About 80 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in offering the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 to the U.S. Congress, described his vision for a public utility to use the Tennessee River to bring jobs and prosperity to the South:
” … A corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise … should be charged with the broadest duty of planning for the proper use, conservation and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory for the general social and economic welfare of the nation. This authority should also be clothed with the necessary power to carry these plans into effect.”
These great words of great expectation from a great man led to the creation of the nation’s largest public utility.
That utility’s board has no oversight. It does not answer to regulatory authority as does Southern Company, Georgia’s primary electric utility, for instance, which is overseen to some extent by both the Georgia Public Service Commission and by the corporate stockholders.
TVA board members – appointed by the president and approved by Congress – answer instead to the public and to electricity ratepayers who are billed by distributors such as EPB.