Bill Bazter resigns from TVA board

Bill Bazter resigns from TVA board

	Published : Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:08 By : Agencies Print this Story

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AFX) - A former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority announced Monday that he was resigning from the board of the nation's largest public utility.

'Today I have self-limited my term to five years in the spirit of the legislation modernizing the governance structure of TVA,' Bill Baxter said in a statement.

The Knoxville businessman said he submitted his resignation Monday to President Bush so he can 'nominate and secure the Senate confirmation of a new part-time director' on the TVA board to fill Baxter's term, which expires in 2011.

Baxter was nominated to TVA's previous three-member, full-time board by Bush in 2001 and was elevated to chairman in 2005. He remained chairman until an expanded nine-member, part-time board took office in 2006. The new board elected Bill Sansom as chairman and chose Tom Kilgore as the agency's first chief executive officer.

Baxter, however, retained a seat on the new part-time board. So did Skila Harris, the only other member left from the previous board.

Significantly, Baxter was the only TVA director who voted last year against a new shoreline management policy that banned residential development on TVA lands.

'I am proud of the progress we have made at TVA over the last five years,' Baxter said.

'TVA is in significantly better financial shape than it has been in several years (and) the air in the Tennessee Valley is cleaner than at any time in the past half century,' he said.

He noted the agency is nearing completion on the $1.8 billion restart of a long-idled nuclear reactor at the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama and 'economic development efforts of TVA have assisted in attracting billions of dollars of investment to the Tennessee Valley.'

The agency is 'well positioned operationally, financially and strategically,' he said.

As for himself, Baxter said he looked forward to returning to the private sector after serving in public offices for eight of the past nine years.

Before joining TVA he was commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development under former Gov. Don Sundquist. He also runs his family's gas supply company in Knoxville.

TVA provides wholesale electricity to 158 distributors serving about 8.6 million consumers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.