The Fix for No Rules: Fewer Rules

On August 13, the SRP Councils filled a vacancy on the District Board with no written procedure, a nomination nobody would claim when asked, and a 15-13 vote that passed over the senior Council member from the affected district. I wrote about it at the time. Two weeks later, the By-Laws Committee met to discuss how Board vacancies should be handled.

I attended. Here is what happened.

The meeting could not decide anything

The item was noticed as informational, which under Arizona’s open meeting law means no binding action could be taken. The committee could talk. It could not vote.

Chairman Brandon Brooks, who represents District 4 on the Council, learned this from counsel when he tried to move to eliminate the 2012 guidelines. His reaction, from the recording:

“This is why we never get any action done in these meetings, because there’s always a nomination. We need to be able to act in this group. I’ve been the chair for how long now? I don’t think anything’s ever gotten done because everything’s informational.”

That’s the chair of the committee, describing the committee, at a meeting he chaired. He isn’t wrong. The committee’s own records show it was asked in November 2012 whether to adopt a Board vacancy process, declined, and never returned to the question until this week. Every meeting in between was also informational.

What the guidelines say, and who wants them gone

The 2012 Council guidelines are the only written thing SRP has ever adopted on Board vacancies. Items one through seven lay out a process for filling Council seats: a subcommittee from the affected district, a candidate list, eligibility screening by the Corporate Secretary, interviews, a short list. Item 8 addresses Board seats in one sentence. It says the seat is typically filled by a senior Council member from the voting area where the vacancy occurred.

That sentence is what District 7 relied on in August. Eric Gorsegner is the senior Council member from District 7. The Councils voted for someone else.

Brooks’s position on Tuesday was that item 8 created a false expectation. The statute, A.R.S. 48-2366, gives the appointment power to the Council as a whole, not to any district. The guideline suggested otherwise and should be eliminated so the bare statute governs. Aaron Herrera, District 3 Council, agreed. T. Suzanne Naylor, District 2 Council and the Council Vice Chair, said the worst outcome, too many candidates showing up at a Council meeting, had already happened and been survivable, and favored dropping the guidelines in exchange for a simple submission deadline.

So the response to filling a Board seat with almost no rules, from some of the room, was that the problem had been too many rules.

Consider what “return to the bare statute” actually means. The statute says the Council may fill a vacancy by appointment. That’s the whole sentence. No deadline, no screening, no requirement that a nomination carry a name, no requirement that the affected district be consulted. It is the legal description of thirty people in a room doing whatever they decide to do that morning. The argument on Tuesday was that this is the apolitical option, because it has been there for a hundred years and nobody complained.

Nobody complained because for a hundred years nobody contested a seat. The system worked because the same families held the seats and handed them along. That’s what people mean when they say good old boys, and it’s the thing SRP’s newer members ran against. What the committee proposed on Tuesday is to strip out the one guideline that imposed any expectation at all and formally adopt the arrangement that let August happen. Not reform the good old boys system. Codify it.

What the other side proposed

Two members went the other direction.

Colleen Resch-Geretti, District 7 Council, proposed that the district with the vacancy gets first right to appoint its nominee, and that nominations come only from sitting members of that district. Not from the floor, not from other districts, not from the public. Brooks rejected it as contrary to the statute.

Eric Gorsegner, District 7 Council and the member passed over in August, proposed extending items one through seven to Board vacancies, so a Board seat would get the same subcommittee, screening, and interview process a Council seat already gets, and adding a candidate submission deadline so no one can be introduced at the last minute. He called it preventing last-minute parachuting.

Adam Hatley, District 9 Council, landed somewhere in between. He agreed the guidelines were murky and said even a return to bare statute would need a timeline: candidates get their resume in, meet with the Corporate Secretary a set number of days before the meeting, and the field gets narrowed before anyone votes. Randy Miller, District 8 Council, suggested applying the existing bylaw language for Vice President succession to all seats. Brooks liked that one.

