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A mad dash to find members in the closing minutes of registration enabled Continental Divide Electric Cooperative to make a quorum Saturday at this year’s annual meeting.
“It was pretty hectic,” said CDEC Assistant Manager Corina Sandoval, who orchestrated the effort to search out members who had yet to register from among a thinning crowd headed for the co-op’s meeting in the Grants High School gymnasium.
CDEC managed to register the 503 members needed for a quorum, before the 12:30 p.m. cutoff. Registration opened that day at 8:30 a.m. The co-op’s bylaws require that three percent of its total membership register at its annual meeting every April. This year the co-op’s total membership was 16,782.
“It was a tremendous effort by everyone involved in the coordination of all those groups that participated. It made for an exciting day,” CDEC General Manager Richard Shirley said.
The “groups” Shirley referred to were the nearly 50 organizations that came together on Saturday at Grants High School to conduct a health fair, a youth festival, a public-safety fair and several other attractions that the co-op had dubbed “the biggest event under one school.”
Even though three CDEC directors up for re-election ran unopposed, the co-op members voted in favor of a bylaw change to allow all active accountholders membership.
Previously, only those who had paid a $5 membership fee were eligible to receive benefits, including college scholarships, the ability to run for, or elect trustees to the co-op’s governing board and the ability to vote on bylaw changes like this one.
“This bylaw change will solve a lot of problems, especially those who have lost voting rights when they’ve moved and their membership doesn’t carry over with their new service,” Shirley said.
Members who have previously paid the $5 membership fee can look forward to having that $5 credited to their electric bill.
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