well the Gringos on the Coop board are no different than your native Taosenos. As a great con man once said, “I never conned any man who didn’t have larceny in his heart.”

For a time there were checks and balances at the Coop as the “political faction” vied for power with the “business faction,” 6-5 one year, 5-6 the next. Offices and perks changed hands. “I get to be president, You get “statewide,” “you get Tri-State.” But the Rio Arriba Trustee and veteran politico from Ojo Caliente broke ranks and flipped when the power brokers offered him the Tri-State gig for several years: $400 a meeting plus perks, Bronco tickets, overnights, etc. and a chance to play at the big Tri-State table with Hub’s successors. At regular meetings Trustees get $150 and $75 for committee meetings. I hear they want a raise. After all they pay Luis in excess of $200,000 what with perks and benefits, who knows what the annual tab is.

Oh, yes, the Trustees used to call me up or turn over notes and documents that recorded the travel perks; they’d bad mouth each other and tell me tales out of school. (I’ve still got the police reports, the reports on the 30 grand they spent for a week in Vegas, the “$100,000” they once spent for an annual meeting.)

They’ve been following Luis down the path and into the devil’s garden for years. The Coop didn’t go broke over night. The Trustees have been working at it for fifteen years that I know about. In front of the PRC they will blame the “economy” but the guys looking back each morning from the mirror caused the damage. And now they want us to pay for their pleasure. Thanks to the Rio Arriba pol, Luis got all the Trustees together and “screwed the pooch.” And that “pooch” ladies and gentlemen is “us.”

P.S. The Town and County are discussing a new tax designated to pay for the E911 “public safety” feature at the County Complex. The previous E911 dispatch center was located in Town and needed some remodeling and new equipment. A modernized E911 center might have been done in place, a room added, some new equipment, for a few hundred thousand dollars. But thanks to Luis’s ill-fated proposal at the Command Center, now abandoned, the E911 project has cost members and taxpayers “millions of dollars.” When Luis sponsors a gold rush, like the “$60 million unfinished Broadband project, there’s no end to it and the manipulation of La Gente. It goes on and on.