Last week was the time to make merry in the executive offices of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
TVA directors the week before voted to give TVA's 10,900 ordinary workers an average year-end bonus of $10,367 per employee. And the board was even more generous to its top five executives who, TVA recently disclosed, were paid millions in 2015.
But perhaps it was not so much a time to make merry in the homes of current and future TVA pensioners - or those of American taxpayers.
While the federal utility - technically a nonprofit endeavor that is ratepayer funded, not government funded - in 2015 managed to spend at least $113 million on the bonuses, it also lost $762 million in its pension fund investments, leaving the utility with a record high $6 billion shortfall in its employee retirement system.
That's $6 billion with a "b" - and that's 53 percent of the $12.8 billion actuaries estimate the plan needs to provide the future benefits for 23,700 retirees and nearly 10,000 active TVA employees.
TVA justifies the outsized $6.4 million-a-year salary of TVA President Bill Johnson and more than $2 million a year for four other top executives by saying the utility must compete with higher-paying, investor-owned utilities.
Now, make no mistake: Johnson and his crew have done good things with TVA numbers. They have trimmed a record $600 million in annual operating expenses over the past three years through staff and program cuts, generated record net income of $1.1 billion on $11 billion in 2015 sales and kept TVA debt $1.2 billion below budget even with a record $3.6 billion in capital spending - mostly to complete the second reactor at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.
But TVA leaders apparently are willing, again and again, to be treated as a private business (or as a government utility) only when it's convenient.
Private and commercial utilities are governed by the Employment Retirement Income Security Act, which requires companies meet minimal funding standards to guarantee the benefit payments for retirees. But as a government entity, TVA is exempted from ERISA. The theory is that the government won't go out of business or otherwise stiff its retirees. After all, taxpayers are on the hook, right?
TVA has not fully funded its retiree pension fund for the last eight years, according to Leonard Muzyn Jr., an analyst for TVA in Chattanooga who has served on the TVA retirement system board for 12 years. Meanwhile, however, the utility's Securities and Exchange Commission filings show that the retirement plan for senior executives has been fully funded.
So let's review:
* The TVA board pays top execs anywhere from five to 16 times more than what the president of the United States is paid, and fully funds the execs' pension plan, all in order to "compete with" (act like) private industry.
* But, absent private industry's ERISA pension funding requirement, TVA's executives and board are more than happy to act like a government utility.
Doesn't anyone other than low level retirees and taxpayers (and future ratepayers for that matter) see some conflicts here?