The real comedy, dark comedy here, is watching people hand the keys of a modern power cooperative to folks who are wildly unprepared for the job, while the people in suits on regional boards talk like Montana’s future has already been signed away somewhere behind closed doors.
Lincoln Electric Cooperative is not bingo night. It is not a popularity pageant. It is not a reward program for whoever has the most recognizable last name or shook the most hands at the café.
It is a utility. A serious one.
That means reliability. Rates. Infrastructure. Capital planning. Executive oversight. Negotiating from strength. Protecting members from getting steamrolled by bigger players with bigger money and better lawyers.
That requires actual competence.
And let me be clear: this is not a slam on the linemen, office staff, field crews, or everyday employees who keep the system running. Many of them work hard, respond in rough weather, deal with frustrated customers, and carry burdens created far above their pay grade.
If anything, weak leadership hurts them too.
Poor planning means more emergency callouts.
Bad decisions mean more public anger aimed at frontline workers.
Weak negotiation means fewer resources.
Lack of accountability means good employees are expected to compensate for failures they did not create.
This criticism is about governance, management culture, and board-level decision making — not the people doing the real work.
Instead, too many voters treat these elections like they’re picking prom king. Familiarity wins. Capability loses. Then when the lights flicker and rates rise, everyone suddenly become confused.
Now let’s add the truly insulting part.
You’ve got government boards, agency people, and power insiders already talking like massive AI data centers and industrial expansion into Montana are inevitable. Like our role is to smile politely, move aside, and be grateful for whatever scraps fall off the table.
No public fight.
No real pushback.
No visible negotiation.
No “what do local members get first?”
Just that smug little tone of inevitability:
This is happening. Get used to it.
That should concern every person paying an electric bill.
Because when outsiders are planning your future, and your local board is stacked with people who can’t or won’t challenge anything, then you no longer have representation.
You have decorative democracy.
Electing an unqualified board member during a moment like this is like hiring a guy who once supervised dodgeball to negotiate a Pentagon weapons contract.
Nice enough? Probably.
Means well? Maybe.
Ready for billion-dollar pressure campaigns, transmission politics, legal traps, ratepayer defense, workforce protection, and industrial demand warfare?
Absolutely not.
And while locals argue over personalities and who is “such a nice guy,” the real game keeps moving:
- Transmission gets reserved.
- Costs get shifted.
- Risk gets localized.
- Profits leave town.
- Workers get stretched thinner.
- Members get explanations later.
Then come the annual traditions:
- Why are rates higher?
- Why are outages worse?
- Why weren’t we told sooner?
- Why does it feel like this was decided already?
- Why does our board look surprised too?
Because you voted for a name, not a résumé.
Now let’s talk about that meeting.
That was less a cooperative meeting and more a hostage situation with door prizes.
They had to feed people and hand out 30+ prizes just to get attendance. Nothing says “healthy civic engagement” quite like bribing adults with raffle tickets and BBQ.
It felt like a grade school assembly run by people who lost the clipboard.
Meaningful information made up maybe fifteen percent of the evening. The rest was giveaways, thank-yous, meandering speeches, and the kind of empty platitudes usually found stitched onto decorative pillows.
And the details? Those details told the story.
What was up?
Wrinkled tablecloths.
Microphones not working.
Prizes disorganized.
No sense of professionalism.
Barely one sentence about the actual financial health of the cooperative.
Some people think those things don’t matter.
They do.
Because excellence shows itself in details, and decline does too.
The “broken windows” principle was never truly about windows. It was the idea that when visible disorder, neglect, and low standards are tolerated in small things, people begin to tolerate larger dysfunction too.
If you can’t clean up, tablecloths, run sound equipment, and a raffle smoothly, forgive me for questioning the five-year infrastructure strategy.
Then the manager stood there and explained outages with the timeless leadership philosophy of:
Not our fault.
No real talk about resilience.
No employee metrics.
No infrastructure condition report.
No hard decisions ahead.
No vulnerabilities.
No personal vision.
No urgency.
Just excuses with a microphone.
Meanwhile, this community still appears to sit on a single point of failure in places where redundancy should already be a serious conversation. One bad actor, one major natural event, one cascading regional issue, and suddenly everyone learns what “fragile systems” means in real time.
But sure, let’s keep giving away crockpots, soft coolers and 20lb propane tanks.
Montana communities do not have to accept being treated like passive scenery for someone else’s industrial ambitions.
We can demand:
- Backup power commitments
- Redundant transmission paths
- Stronger negotiation
- Real transparency
- Member-first priorities
- Accountability
- Protection for workers and crews
- Adults in the room
But none of that happens when citizens keep electing passive people because they recognize the name from somewhere.
That is the darkest joke of all.
The public still owns the cooperative.
It just keeps acting like a
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