SEVENTY
YEARS OF POWER TO THE PEOPLE by Updated
from article published in the
At that time,
In the
mid-1930s, in the
depths of the Great Depression, only 11 percent of the rural people of
the
This growing inequity between town and country was
acknowledged by the government in 1935, when it included rural
electrification
in a general program of unemployment relief. It quickly became clear
that rural
electrification required a lot more than employing people to
string lines. In
May 1936, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was given
its own
statutory authorization, and one of The REA made
low-interest loans to local cooperatives, and also loaned them the
expertise
needed to design and construct electric systems. People in the
On The
dispersion from
around the valley just of the original board members indicates the
magnitude of
the electrification challenge: Allen was a ranchwife from Ohio Creek;
Shackleford was a ranchwife from up the East River; Lobdell ranched
east of
Gunnison in the Tomichi Creek valley; Dickerson ran a river resort west
of
Gunnison; and Walker had a dairy on the river a few miles north of
Gunnison. The REA in The only hope
for
getting enough customers to break even was to get one or more of the
valley's
population concentrations to buy in. The city of Crested In October
1940, with 200 Crested Buttians present, that
town's board approved a resolution permitting
the GCEA to solicit memberships in town, and giving rights-of-way and
easements
on streets and alleys for distribution lines. The resolution was
presented to
the Town Board by GCEA attorney Porter, but also speaking on behalf of
it were
the managers of CF&I's Big Mine and the Crested Butte Coal Company,
George
Spehar on behalf of the Crested Butte Lions Club, and County
Commissioner Bill
Whalen (who was also vice president of the GCEA). Arthur Gerth
from the REA in Bids for the
power plant and for line
construction were let that winter, and early in April, with the
appropriation
supposedly making its way on schedule, the town of Then politics
struck.
Porter received a telegram in mid-April announcing that the $155,000
allocation
had been approved – but he didn't even have time to get the
good news around before
receiving a phone call telling him to ignore the telegram; the
appropriation
had been canceled. The reason for the cancellation was not
specified. Whatever the
cause, it
was a bad moment in rural "Up to this
time we
had not attempted any political involvements," Porter said, "but
this time we were desperate and when we arrived in “Mr.
Taylor, after hearing our story, went with us to the office of the
(REA) administrator
and that very afternoon the allocation was reinstated." Morgan and
the staff went to work. Crews
worked through the summer and fall, running lines down the The plant to
power all of those lines
was not quite so easy. For reasons unspecified - but
probably related to the
Lend-Lease Act for the war in The price of
this hydro plant drove the
total cost to more than a quarter-million dollars. Bids were let
for the plant in June
1941, and construction began that summer. Late in the summer
Morgan seemed to
still be hopeful that the plant would be ready by winter, although the
dams and
the pipes and flumes to the reservoir had not been begun. By mid-fall,
the date
for energizing the system had been pushed back to late November, and
Morgan and
the GCEA directors decided to approach the town of So on
Saturday, Dec. 6, with much
ceremony, speechifying and music from the Crested Butte High School
Band, the
little steam plant began pushing electricity into the rural
reaches of the
county. By Christmas, according to the News-Champion, 80 rural
residents were
enjoying a steady flow of 117 volts along 112 miles of new lines. But that was From there he
went on to Washington,
intensifying his own efforts to break loose the pipe, penstocks,
turbines and
generators needed to complete the GCEA plant. But he found that to be
impossible under the standing order of the War Production
Board:
"When material is needed for the civilian population in quantities
such
as the hydro plant at Crested Butte calls for," he reported on his
return
to the valley, "they must refuse on the basis that it is a question now
of
'winning the war first.' " The walls for
the powerplant were erected on the foundation,
but that was as far as the project ever went as a power plant. In the
early
1960s, after the ski area began, In addition
to no
materials for the power plant, there were no materials for extending
the lines,
so what might have been a showcase rural electrification project
powered by a
state-of-the-art hydroelectric plant, was instead a limited system
struggling
to get by with a small antiquated steam plant. Frequent outages,
"unavoidable because of the
condition of the old steam engine and boiler," plagued the valley, and,
Morgan noted, "having only one unit means an outage every time repairs
have to be made." Morgan drew a
kind of a
Model A analogy: An automobile that has been run from 10 to 30
miles per hour
for 30 years will click along and give that rate of service for a long
time.
But when you speed it up to 60 miles per-hour to meet your additional
demand,
your automobile will naturally have to be in the shop for repairs
frequently.
