Members of Tri-State direct and support our future

As a not-for-profit cooperative, Tri-State's members guide our actions, make our key decisions and set our direction. The majority of our members strongly support Tri-State and our meaningful actions to be reliable, affordable and responsible. Of this there should be no doubt.

After all, our direction is driven by a democratic process in which all of our members have a voice. As is often the cooperative way, our members thoughtfully lead forward, and they deliberately work in the best interest of all those they serve.

Don't mistake our members' quiet, steady leadership as complacency. Our members are firm in their resolve and confident in their actions.

There is strong support form the utility members of our cooperative for our Responsible Energy Plan and our decision to seek Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FREC) jurisdiction. For those seeking evidence of our member support, I encourage you read the numerous letters our members sent to the FERC in support of Tri-State's direction.

We also have received recognition from outside groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute, which recently released a case study on the process to develop the Responsible Energy Plan.

Two of our utility members, La Plata Electric Association and United Power, see issues differently than the majority of our members. These two utilities have taken actions to terminate their contracts with Tri-State at an unreasonably low cost that would increase costs by more than $1 billion dollars for the remaining customers.

With the support of the majority of our member electric utilities, we are opposing LPEA and United Power's actions, and we have filed a member-developed contract termination payment methodology with the FERC that is fair to all of our cooperative's utility members and their customers.

While each utility member has a different perspective, what these letters show is they all agree that Tri-State is on the right path - a path our utility members set themselves.