Chugach Outlet
May/June 2001, Number 192

Election results

Chugach held its annual meeting April 26 at the Hotel Captain Cook. One hundred and forty members registered for the meeting which drew a crowd of about 300 people.

Dave Cottrell and Bruce Davison were elected to 3-year terms on the cooperative's board of directors. Cottrell finished with 5,209 votes in the election, followed by Davison with 4,681 and Mary Minder with 4,183.

Four of the five proposed bylaw changes and one article of incorporation change on the ballot were also approved by the membership. The amendments which passed dealt with legally recognized entities, termination of membership, voting methods and the change of the regulatory commission name.

The proposed amendment which failed would have eliminated the reference to board compensation.

Ballots were counted for 8,046 of the 58,148 Chugach members of record. That equated to a vote by 13.8 percent of the membership down from the 16.6 percent of the members that voted in the 2000 election.

As usual, voting by mail was the most popular way to cast a ballot. There were 58,148 Chugach members eligible to vote as of the March 14 record date. A total of 8,372 ballot envelopes were returned by the close of mail voting at noon on April 24. However, 393 of those were invalidated by the Election Committee and never opened nor counted. Unsigned ballot envelopes constituted the bulk of the invalidated envelopes. In all, 295 ballot envelopes were rejected for lack of a signature.

In addition to the 7,979 valid ballots cast by mail, another 67 members voted in person at the annual meeting. A total of 140 members registered at the meeting, down slightly from the 144 members who registered at last year's meeting.

Immediately following the annual meeting the board met to elect officers for the coming year. {249059 KE} Bruce Davison was elected president, H.A. "Red" Boucher vice president, Jeff Lipscomb treasurer and Chris Birch secretary.