The question of how the leaders of the Salt River Project are chosen — and whether acreage-based voting is fundamentally unfair to most of the utility's customers — became a flash point at a contentious meeting Thursday.

For more than 100 years, SRP has weighted votes for board members, president and vice president by how much land a person owns. That stems from farmers pledging their land as collateral to build the Roosevelt Dam and gives large landowners immense power in deciding who controls the organization.

The elected board members set rates and policies for the water and power utility.

Officials said they will explore changes to that system, but based on the heated discussion among decision makers Thursday, changes seem unlikely.

"I didn't buy my property to vote one goddamn acre," said Stephen Williams, an alfalfa farmer whose late father served as the previous president of SRP.

Williams represents District 5, an area south of the Salt River from about 75th Avenue in the west to Rural Road in the east.

Other board members said the current system needs reform.

"It's just not democratic," board member Nick Brown said Thursday.

Brown is one of four "at-large" board members. The four seats were added to the original 10 in the 1970s amid criticism of the acreage system, and the at-large seats are elected on a one person, one vote basis.

Voting system survived court challenges

The SRP voting system has survived court challenges, including a 1981 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

But it is coming under scrutiny by customers increasingly frustrated by the utility's policies on rooftop solar energy, renewable energy and other issues.

Michael O'Connor, associate general manager and chief legal executive, fielded several difficult questions from board members Thursday after giving them a nearly one hour closed-door session on the acreage-based system.

The more land a farmer pledged to build the dam when SRP was formed in 1903, the greater the stake in the project, and thus the larger vote.

MORE: How to vote in SRP elections, a guide

Today, people who own land in the SRP territory get one vote per acre they own in the spring elections held in even years. People with multiple acres get multiple votes, and people with a fraction of an acre get a fraction of a vote.

Many people who get electricity from SRP either don't own their home or own a home on land that wasn't originally pledged to build the dam, so they don't get to vote at all.

O'Connor said SRP is considering whether customers who pay for electric service should be given a greater voice.

"We will have some further discussion on ... what to do with them, one way or another," O'Connor said.

Officials Thursday could not estimate how many SRP customers are precluded from voting, but in the past estimated the figure at about 321,000 out of about 1 million customers.

RATES: Are you on the least expensive SRP rate plan? Here are your options

Now customers like Jeff Sussman of Chandler, who moved to the SRP territory from Pennsylvania two years ago, are protesting the practice.

Sussman said he has tried for a year to offer public comment to the SRP board regarding voting, but has been unsuccessful. On Thursday, board member Leslie Williams, who chairs the Governance Committee, refused to let Sussman comment on that topic.

Leslie Williams represents a district from about 67th Avenue to 27th Avenue, and from the Salt River north to Glendale Avenue.

Sussman took an interest in SRP policies when he learned about a controversial rate plan the company requires rooftop solar customers to use, and he said the SRP voting system was "archaic."

"I would like them to consider policies so all people who live in the district, including renters, can vote," Sussman said.

Sussman said he has reached out to state lawmakers to consider bipartisan legislation that would open SRP voting to more people.

State Rep. Mitzi Epstein, D-Tempe, attended Thursday's meeting and said she has many constituents in the Ahwatukee area of Legislative District 18 who pay bills to SRP but don't get to vote in the elections.

Epstein said she is hopeful SRP leaders address the issue on their own, but she has been reviewing the pertinent statutes that could be changed legislatively if not.

"They will have to do something about this," Epstein said.

SRP leaders have strong opposition to change

Even if SRP's lawyers and managers continue to discuss the voting system with the board, changing the system seems to have wide opposition from a majority of the board's members.

"Why should the association change? I don't know that it should," Vice President John Hoopes said. "It is a property right. It is a water right that belongs to the owner of that land."

Hoopes said it is common for corporations to weight votes based on how many shares the various members hold, and that is no different with SRP, where shares are based on acres pledged to build the dam in 1903.

"It is a right that I think any real-estate agent will tell you people pay for," Hoopes said, adding that home buyers seek out property in SRP territory versus other electricity providers. "I don't lose any sleep over the fairness of that."

When board members began to discuss the legal implications of changing the voting, O'Connor warned them that they could be sharing too much information in the public setting.

Board member Keith Woods, who represents an acreage-based district in east Phoenix and south Scottsdale, suggested the voting could be changed. Most of the calls to expand voting came from the four at-large members.

Woods said the same statutes used to add the at-large members in 1976 could be used to again expand voting, possibly allowing one vote per electric meter.

Woods was rebuked by Leslie Williams, who called Woods' comments a "diatribe."

"You are assuming everyone is in agreement," Williams said. "I like the process. The process always seems to do well."

After a few more moments of debate, he shut the meeting down. When the at-large members protested ending the meeting with so few questions answered on the subject, West Valley board member Mario Herrera shouted over the others to end the meeting.

"Time to wrap up!" Herrera yelled.

Past dispute over voting didn't force change

Board members have complained about the acreage-based voting before.

In 2011, at-large board members Bill Arnett and Fred Ash, believed that acreage-based board members were intentionally suppressing discussion of the issue because it would affect how many of them were elected.

Ash and Arnett bypassed the board of directors and took a proposal to then state Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, who had legislation drafted that would have eliminated the acreage voting and made other changes.

When Arnett and Ash told the rest of the board what they had done and asked them to review the legislation, it sparked a firestorm.

The other board members called an emergency meeting and voted to remove Arnett and Ash from their SRP board committees.

But they did so without first putting that action on the public-meeting agenda, making their vote a violation of the state open-meeting law. They had to address the action at a subsequent meeting. Ash and Arnett no longer are on the board.

Randy Miller, one of the new at-large members as of last year, said after the meeting he and the other like-minded board members would continue to push the issue.

Reach reporter Ryan Randazzo at ryan.randazzo@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4331. Follow him on Twitter @UtilityReporter.

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