When oversight becomes ratification at OPALCO | Column
Published 1:30 am Monday, April 27, 2026
By Decatur residents Dawni Cunnington, Brian Grant, Dave Groff, Bill Hurley, Alan Mizuta, Jill Rullkoetterand Roslyn Solomon
The immediate controversy at OPALCO is the Decatur solar expansion. But the deeper problem is no longer just Decatur. It is governance.
On April 14, 30 individuals and one community organization formally asked the board to delay action on the project until after the election, after the annual meeting and after the project’s legal and permitting posture was clearer. At the April 16 meeting, many community members attended, spoke and publicly urged the board to delay action. During the public portion of that board meeting, no director moved to delay, and no public acknowledgment was given. As of this writing, there has been no public notice of any change to the plan to proceed on April 21. That silence matters, not only because members were ignored, but because it reflects a larger failure of oversight.
A cooperative board is not supposed to function as a rubber stamp for management momentum. Its job is to test management’s judgment, demand candor when the record is troubled and slow things down when confidence is eroding. That is especially true when the same pattern keeps reappearing.
The public record now reflects more than a single siting dispute. OPALCO’s tidal project drew a formal tribal escalation in which the Swinomish Tribe told FERC that OPALCO’s response contained “no substantive information” and urged the agency to deny the project on consultation and treaty-rights grounds. Its flagship Bailer Hill solar effort was then paused after years of promotion, only to give way to a pivot toward Decatur. Now Decatur itself has become a flashpoint, not simply because people oppose change, but because management appears to have advanced a controversial project path without the kind of early risk screening, public legitimacy and disciplined sequencing that a cooperative should demand from itself.
Most troubling of all is the survey record OPALCO has used to claim member support. OPALCO’s own representative results showed the lowest support for forested land of any siting category, just 13%, yet Decatur is exactly that kind of forested siting. And the problem is not merely presentation. The survey itself was structured in ways that look less like neutral research than advocacy, priming respondents with outage fears, embedding favorable policy definitions and then reporting the results as broader support for management’s preferred direction. OPALCO’s own published comments included respondents calling the survey “biased,” “loaded” and slanted. That is not a minor communications problem. It goes directly to whether the board can rely on management’s representation of member sentiment.
This is where the board’s responsibility becomes unavoidable. The question is no longer whether management has pursued ambitious projects. The question is whether the board is exercising independent judgment when those projects encounter recurring problems of process, trust and credibility. If directors continue to treat each controversy as isolated, they will miss what the broader record now suggests: a pattern of advance first, explain later and ask members, regulators, neighbors or host communities to absorb the consequences after the fact.
That is not sound cooperative governance.
This short piece cannot cover the full record. A longer documented assessment is available here: https://tinyurl.com/meeehtj9. But the basic point is plain enough. Decatur is not just a local dispute. It is the latest test of whether OPALCO’s board will exercise real oversight, or continue to ratify a management pattern that has already done substantial damage to member trust.
