Guest Opinion | Board responsibility and credibility in the Decatur matter

||| FROM ALAN MIZUTA, et. al ||| 

What Happened Before This Was Published

On April 14, 2026, thirty individuals and one community organization from the Decatur community formally asked the OPALCO Board to defer the April 21 vote on the Decatur solar expansion. That letter is linked here: https://tinyurl.com/5a8627bn

It took significant effort to deliver it at all.

OPALCO does not publish email addresses for its elected board members. There is no direct, accessible way for member-owners to contact their own representatives. Correspondence must instead move through management-controlled channels. For a member-owned cooperative whose elected directors are accountable to those same members, that is not a minor inconvenience. It is a governance problem.

The letter was delivered through the channels available. We have reason to believe it reached at least some board members. We received no formal acknowledgment, no confirmation of receipt, and no official response of any kind.

The Board met on April 16. Many from the community attended, spoke, and urged the Board to delay action. During the public portion of that meeting, no director moved to delay the April 21 action. As of publication, there had been no public notice of any change to the plan to proceed on April 21. Thirty-plus member-owners asked their elected representatives to slow down, documented the reasons in detail, and received no public response.

That silence is itself part of the record.

What follows is the coalition’s full assessment of the leadership and governance failures that made this publication necessary. It is addressed to the Board because the Board must own what comes next. But it is published here because member-owners deserve to read it,

and because the channels that should have made publication unnecessary were either unavailable or went unanswered.

The Board had every opportunity to respond publicly. It did not. This is the consequence.

The following letter was delivered to the OPALCO Board on April 16, 2026. It is published here without alteration.

• Dawni Cunnington
• Brian Grant
• Dave Groff
• Bill Hurley
• Alan Mizuta
• Jill Rullkoetter
• Roslyn Solomon

April 17, 2026

Subject: By Keeping April 21 on Track, the Board Now Owns the Record on Foster Hildreth

Board Members,

Yesterday, during the public portion of the meeting, the Board was asked to delay action on the Decatur expansion until after the election, after the annual meeting, and after the project’s legal and permitting posture was actually settled. No motion to delay was made in public, and as of this writing there has been no public notice of any change to the plan to take action at the April 21 Special Meeting.

That continued public posture matters. By making no public move to delay and giving no public indication of a changed course, the Board left the April 21 action on track in reliance on the judgment, representations, and strategic framing of General Manager Foster Hildreth despite the record now before it. His record is therefore no longer a side issue, and no longer merely management’s problem. It is central to whether this Board is exercising competent oversight, and whether it is willing to own the consequences of proceeding on a record that should have stopped this project in its tracks.

We therefore write to place before you a direct assessment of Foster Hildreth’s leadership as reflected in the public record. This assessment is not based on rumor, personal grievance, or undisclosed information. It is based on OPALCO’s own public board materials, project pages, survey materials, and related public reporting. Taken together, that record shows a pattern of weak project execution, advocacy-leaning communications, and repeated overstatement of member support for management’s preferred direction.

Our conclusion is that the record does not raise a question about Foster Hildreth’s ability to manage a utility. It raises a question about whether this Board can trust what he tells it. Those are not the same question, and for a cooperative board, the second one is the only one that matters. The public record now shows serious weaknesses in project execution, stakeholder process, and member trust. More troubling, the survey record suggests OPALCO did not merely misread member sentiment. It appears to have designed, framed, and then publicly reported member sentiment in a way that exaggerated support for management’s preferred policy direction while minimizing the conditions, reservations, and objections that members actually expressed.

That matters because the survey was not peripheral. In January 2025, after pausing Bailer Hill, OPALCO told the Board it would check with the membership through a survey to determine whether it had support to continue permitting and building local renewable-energy projects. In other words, the survey was positioned as a legitimizing tool for major strategic choices.

