No Rule to Break

On Thursday morning the SRP Councils filled a vacancy on the District Board, the body that sets electric rates for more than a million customers and approves the spending that shapes this valley’s water and power for decades. The seat belongs to District 7. It went to Thomas Galvin, a sitting Maricopa County Supervisor and a partner at Rose Law Group. Eric Gorsegner, the senior Council member from District 7, lost by about three votes.

I voted for Mr. Gorsegner.

The appointment changed the balance of the Board. In April, customers elected a clean energy majority for the first time in SRP’s 120-year history, 8 to 6. On Thursday that became 7 to 7, with the tiebreaking vote held by a president elected on the Turning Point Action slate. The majority that voters produced in April was undone by an appointment in August, and no one had to win an election to do it.

I want to explain what happened, because the vote itself is the least interesting part of it.

What governs this

Nothing does. That is not a figure of speech.

I asked SRP’s legal department, in writing, what bylaws or written procedures govern filling a vacancy on the Board. The answer came back from SRP’s Associate General Manager and Chief Legal Executive: the governing authority is a single provision of state statute saying the Council may fill a vacancy in the Board of Directors by appointment. There are no District bylaws describing the process. There are no Association bylaws describing it either. That is the entire body of law.

The same statute that leaves Board vacancies to Council discretion requires the Council to adopt bylaws for filling vacancies in the offices of President and Vice President. The legislature specified a written process for those offices. For a seat on the Board, it left the method open, and in more than a century the Council never closed it.

Compare that to how SRP fills a vacancy on the Council itself, an office with considerably less authority. There the Councils adopted a written procedure in December 2012 with seven steps: a subcommittee of elected officials from the affected voting area, a list of candidates, an eligibility screening through the Corporate Secretary’s office covering residency, property ownership, how that property is held, voter registration, and whether the candidate has relatives employed by SRP, then interviews, then a short list. The same document requires that any nomination made from the floor be cleared through the Corporate Secretary’s office before the meeting.

Seven steps for the junior seat. For the Board seat, one sentence.

That sentence is item 8 of the Council vacancy guidelines. It notes that the Councils also have authority to fill Board vacancies, and that typically a recommendation is made to fill a vacant Board seat with a senior Council member from the voting area in which the vacancy occurs. It describes a habit rather than imposing an obligation, and it sits at the end of a document about something else entirely.

The committee was asked

This is the part that has stayed with me.

SRP has a By-Laws Committee. I requested ten years of its meeting history and received it. Thirty meetings are documented across the records I was given, running from 2008 to April 2025.

On November 13, 2012, that committee sat through a presentation on elected official vacancies. The presentation put three questions to the members. One of them, verbatim, was: “Adopt process to fill Board vacancy?”

They did not. The motion that day directed revisions only to the Council vacancy guidelines. The phrase does not appear in a committee record again.

What does appear, over the following fourteen years, is compensation for elected officials, in fifteen separate meetings. Also per diem payments for attending meetings remotely, term limits, and split seats. The committee took up the process for filling vacancies in the offices of President and Vice President again in September 2022, and Board vacancies did not come up. At the most recent meeting in the file, in April 2025, it discussed reducing the number of Council meetings.

The committee has not been idle. It has been attentive, and consistently attentive to the questions that affect the people who sit on it. The one rule that would have constrained them in a moment like this week’s is the rule that never got written.

How the nomination arrived

On August 4, the Council met. A name came before us: Thomas Galvin. It arrived without attribution. When I asked, in the meeting, who was making the nomination, no one answered.

I put the question in writing to SRP’s legal department afterward, and the answer that came back filled in what the room would not. Before the August 4 meeting, a Council member had directed Mr. Galvin to contact the Corporate Secretary’s office to determine his eligibility for the District 7 seat. The Corporate Secretary then confirmed with that member that he intended to formally nominate Mr. Galvin. At the August 4 meeting, Mr. Galvin’s name was supplied by the Corporate Secretary in response to a different member asking whether there was any other interest.

So the information existed. Both the Corporate Secretary and the nominating member had it. When a member of the body being asked to vote asked for it out loud, the room went quiet.

