Every spring, members of Petit Jean Electric Cooperative receive a ballot. It arrives in a plain envelope, easy to set aside in the stack of mail. But that ballot represents one of the most consequential decisions a member-owner makes all year.
This isn't a political election. It isn't a popularity contest. It isn't a referendum on any single decision the cooperative has made.
It's the selection of fiduciaries.
That word matters. And before you mark your ballot, it's worth understanding what it actually means.
What a Cooperative Board Director Does
A director on the Petit Jean Electric board is not a representative in the way a state legislator is. A legislator's job is to advocate for the people who elected them. A cooperative director's job is something different, and in many ways more demanding.
A director has a fiduciary duty. That's a legal and ethical obligation to act in the best interest of the cooperative as a whole. Not in the interest of the members who voted for them. Not in the interest of the loudest voices in any given month. Not in the interest of a particular outcome someone wants to see.
In the best interest of the cooperative. All of it. The members who agree, the members who disagree, the members who don't follow co-op business at all, and the members who haven't been born yet but will inherit whatever decisions get made today.
That's a high standard. It's supposed to be.
What Fiduciary Duty Looks Like in Practice
It looks like this:
Reading the materials. Board packets are long. The financial statements are technical. The engineering decisions involve depreciation schedules, load forecasts, and rate structures most people will never encounter in daily life. Directors are expected to understand them, ask questions about them, and make informed decisions because of them.
Completing the training. Cooperative directors complete formal education through programs offered by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. Credentialed Cooperative Director. Board Leadership Certificate. Director Gold. These aren't optional credentials for serious directors. They're the baseline.
Sitting with hard tradeoffs. Most board decisions don't have a clean right answer. Holding electric rates down today might mean underinvesting in infrastructure that fails tomorrow. Investing in fiber broadband requires capital that takes years to return. Approving a wholesale power contract locks in costs the cooperative can't easily renegotiate. Directors weigh these tradeoffs not based on what feels good in the moment, but on what serves the long-term health of the cooperative.
Representing every member. A director who only represents the members who agree with them isn't fulfilling their duty. They're failing it.
What Fiduciary Duty Is Not
It's not advocacy.
It's not pushing a particular agenda onto the board on behalf of a particular group.
It's not promising to "speak for the majority" because the majority shifts, and a director's duty doesn't shift with it.
It's not running for the seat in order to overturn decisions you disagree with. The board makes decisions through deliberation, not through the arrival of a single director with a mandate.
A board seat is a stewardship role. The members entrust the board with the long-term care of an asset they collectively own. The director who treats it as a platform for any cause, however sincerely held, is doing the job differently than the cooperative model was designed for.
A Word About Cooperative Finances
Electric cooperatives are capital-intensive businesses. Always have been. The infrastructure that delivers power to your home, the poles, the lines, the substations, the trucks, the people, costs money to build and money to maintain. Modernizing that infrastructure costs money too.
That's why cooperatives borrow. Long-term debt is how every electric utility in America funds the infrastructure its members depend on. Petit Jean Electric is no exception. The fiber broadband network now serving thousands of households across our service territory was built through long-term financing, the same way the electric system itself was built decades ago. That investment is now generating subscriber revenue and contributing to the cooperative's overall financial strength.
A debt number, on its own, tells you very little. What matters is what the debt is funding, what assets sit on the other side of it, what the repayment schedule looks like, and whether the investment is generating the returns required to service it. It also matters where the funding came from in the first place.
Like many electric cooperatives expanding broadband to underserved areas, Petit Jean Electric secured federal and state grant funding to help build the fiber network, reducing the amount of long-term debt required for the project. A cooperative with $260 million in long-term debt and $400 million in productive assets is in a stronger position than a cooperative with $50 million in debt and crumbling infrastructure.
Informed members ask the full set of questions. So do informed directors. Anyone running for a board seat should be prepared to read a balance sheet, not just react to a single line on it.
What to Look For in the Candidate Answers
We've published each candidate's responses to the same questions. As you read, here are some things worth paying attention to.
Do they describe the role as service or as representation? Service language sounds like "listening to all members," "weighing decisions for the whole," "long-term interest of the cooperative." Representation language sounds like "speaking for" a particular group or majority. Both candidates may sound thoughtful. The difference is real.
Do they describe a learning posture? Cooperative governance has a steep curve. Look for candidates who acknowledge what they don't yet know and describe how they plan to learn it. Confidence in things you haven't yet been responsible for is a yellow flag.
Do they have a track record of completed commitments? Boards run on follow-through. Look for evidence of past roles where the candidate showed up, did the work, and saw things through. Budget committees, city councils, business ownership, and sustained civic involvement. These all count. So does the simple act of submitting a candidate biography to the cooperative's own publication when given the opportunity. That's the first ask of board service. How a candidate handles it is information.
Are there any conflicts of interest worth thinking about? A director should be free to vote on the cooperative's business without their personal or business interests pulling against the cooperative's. If a candidate operates in a related industry or has a financial stake in an outcome the board will decide, that's worth knowing before you vote.
Why are they running, in their own words? This is the question that often reveals the most. A candidate running to serve sounds different from a candidate running to fix, change, or oppose. Both can be legitimate. But they describe different jobs.
Your Vote, Your Cooperative
Petit Jean Electric is owned by its members. Every member. The board exists to safeguard that ownership across decades, not just the current moment.
When you mark your ballot, you're not picking a side. You're selecting the people who will be legally and ethically bound to act in the best interest of every member, together.
Read the candidate's answers. Read them carefully. Notice what's said, and notice what isn't.
Then vote.
Watch for your ballot to arrive soon in the envelope shown below.
Your Co-op. Your Vote.
Now, click here to meet the candidates.
By Angie Hutchins, Communications