Michael O’Connor, SRP’s chief legal executive, offered to draft four options for a future meeting where action could be taken: eliminate the guidelines; simplify them with a deadline calendar; codify everything in the bylaws; or add a slim bylaw mirroring the VP succession language, paired with lightweight guidelines. Brooks asked for the next meeting before November.

Someone said what this is about

The most direct thing anyone said all morning came from Michael Rakow, District 4 Council:

“I think the elephant in the room is really, do we wanna keep this political or non-political? We just had a 13-15 vote, it was pretty close. We have the solar people, and then we’ve got the fossil fuel kind of people.”

He asked whether whoever controls the candidate-vetting role would control the political direction of future appointments, and whether politics could be taken out of the process at all. Brooks answered that the statute had worked apolitically for a hundred years and the guidelines introduced the problem. Which is one way to describe a century in which the outcome was never in doubt.

That’s an honest disagreement and both positions deserve a hearing. But note what Rakow’s question concedes. A committee member is saying, on the record, that the way SRP fills seats is now a contest between two blocs, and that the vetting process is where that contest will be decided. Nobody in the room disputed the premise.

Then they talked about their own pay

The second agenda item was compensation.

District Board and Council members receive $60 per day, a ceiling set by statute and unchanged for roughly 26 years. Any increase requires the Legislature. The Association Board of Governors per diem is $320, last changed in 2017. There is no compensation for attending by Zoom.

The committee spent much of the item on that last point. Hatley suggested paying for Zoom attendance once per quarter. A straw poll clustered at two to four compensated remote meetings a year. Brooks and Paul Van Hofwegen, District 3 Council and the committee’s Vice Chair, argued for keeping the number low, citing accountability and in-person relationships. Brooks put it this way:

“It’s easy to log into a Zoom meeting and not listen to two words the whole time and cash your $400 check. That’s easy, and that abuse will absolutely happen in my opinion. It did happen.”

O’Connor flagged two things. Any change to Zoom compensation could bear on the pending litigation between Council member Lupe Conchas and the City of Glendale, since Conchas is participating by phone and not receiving compensation. And Arizona law does not permit elected officials to refuse compensation outright.

Rakow raised the $5,000 annual health supplement for Association elected officials, established around 2016, and said inflation-adjusted it should be $6,800 to $9,836 depending on method. O’Connor agreed to bring compensation scenarios back at the next meeting as an action item.

That word again. Action item. The question of how a Board seat gets filled produces four options to think about at some future meeting. The question of the members’ own pay produces scenarios for action at the next one. The committee has found the one subject on which it can move quickly.

The record so far

Board vacancy procedure has appeared on this committee’s agenda twice in fourteen years: November 2012, when the committee was asked whether to adopt one and didn’t, and this week, when some of the room favored removing the guideline that exists.

Elected official compensation has appeared at fifteen meetings in the same period, and is now scheduled for a sixteenth, with action.

See for yourself

You can watch one of these riveting meetings yourself. Agendas are posted at srpnet.com/about/governance-leadership/district-public-meeting-agendas, and anyone can attend in person or by Zoom by registering through the Corporate Secretary’s Office at (602) 236-4398. You don’t need to own land. The next By-Laws Committee meeting, the one where they might actually vote on something, is supposed to happen before November.

Also mentioned

O’Connor reported that the Department of the Interior issued its Record of Decision on the 2026 to 2029 Colorado River operating guidelines on August 31. Nevada filed a federal lawsuit the following Monday. Arizona had not joined as of the meeting. SRP has retained Elizabeth Prelogar, former U.S. Solicitor General, as outside counsel, and she will present to the Board and Council on September 14.

Future agenda topics flagged by the chair: extending the President and Vice President terms from four years to six, which would require legislation; a resign-to-run rule; a post-election bylaws review; polling place expansion; and a civil discourse workshop.

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John Travise is an SRP Association Council Member representing District 6. He is not a member of the By-Laws Committee. Views are his own and do not reflect the views of Salt River Project or the SRP Association Council.