Could firing increase electric rates Richard Howorth isn’t bashful about being fired by Donald Trump last week. Here’s the way he leads an op ed column in the Tupelo Daily Journal Sunday. “I’m fired. By the President,” The former Oxford mayor and owner of Square Books was referring to the president removing him and another Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) director — Board Chairman Skip Thompson of Alabama — from their jobs. In his announcement, Trump slammed TVA’s hiring of “foreign” workers and criticized the high salary of its top executive. As usual, Trump’s demagoguery sounded good, but those in Northeast Mississippi may not like the results of his micro-managing if their electricity rates begin to rise. Howorth, in his column, has a good rebuttal to Trump’s criticism of the agency, and I’ll get to some of that later. First a little TVA history. It was created in 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region hard hit by the Great Depression. TVA's service area covers most of Tennessee, parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky, and small slices of Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Over the years, TVA has developed primarily into a power utility, owned by the federal government. It has a nine-member board of directors, each nominated by the U.S. President and confirmed by the Senate. Some say it’s socialistic — the government owning a big business. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it an example of “creeping socialism” and told friends in private, “I’d like to sell the whole thing.” Instead, in 1959 Eisenhower signed into law amendments to the TVA Act that essentially resolved an ongoing argument between free-enterprise Republicans and public-power Democrats. The deal gave TVA financial independence but provided it could not expand its power sales beyond the territory it served in 1957. Now back to the present. Noting that Trump’s justifications for his action were TVA’s recent use of an external company to fulfill about 20 percent of TVA’s tech services, which involved some furloughing of TVA employees, and the salary of the TVA CEO which last year was a “whopping $8 million,” Howorth wrote that the external company TVA used for tech work was contractually required to use only U.S. workers and to keep all data in the U.S. CGI, based in Canada, has been used by the U. S. Navy, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, he asserted. “While no one on the TVA board likes the idea of furloughing TVA workers, the board is obligated to make TVA as beneficial as it possibly can be to all the people in the Valley.” Howorth wrote that although the salary of CEO Jeff Lyash “seems to defy reason (akin to that for football coaches), the base salary is just shy of $1 million annually. The rest is at-risk incentive pay determined by a strict set of markers; still, $8 million puts the executive’s pay in the bottom one-fourth of similar utility companies (My own salary was $45,000 when I began, $55,000 the two years I was chair — about a tenth of the average pay for a similar position in the private sector.) “The President said that, if the board, now entirely Trump appointees, did not immediately lower the CEO salary to below $500,000, he would continue firing directors and replacing them until they did. Finding someone qualified to run TVA, with its complex operations — nuclear plants, river control, environmental stewardship — and 10,000 employees, the sixth largest utility corporation in the country, at that salary will be difficult if not impossible, though I’m sure many friends of friends of the President might apply.” Howorth continued, “let’s not kid ourselves. This was a MAGA drama conceived by the President’s team to alter his current political trajectory. His actions upon TVA accompanied his press conference signing an executive order ‘requiring that only United States citizens and nationals are appointed to competitive service,’ with which, as I say, TVA already was in compliance. To my knowledge, the White House never called to ask us for an explanation, and I have to wonder if the President even knows that TVA receives zero federal tax dollars. “I was the sole Democrat, appointed by Obama in 2011 and again in 2015, remaining on the board. Technically, my term expired in May, but, as with all previous directors I’ve worked with in my 9-plus years at TVA, I was expected to serve until the calendar year-end. It’s clear that Republican officials hoped to squeeze a Republican appointee into my slot before the November election, fearing Trump’s loss, and Roger Wicker had recommended my replacement less than 24 hours after I got the boot. So, I get it – politics. But firing the board chair, a Trump appointee, Skip Thompson from Alabama, one of the finest and ablest leaders I have ever worked with, made no sense at all, except in the context of the President’s show.” Charlie Dunagin is editor and publisher emeritus of the McComb Enterprise-Journal. He lives in Oxford.