1. The tidal project remains the most serious governance failure in the record

The tidal project is still the clearest sign of leadership failure at the highest level. OPALCO publicly emphasized tribal engagement and repeated “touch points,” but the Swinomish Tribe later told FERC that OPALCO’s December 2024 response contained “no substantive information,” that meaningful consultation could not occur until adequate substantive information was provided, and that the project would directly interfere with treaty-reserved fishing rights in the Tribe’s adjudicated usual and accustomed fishing area. The Tribe went on to urge FERC to deny the project.

That is not routine project opposition. It is a formal tribal-government escalation in a federal licensing process, centered on substance, process, and treaty rights.

The leadership problem here is not whether OPALCO had contact with tribes. It is that OPALCO appears to have treated outreach activity as evidence of success while a sovereign government concluded the consultation was not meaningfully substantive. That is a grave failure of judgment and credibility. For a cooperative claiming to advance innovative infrastructure in a sensitive and regulated environment, that kind of breakdown is not a side issue. It goes to the core of whether management can be trusted to recognize when a project is not procedurally or politically ready to advance.

2. Bailer Hill shows weak execution and poor early risk screening

In January 2025, OPALCO told the Board that county requests for additional information would take another 9 to 12 months, push the project beyond the low-income solar grant schedule, and that, rather than continue struggling with delays and permitting opposition, OPALCO had decided to pause permitting efforts on Bailer Hill. At the same time, OPALCO said it would survey the membership to determine whether it had support to continue permitting and building local renewable-energy projects, and it identified Decatur as an alternative site for the grant-funded low-income solar component.

That sequence is deeply damaging. After years of strategic messaging around local renewable buildout, the flagship project stalled, was paused, and then triggered a grant-driven pivot. That is not merely a county-permitting story. It points to weak early siting judgment, weak entitlement-risk assessment, and weak appreciation of what it takes to build durable public legitimacy around a controversial project.

The Board should treat this not as an unfortunate detour, but as evidence that management advanced a major project farther than the underlying siting and public-process realities justified.

3. Decatur shows that trust damage is now cumulative, not isolated

The Decatur matter now looks less like an isolated siting conflict and more like a breakdown in member confidence. OPALCO’s own project page confirms it acquired 19 acres of forested land adjacent to its current property in March 2025, intending to use part of the site, together with Commerce grant funds, for additional solar development. The proposed expansion, including clearing roughly eight acres of second-growth forest, quickly united much of the community in opposition.

What makes this more serious is that Decatur does not appear to be a fresh slate. Public reporting ties the new proposal to dissatisfaction with the first project and to broader concerns that OPALCO was not listening or had not fully delivered on earlier expectations. That means Decatur is not just a permitting matter, it is a trust and legacy issue. A cooperative can ask members to accept difficult tradeoffs. It is far harder to ask them to do so when the local memory of prior execution is already contested.

There is also a separate and significant liability in the public record: OPALCO is now asking San Juan County to revise or roll back pre-existing restrictions on the Decatur solar site. That is a serious public-interest problem. It suggests the site was acquired or advanced without the level of up-front due diligence and risk screening the Board should expect when recorded restrictions are already in place, and it places the cooperative in the position of using member resources to seek relief from protections that were already part of the property’s legal condition. Even if management believes those restrictions should be changed, that is a difficult position to defend and one that predictably deepens mistrust.

The survey and the broader public record cut directly against management’s Decatur posture. The representative survey found the lowest support of any listed siting category for forested land, 13%, and only 19% for residential land. Members most preferred previously disturbed or industrial sites at 60%, followed by public non-conservation land at 48% and agricultural land at 44%. Scenic views and wildlife tied as the top concerns at 49% each, followed closely by increases to cost at 47%. These are not peripheral caveats. They go directly to projects like Decatur.

The Board should read that plainly: OPALCO’s own representative survey says members are least supportive of exactly the kind of forested siting that has made Decatur so controversial. If management nevertheless treated the survey as support for its broader siting and policy posture, that is not a minor interpretive mistake. It is either careless or tendentious.