And if you don't have a spare automobile, you have to walk." In 1942,
after a long year of farm-type make-do repairs,
Porter said that "an inspector closed down [the Crested Butte plant
with
an admonition that this old plant was likely to blow up at any time,
and probably
when it did blow up it would damage most of the town of The Roosevelt
Gold Mines
Company above Pitkin had a small hydro plant which Morgan arranged
to adapt to
fit the GCEA system. The GCEA got a special dispensation from the War
Production
Board for the seven miles of wire necessary to connect the system to
that
plant. But that was not a very good solution since Quartz Creek froze
down to a
trickle in the winter, rendering the plant useless for a good part
of the
year. The temporary
solution
for the duration of the war and some years thereafter was to connect to
the That
got the lights back on, but it was not ideal. It put a significant
burden on
the Again
according to
Porter, "We tried to get an agreement with
the Public Service Company to bring us power over the existing
line from Poncha Junction to White Pine. That failing,
we then discussed and planned for bringing in a diesel plant on a flat
car to
furnish power. That fell through. We actually surveyed two routes for a
line
from In 1943,
frustrated at
the inability to get anything constructive done, Morgan
requested a leave of
absence, which became permanent. Homer Duke, the GCEA bookkeeper,
was
appointed superintendent, a position he held for 21 years. In 1948, the
GCEA began
negotiations with the Bureau of Reclamation, which was looking for
customers
for power from its Green Mountain Reservoir near Dillon. The bureau was
receptive,
but there was a catch; since such an arrangement would involve the
construction
of an expensive transmission line over City leaders
were not entirely opposed
to the idea because their steam plant was aging. They were going to
have to
make a significant investment in new equipment or begin importing power
– and
the Bureau’s power was attractively cheap. The bureau's line
would cost the
valley nothing directly - the bureau had taken care of that by
declaring the city's equipment
sufficiently outmoded to constitute an "emergency situation" for the
valley, which enabled the bureau to go to Congress for a $200,000
emergency
appropriation for the transmission line. But the city
had grown accustomed to the revenues from the
sale of power to the GCEA users; without that revenue, they faced a
local tax
increase. So they negotiated for a complicated deal whereby, in return
for
keeping their equipment maintained as "standby" for both systems in
case of a line break or other outage, they would get to add several
mills onto
the bureau's price for power.
Negotiations went on through 1950. Finally, in early
December 1950,
the city signed a satisfactory contract with the bureau, and the
bureau's
transmission line came over the pass in 1951. That was the
end of home-grown power generation in the With the
power supply
problem solved by the bureau line, the GCEA was able to expand its
service
area. In 1953 lines went into the The
association also finished hooking up people in its
original service areas, extending lines to
Gothic above Crested Butte and into the uppermost reaches of the
Quartz-Cochetopa-Tomichi valleys. All of these extensions were financed
through
the REA. The
last major area of the The Crested
Butte Ski
Area became a big new customer in 1960-61; that, plus the general
increase in
domestic electric usage, began to burden the bureau line, and in 1962,
the GCEA
joined the Colorado-Ute Generation & Transmission Association, a
“co-op
organized by co-ops” headquartered in Montrose, and purchased
power from that
organization until Colorado-Ute's demise in the early 1990s - a
consequence of
over-building its generation capacity in the late 1970s and 1980s,
anticipating
an energy boom that didn’t happen. Since 1992 the valley's
G&T is the huge
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association (also a co-op of
co-ops with
44 members), which added Colorado-Ute's customers to the co-ops it
serves
throughout In 1975, the
GCEA moved
its main offices from Crested Butte to its more central location west
of In 1996, the
GCEA refinanced all of its debt with private
finance companies, and no longer receives any financial assistance
from the REA (recently renamed the Rural Utilities
Service). This saves the local co-op money in the short term, and
enables a
greater flexibility in the future. Enough co-ops across the country are
doing
this so there is discussion about decommissioning the REA/ But the
importance of
the federal assistance notwithstanding, the most important action
happened at
the local level, where some people performed heroic and often
unpaid service.
Janet Allen was on the GCEA's original board of directors, and
served as the
organization's secretary for its first 36 years. Robert Porter,
who eventually
became district judge, served as the GCEA attorney from its start until
1969.
The first manager, V. A. Morgan, struggled against overwhelming wartime
odds to
get the system up and keep it running. Homer Duke stepped in when
Morgan left
and managed the utility for the next two decades. Today, the
organization has two 25-year employees who have
helped guide the organization into its maturity. Mike Wells
started as a
lineman in Crested Butte and is now the general manager. Despite
having a modem and reliable electric system in place
for all of the But in moving
into its eighth decade now, with 10,000 meters
active, the GCEA is a long way beyond starting from scratch to address
these
challenges.
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