In the middle of his opening welcome speech at the 78th OPALCO membership meeting, Board of Directors President Chris Thomerson shocked the 300 or so attendees by announcing that General Manager Randy Cornelius would be retiring. Foster Hildreth will be his successor.

Cornelius was given a standing ovation by the crowd of 300 before giving a “state of the cooperative” address to the assembly.

Incumbents Vince Dauciunas and Glenna Hall were re-elected to the board of directors, but Steve Hudson pulled within 50 votes of Hall in the closest election with the largest turnout in recent memory.

Dauciunas racked up the most votes, 1,658; Glenda Hall polled 1,112; Steve Hudson made a strong showing at 1,062 votes. Doug Rowan polled 497, Brian Hoyer 386 and John Sheehan 128.

Two changes to the bylaws presented by petition to the co-op were rejected. The first amendment, which would require three Energy Member Informational Meetings, was voted down by a 904 to a 1,438 majority. The second amendment, requiring streamed audiovisual or videoconferencing of board meeting, received 1,554 no votes to 776 yes votes.

The 2,524 total votes cast was an unprecedented 23 percent of the approximately 12,000 OPALCO members.

The announcement that Hildreth would take over as the top executive of OPALCO was a surprise to most of the annual meeting audience, but not to the board.

Dauciunas said the board had been talking about the succession plan in private executive sessions for almost a year.

“The board talked with other co-ops in the state,” said Dauciunas. “None of the co-ops we talked with had any suggestions. They told us we should promote from within if we had an experienced executive. We had that in Foster Hildreth so we saw no need to do an expensive executive search.”