San Miguel Power Association’s politics and policies have generated plenty of public interest in the Telluride area, where one of two seats on SMPA’s Board of Directors is up for grabs on June 3. Not so in the Nucla, Naturita and west Montrose County area where the co-op’s consumers will elect the second new director. The contrast is startling and it says volumes about the diverse economies and attitudes of the east and west ends of the San Miguel River Basin.

First, the basics: San Miguel Power’s territory is divided into seven director districts. It’s 12,586 metered consumers only vote (mostly by mail) for candidates in their own director district. The four-year terms are staggered to allow for more continuity. In the Telluride area, 11 year SMPA Director John Arnold, a longtime Telluride area resident and publisher (Telluride Magazine), is being challenged for his District 4 seat by another longtime resident and community activist, Michael Saftler, a real estate broker. 

Arnold defends his support for Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association’s often controversial policies. Much like its earlier, smaller predecessor, the now defunct Colorado-Ute Electric Association, Tri-State is a major political force in the four states where it delivers wholesale electricity to its 44-member co-ops. San Miguel and all of its nearby rural electric cooperatives buy power from Tri-State.

Challenger Saftler, who is 55, says Arnold, 59, failed to represent some 300 local consumers who opposed his support for Tri-State’s pro-coal policies and that it’s time for a change on the SMPA Board.

In contrast, in the Nucla-Naturita area, there’s virtually no public conversation about the two candidates who are running for the District 1 board seat. Former 20-year SMPA Boardmember Mel Staats is running to regain the seat he lost to Joe Garvey in 2004. Another Nucla native, 54-year old Gayland Thompson, who retired from the U.S. Navy in 1994 and returned to Nucla to become a contract electrician, decided to run for the seat Garvey was vacating. He says he doesn’t have any specific agenda and “has a lot to learn,” but is interested in making SMPA “more customer friendly.”

Staats, 61, says now that he’s leased the family’s farming operation he has plenty of time to devote to SMPA affairs and that being a SMPA Board member “is a very interesting job.” He cites his longtime experience, which includes most of the training sessions provided by the federally supported rural electric system, as well as time he served on the Colorado Ute Board. Staats says he lost his bid for reelection in 2004 because there was the perception that he “wasn’t communicating with the public.” He thinks that was a false charge, noting that only six people called him on the phone to discuss SMPA issues.

At the time, the Nucla community was in a frenzy over talk that SMPA headquarters in Nucla were about to be moved to Ridgway. Then SMPA General Manager Bobby Blair
appeared to favor that move, although board members insisted they had no plans to do so. Soon, board members held a special, closed-door meeting in Nucla to assure community representatives that the SMPA’s main operation would remain in Nucla. Of course, SMPA did build a rather nifty new office complex in Ridgway, which may still look somewhat threatening to the economically distressed Nucla community.

I wasn’t able to catch up with Joe Garvey, but observers suggest that he has other interests that top the time he devotes to the electric co-op. District 4 board candidate Thompson says when he learned that Garvey wasn’t going to seek reelection, he decided to run for that seat. He thinks his U.S. Navy experience in engine rooms give him an excellent understanding of general electronics, and his present business, Wing Electric, also adds to his knowledge about the business of delivering electricity to San Miguel consumers. SMPA officials agree that a very modest home – perhaps a double wide – would pay from $3,000 to $5,000 to connect to SMPA’s system. Thompson says if he’s elected he hopes to find ways to make hooking up to the system more affordable.

“Telluride can pay for what it wants” – underground service, for example – but the Nucla-Naturita’s long history of boom and bust mining has left the area still trying to recover from the last bust. 

Thirty-year Nucla resident and local activist (regional biking trails) Paul Koski agrees that there isn’t much talk about the District 4 candidates and the upcoming election. A few years, back, during a charged SMPA Board meeting in Ridgway, Koski spoke eloquently about the dire economic impact losing SMPA’s headquarters would have on Nucla. He still feels that way. Without SMPA and the Peabody Coal Company operation there, Koski says, Nucla could not survive. Koski says everyone should take a look at the terrific reclamation job Peabody has done – and continues to do.

He and his wife, Renee, have long been “active members of the green power movement,” but he says talk of green power in this blue-collar, mining community is viewed as “political fluff.” And although Koski’s business (Koski’s Fine Woodworking) is doing well enough, he’s troubled at seeing his community decline into poverty. That’s why, although he’s “no fan of nuclear power,” he’s supporting a proposed new uranium mill nearby. And while the plan doesn’t directly bear on San Miguel Power and its upcoming election, Nucla’s mining past and its current economic plight are in startling contrast to Telluride’s resort affluence and even Ridgway’s galloping growth.

Still, how these differences will play out in future SMPA policies will have a lot to do with who wins the two director seats on June 3.