4. The Rock Island easement dispute reveals the same pressure-first posture toward members

Recent public reporting suggests that this pattern may extend beyond renewable siting disputes. In a Dec. 2 San Juan Journal news report, San Juan County landowners alleged that OPALCO/Rock Island wireless facilities and related equipment were advanced on private property without proper permits or easements. The County’s director of community development confirmed that a 2019 permit application for backup power equipment was not approved because the County needed additional information regarding easements and that clarification was never submitted. The same report stated that OPALCO/Rock Island’s counsel later demanded a new easement and referenced possible disconnection of electric service if the easement was not granted, even as OPALCO/Rock Island maintained that it follows permitting requirements and that no violations have been identified. Days later, adjacent homeowners publicly added a first-person account stating that Rock Island expanded operations without asking, had no easement to use their property, claimed that OPALCO membership gave the utility control over their property, and threatened shutoff if they did not allow use of their land and private road. Whether every allegation is ultimately proven in court is not the point here. The point is that the public record now reflects the same deeply troubling institutional instinct seen elsewhere in this letter: when property rights, permitting limits, or member consent complicate an infrastructure objective, the response appears to lean toward pressure, necessity, and after-the-fact rationalization rather than front-end clarity, permission, and discipline. 

5. The survey and its public reporting deserve a far harsher assessment than OPALCO has received

This is now a centerpiece issue, not a side issue.

The survey’s topline framing says members strongly support maintaining reliable service, reducing dependence on mainland power, and advancing local renewable-energy projects with appropriate environmental safeguards. But the deck’s own details show that support was conditional, conflicted, and heavily shaped by question framing.

The survey first primed respondents with an outage narrative. It reported that 61% were concerned about future outages, then told respondents that the county’s Comprehensive Plan projects 30% more electrical use due primarily to population growth and that “there is no plan” for the increased electricity need that growth would bring, after which 74% became more concerned. The deck then used that primed context to report that 60% would support flexing land-use policies and 63% would support streamlining permitting processes if doing so would allow quicker renewable development and prevent future outages.

That is not neutral measurement. It is advocacy dressed as research. The survey did not ask members what they thought. It told them what to be afraid of first, then asked whether policy and permitting should bend in response. That is a push poll. The outage narrative was not neutral context. It was engineered to produce a result. The survey record shows exactly what that result was supposed to be.

The same pattern appears in the Essential Public Facility question. Respondents were told that an Essential Public Facility is a land-use designation that helps get essential facilities built “without circumventing environmental permitting requirements,” and then were asked whether they would support designating OPALCO’s renewable energy and battery storage projects as an Essential Public Facility. Reported support was 73%. But that result is inseparable from the favorable definition embedded in the question itself. It is not a neutral test of how members would react to the actual controversy such a designation would raise.

The county-policy and land-use results were likewise spun beyond what they support. OPALCO’s reporting and the republished coverage emphasized that 71% said renewable projects should receive priority in the land-use process and 74% thought the county should adjust policies to allow more local energy generation. But those figures collapse major conditions. Only 28% said “yes, definitely” on land-use priority, while 43% said yes only as long as county permitting requirements are met. On county policy, only 20% said policies should be adjusted as quickly as possible, while 54% said only as long as there is intentionality about environment, conservation, and safeguards.

That distinction is everything. The survey does not show a mandate for OPALCO’s preferred projects, preferred siting, or preferred policy pathway. It shows a membership saying, in effect, that reliability matters and local resources may matter, but environmental safeguards, proper permitting, and careful siting still matter a great deal. That is not a framing choice. It is a falsification of what the membership actually said.

The cost issue alone should have prevented any triumphal presentation. The representative survey found members split on willingness to pay more for renewable energy, 50% willing, 45% unwilling, 5% unsure. A nearly even split is not a mandate. It is a warning to proceed cautiously and honestly.

Worse, OPALCO’s own published comments show respondents themselves objecting to the instrument. The survey file includes remarks such as “The survey assumes that blackouts are coming,” “The survey questions and potential answers are loaded,” “The wording of this survey could have been better, the options are very slanted,” “This survey was worded in a very biased way,” and “Your survey has inadequate response options and is fraught with survey bias.” Those are not stray complaints from an outside critic. OPALCO published them in its own materials.

