TVA President Tom Kilgore listens to public comments during a TVA board of directors meeting Thursday in Knoxville.A day after TVA’s chief executive said he is stepping down, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., warned Friday that the board that will pick a new TVA head includes too many directors without corporate experience or the financial skills to oversee a complex agency like TVA.
“As you look at TVA today as an $11 billion-a-year company with tremendous challenges, it has a board of directors with the qualifications that I think would cause most Tennesseans to be very concerned,” Corker said. “We have only one person on the board, to my knowledge, who even has any corporate board experience.”
Currently, only six of the nine seats on TVA’s board are filled and, unless Congress acts to confirm new members, the TVA board could shrink to only four members and lack a quorum by the end of the year.
Corker said he personally likes the members of the TVA board. But he said too many directors were appointed based upon geographic or partisan politics, not the person’s experience and skills to oversee America’s biggest government utility. Corker said in the past one TVA director admitted he didn’t know what was a “P&L statement” of profits and losses.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said in a statement Friday that he agrees with Corker that “the new governance structure [adopted for TVA in 2004] has not worked out as well as I had hoped.