I do not think that was anyone’s scheme. I think it is what happens when nothing requires a nomination to carry a name. Under the Council’s own procedure, a floor nomination for a Council seat must be cleared in advance through the Corporate Secretary’s office, which means somebody’s name is attached to it before anyone walks into the room. No such requirement exists for the Board, so none was met.

The question he would not answer

Mr. Galvin is a partner at Rose Law Group. The firm advertises a data center development practice, describing its work on land use entitlements, incentives, and the provision of water and power, and stating that it represented the first data center to locate in Arizona. It publicly discloses representing Microsoft on data center development in Goodyear and El Mirage. Its co-founder represented Google in the clean energy agreement Google reached with SRP to power its Mesa data center, which the firm’s own release described as a first-of-its-kind contract in Arizona. The same firm is the registered agent and lobbyist for Fondomonte Arizona, the Saudi-owned alfalfa operation, and is defending Fondomonte against the Arizona Attorney General’s groundwater lawsuit.

SRP is deciding, right now, how the cost of the data center buildout gets allocated: whether the companies demanding enormous new loads pay for the infrastructure built to serve them, or whether that cost lands on residential customers. It is the most consequential open question in front of this utility. Gallup finds seven in ten Americans oppose a data center in their local area, with majorities in both parties, and the top concerns are water and energy use.

Before the meeting, I asked SRP’s legal department whether it would be appropriate to ask Mr. Galvin a general question: whether he or his firm currently represents clients adverse to SRP or negotiating with SRP on a business transaction. SRP’s chief legal executive told me in writing that specific client disclosures would normally require prior client consent, but that a general inquiry of that kind would not raise the same concern. He offered to inform Mr. Galvin of the question in advance so that Mr. Galvin could prepare a response consistent with his professional obligations. I agreed.

At the meeting, I asked it. Mr. Galvin declined to answer, asserting client privilege.

The Council seated him anyway, without knowing which of those relationships touch SRP.

I want to be precise about the conflicts question, because SRP was. Outside ethics counsel reviewed the matter and concluded that Mr. Galvin’s partnership at Rose Law Group does not disqualify him from serving. I asked whether the written opinion would be provided to the Council before the vote. It was not. I also asked what happens after appointment. Disclosure runs to the Corporate Secretary’s office, evaluation sits with SRP legal services, and, in counsel’s words, the Council would not normally be involved with a Board Member conflict of interest issue. As a normal proposition, the Council’s role ends with the appointment.

So the body that hands out the seat acts once, on whatever information it happens to have in that moment, and then has no further part in the matter. That is why I asked whether the disclosure and recusal commitments could be put in writing as a condition of appointment. They were not.

April

There is one more thing.

In April, shortly after I was elected, I received threatening messages from an unknown number. I reported them to SRP’s Corporate Secretary’s office on April 17 and filed a report with the Phoenix Police Department, report number T26005804.

One of those messages read, in part:

“Lupe is gone. So is another one of your team. Voluntarily actually. Health reasons. Within the year. We can choose not to fill the seat. We can choose who gets seated. It’s not a democracy.”

That was April 17. In July, a Board member retired for health reasons. On Thursday, the Council filled the seat.

I had a statement prepared for the meeting that included this. I did not read it. I decided to let the vote proceed on its own terms and to trust that the Council would follow the one practice it had written down without being pressured. That was my judgment and it was wrong.

I am publishing it now because SRP’s customers should know it exists. The messages are with the Phoenix Police Department.

What this was really about

More than a million people receive power from SRP. The overwhelming majority of them cannot vote in its elections, because eligibility runs through land ownership, and for most seats the votes are weighted by acreage. Changing that would take the legislature. In the meantime, the only accountability available to most customers is whatever the institution imposes on itself.

This week it imposed nothing, and the result was that an appointment reversed what an election had decided four months earlier. It was told, in writing, by its own chief legal executive, that no procedure existed. Not one member spoke to that. A nomination that no one would claim on August 4 became an appointment on August 13. A nominee declined a question SRP’s own lawyer had already said was fair to ask, and was seated anyway.

Nobody broke a rule on Thursday. That is the point. There was no rule to break.

I intend to keep pushing for one to be written down, and I will report what happens when I do.

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John Travise is an SRP Association Council Member representing District 6, elected in April 2026. Views are his own and do not reflect the views of Salt River Project or the SRP Association Council.