# John Travise: essays, full text

> Every essay published on https://john.travise.net/, as plain text. Summary and bio: https://john.travise.net/llms.txt

## Every Customer Is a Stakeholder

Notes, June 2026. Retiring the 1903 rule that says only landowners get a vote.

There is an argument that has been circulating since the election, though it has been around SRP much longer. The argument is that only stakeholders should vote, and that stakeholder means landowner. SRP’s structure has rested on it since 1903, and it is the one I want to retire.

The 1903 case for landowner voting was real. Farmers in this valley put their land up as collateral for the federal loan that built the Roosevelt Dam. If the project failed, they lost their farms. That is what skin in the game looked like, and the governance structure reflected it. Landowners had bet something tangible on the outcome, so landowners got the votes. Fair trade.

Fine. What is the equivalent risk a landowner takes on today?

I asked this question on doors, in coffee shops, at meet-and-greets, and in conversations with people who voted for the other side. Nobody could answer it. The dam is paid off. The capital projects that built modern SRP have been funded through bonds and customer rates, not land collateral. If SRP procures a bad gas plant tomorrow, no landowner loses an acre. The cost shows up on every customer’s bill, the same way every other cost does.

Owning a patch of land in this valley does not override the wellbeing of everyone else who lives here. That was never the deal in 1903, and it is not the deal now. Water is a separate debate, with its own court rulings and its own legitimate reasons for being treated differently. I am not touching water in this piece; it carries genuine legal complications that power does not. Electricity in 2026 is generated, transmitted, and billed the same way for every meter on the grid. A landowner’s exposure to a 3.5 percent rate hike is identical to a renter’s. They both pay it. Neither is putting up collateral, and neither has a moral claim on the other.

So when someone says only stakeholders should vote, the honest response is that they are right, and every customer is a stakeholder. The 1903 definition was tied to a specific kind of risk that no longer exists for power customers. The only people still bearing real cost when SRP makes a bad decision are the people on the bills. Renters bear that cost. So do apartment dwellers, and homeowners outside the original land boundaries. About half a million customers, all paying SRP bills, none with a vote.

I want my colleagues to consider what comes next. SRP can become the best working example of public power in the country. We already have the parts other utilities cannot buy: rates that compete with any utility in the West, a grid that has held up through some of the hottest summers on record, and a generation mix shifting toward cleaner sources at a pace the Board controls. Most public utilities would trade balance sheets with us tomorrow.

What is missing is governance that matches the rest. A utility this large, with this many customers depending on its decisions, should be governed in a way that reflects who its customers are. That starts with naming what 1903 was for and what SRP has become.

The voters who turned out in record numbers on April 7 saw the gap. So did the customers who showed up at meetings, sent emails, made calls, and asked questions. They are asking to be counted as the stakeholders they already are. The ask is modest and overdue.

Get the governance question right and everything else SRP has built compounds: cheap, reliable, cleaner power in a public utility where every customer has a voice. That is a utility worth building. The first step is naming the bad definition and replacing it with one that fits the utility we run today.

## I Am Not An Activist

Indivisible, April 2026. On who gets called normal — and who gets to decide.

I won an SRP Council seat on April 7. The morning after, the Arizona Republic ran a piece calling our slate “climate activists” and the other side “traditional leadership.”

I read it twice. The second time, the absurdity hit.

The other side had a corporate PAC funded by data center builders and SRP contractors. They had a national political organization spending millions on a utility race they openly described as a trial run for the midterms. One of their candidates had his own company on the PAC donor list. Another donated $200,000 to that same national organization in the two years before they endorsed him. A third candidate went on the record describing what he saw as coordination at the organization’s headquarters months before the election.

That, in our state’s largest paper, is “traditional leadership.”

I’m a cybersecurity engineer. I’m an Army veteran. I deployed to combat. My wife and I funded our campaign with small donations from neighbors and $2,000 from a climate PAC. We had never run for anything before. We knocked our own doors and built our own software because nothing existed for a race this strange. We won because people want their neighbors running local offices, not corporations. Certainly not Turning Point USA.

That, apparently, makes me an activist.

Here’s what I want. I want my electric bill to stop going up faster than my pay. I want to know why the data center across town pays $6.08 per thousand gallons of water while my family pays $10.80. I want board members who don’t sit on the board of companies that hold $3 million in contracts with the entity they govern. I want my elected officials to disclose their financial conflicts before they vote.

That isn’t activism. That’s the floor.

Wanting clean air is normal. Wanting clean water is normal. Wanting electricity you can afford is normal. Wanting your kid to inhale less smog when she walks to school is normal. Wanting the people who set your rates to answer to you instead of to a construction company executive is normal.

I write this knowing my audience is people who proudly call themselves activists. I’m not telling you to put the word down. As the son of a coal miner from West Virginia, I understand the bloody history our grandparents and great-grandparents fought through. Activist organizing is the reason men came home from a shift instead of dying in it. The chapter publishing this does that work right now. I’m grateful for it.

But I want to name something we should refuse.

Somewhere along the way, the political class and the press decided that the people taking corporate money to make decisions about your life are the normal ones, and the people who wanted to know how that money was spent were the radicals. Once that frame is set, every fight starts from a deficit. Every candidate who runs on basic accountability gets coded as an outsider, a disruptor, an agitator. Every donor with a quiet five-figure check to a friendly PAC gets coded as a stakeholder, a community leader, a builder.

I am not willing to start every fight from a deficit. Neither should you.

When the Republic called me a climate activist, they weren’t describing me. They were describing what happens when the words for “wanting normal things” have been quietly handed over to one side. The other side becomes the default. You become the deviation. The story writes itself before anyone hears your name.

So I’m going to keep saying it plainly. I’m not an activist. I’m a person who pays an SRP bill, who served his country, who knows how to read a budget document, who got tired of being told that wanting clean water and a fair rate structure was somehow extreme.

If that’s activism now, the word doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

Here’s what I think you should do with this. Look around at the people you know. Your cousin in rural Mississippi who runs the volunteer fire department. Your aunt in Ohio who knows every quirk of her township’s drainage code because her basement floods every spring. The neighbor who actually shows up to the HOA meeting. The coworker who reads every page of the contract.

Those are the people who should be on a ballot somewhere. Not in 20 years. Now.

Most of them have never thought of themselves as candidates. Most of them never will, unless someone they trust looks them in the eye and tells them they’re exactly what an elected body is missing. That’s the work. Recruiting the people you already know are good at the kind of careful, unflashy attention these jobs actually require.

The same machinery that called me an activist is counting on those people staying home. Tens of thousands of seats, decided every cycle by a few hundred votes, mostly going uncontested. The moment a few of the right people file, the frame falls apart. You can’t call 30,000 neighbors with day jobs activists. You can’t call your accountant a radical. You can’t call a volunteer firefighter from Tupelo a fringe element.

We won. So can the people you know.

The only people who benefit from us thinking we have to be activists to want a livable life are the people who benefit from us not having one.

We’re the normal ones. Time to act like it.