There is also a methodological problem that should have triggered far more caution in public reporting. OPALCO’s own survey materials say the opt-in portion did not rely on random sampling, was not weighted, and cannot be treated as a representative sample. Yet the public presentation still used broad language about what “members” think, and the surrounding communications environment invited exactly that inference. When a cooperative commissions a representative survey and then wraps it together with a much larger opt-in exercise, plus AI-assisted qualitative synthesis, it has an obligation to be especially careful. Instead, the presentation flattened complexity and promoted a narrative of support.

In our judgment, that deserves blunt language from the Board. A cooperative survey used to justify policy pressure and controversial projects should be above reproach. This one is not.

6. The survey failure makes the broader communications problem look worse, not better

Before reviewing the actual survey deck, it was possible to say OPALCO had a communications problem. After reviewing it, the problem is more serious: OPALCO used its communications tools to manufacture legitimacy for disputed strategic moves. That is a much more troubling governance issue.

The concern is not that management published information. It is that management shaped what it published around a policy agenda already underway, after Bailer Hill was paused and while Decatur was a live controversy. The survey was not listening. It was lobbying.

This matters because the communications pattern is no longer just about tone. It is now tied to process integrity. The published conclusions do not reflect what members actually said. The survey record proves it. A cooperative that cannot be trusted to report its own member sentiment accurately cannot ask its Board or its members to take future communications at face value. That trust, once broken, does not repair itself quietly.

7. Rates and strategic ambition now collide with weakened trust

The survey also makes the rate issue more politically dangerous for management. If members were enthusiastically aligned with management’s renewable strategy, rate pressure would be easier to defend. But the survey shows ambivalence on paying more and strong conditions around siting and safeguards. That means rate increases are being layered on top of contested strategic choices without a clear member mandate.

For the Board, that should heighten concern about leadership judgment. Management is not operating from a settled base of trust. It is advancing controversial strategic positions while relying on a survey record that, on close inspection, does not cleanly support the conclusions publicly drawn from it.

8. The pattern now looks systemic

Taken together, the public record shows a tidal project that triggered formal tribal escalation on consultation and treaty-rights grounds, a flagship solar project at Bailer Hill that was paused after years of effort, a pivot to Decatur despite the membership’s weakest siting support being for forested land, a separate Rock Island property-rights dispute that exposed the same pressure-first posture toward members, and a survey structured as a push poll whose findings were reported in a way the underlying data does not support.

That is no longer a collection of isolated controversies. It is a management pattern: advance a strategic narrative strongly, underweight stakeholder and legitimacy risk, then use communications to defend or rehabilitate the position after confidence has already eroded.

Conclusion

The record does not raise a question about Foster Hildreth’s ability to manage a utility. It raises a question about whether this Board can trust what he tells it. Those are not the same question, and for a cooperative board, the second one is the only one that matters.

The public record shows a serious imbalance: operational ambition has been paired with weak judgment in project execution, stakeholder process, respect for member consent, and the honest presentation of member sentiment. On the most serious external issue, the tidal project, OPALCO’s process drew formal tribal escalation. On Bailer Hill, execution broke down after years of promotion. On Decatur, management is pushing a forested-site expansion even though OPALCO’s own representative survey shows forested land is the least-supported siting category. And on the survey itself, the published conclusions do not reflect what members actually said. The survey record proves it.

For the Board, the question is no longer whether management can continue to frame disputed projects aggressively and ask directors to accept the resulting risk. The question is whether this Board, having been warned and given the chance to slow down, will now choose to make that pattern its own. If it proceeds anyway, it will do so with full notice of the record, full notice of the gaps, and full notice of the damage already done to member trust.

Yesterday, the Board had the opportunity to insist on discipline, candor, and proper sequencing. Instead, it left the public posture unchanged. If the Board now proceeds on Decatur, responsibility will no longer rest with Foster Hildreth alone.

It will rest with the Board that was warned, left the public posture unchanged, and made itself responsible for the consequences.