By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Members of the Overton Power District (OPD) Board of Directors, last week, voted to make cuts to a long-standing OPD scholarship program which has long benefitted the students of local high schools. In a Wednesday meeting held in Overton, Board members spent a half hour weighing the benefits and drawbacks of the program. In the end the seven member board, four of whom were newly-elected to their seats in November, voted to cut the scholarship program by 20 percent.
For many years, the OPD has awarded $2,000 scholarships each to a total of 10 students: five from Moapa Valley High School and five from Virgin Valley High School. OPD General Manager Mendis Cooper explained to the board that the program was done as a way to harbor community good will, help local families and make an investment in the future of the community.
The program was also a way for the OPD to be fair in its support of community programs and activities, he said.
“In the past, there was a number of entities in the communities coming to the board looking for donations,” Cooper said. “It became very difficult to decide who got donations and who didn’t; because you can’t fund them all. So the approach of the board was to put the donations into scholarships and spread those out across both schools and then not give donations to any other entity.”
Cooper said that this had been the practice of the board for the past 30 years or more.
The tone of the Board’s discussion on the item was set by a public comment made by Mesquite resident David Ballweg at the beginning of the meeting. Ballweg said that he was opposed to the district using ratepayer funds to give scholarships at all.
“This is a government entity,” Ballweg said. “We should not be giving these out. It should go to the private sector to give out scholarships.”
If scholarships were given, Ballweg said, a greater number should be given to VVHS students, and less to MVHS students, since the majority of ratepayers live in Virgin Valley.
During the Board’s discussion on this item, new Bunkerville board member, Bob Bunker, brought up this last question about fairness in how the scholarships are distributed between schools. He asked the question of whether the determining factor should be school size or number of ratepayers in the community.
“The schools are comparable in size, so that would be an argument for keeping it the same,” Bunker said. “But there are more ratepayers over (in Virgin Valley).”
“I’ve always looked at it that you have two schools and you just keep it even between the two,” said long-time board member Mike Fetherston. “If you start talking about money, most of our ratepayer money from Moapa Valley has gone to build infrastructure in Mesquite to keep up with growth over there. There hasn’t been much spent over here. So we could go back and forth about being equitable.”
New Mesquite Board member Mike Young echoed Ballweg’s general opposition to the scholarship program.
“I don’t really think that a public utility should be donating money to anything except to be used for the ratepayer,” Young said.
Young referenced an upcoming item on the meeting’s agenda to consider hiring summer interns at the district. He said that this idea would be far more valuable to the district than scholarships.
“I’d like to see at least a cut to the scholarships down to four at each school and have the intern program started again,” he said. “It is just hard for me to justify rate-payers giving scholarships out.”
Bunker agreed.
“My problem is that we are making a decision for all of the rate-payers,” he said. “Some of them have kids going to school and others don’t. We are making a decision for all the rate-payers to be generous and give to these students. I’m not sure we should.”
Mesquite board member, Doug Waite, asked if the district had tracked the progress of students who had received OPD scholarships in the past.
“There are kids that have gone into the medical profession, engineering, one works for GM back in Michigan,” Cooper responded. “So, many of these kids have done very well and we’ve been proud of them.”
New at-large Board member, Judy Metz, stressed, what she felt was, the great importance of the OPD scholarship program to the community.
“I agree that internships would be valuable, but that is an entirely separate issue,” Metz said. “As far as scholarships, I’ve always been a strong supporter of them in both valleys.”
She emphasized that going to college is financially difficult for local families. Those families are OPD rate-payers, she said.
“In the long term, everyone benefits,” she said.
Metz made a motion to approve the full scholarship program, including five to each school. But Young proposed an ammendment to the motion to reduce the number of scholarships to only four per school. Fetherston seconded Young’s amendment, and it was immediately brought to a vote.
The Board voted 6-1 to approve the motion, with only Metz voting against it.
In later action, the Board approved $7,600 for two summer interns. In that action, the Board also instructed that the interns must be from the local communities, preferably one from each valley.
More information on the application process for internship positions will be made available soon by district staff.
During the meeting, the Board also approved a $37 million budget for the year 2015. The approval came following a detailed, hour-long presentation by OPD accounting staff.
Included was a list of capital projects which added up to $1.4 million. In the list were system improvements, equipment and vehicle purchases, security systems, updates to telephone and computer systems, and improvements to OPD buildings and facilities.The budget was approved with a unanimous vote with little discussion from the Board.
