What it was about for me was seeing the Co-op as an instrument of progressive change. – Richard Rubin
Richard Rubin was ready to retire from the WEC Board of Directors last year. But the 78-year-old trial lawyer from Plainfield decided to run for re-election one last time after he met Board newcomer Pat Barnes, liked Barnes’s energy and ideas, and thought it would be fun to work with him.
So when Rubin slipped off the Board by one vote, he shrugged and summed it up simply: “I liked being on the Board a lot. It was fun.” He also describes his 50-year career as a public defender as fun, or at least enjoyable. Others might say “rewarding” or “fulfilling” about a lifetime pushing for progressive system change and justice. But Rubin is all about fun.
In his many years serving WEC—Rubin isn’t counting how many, but more than 20—he focused on what he could contribute to the Board (“my lawyerly skills, raising questions, bringing analytical process”), and what the Co-op could do to deliver power—he doesn’t mean electricity—to the people.
Early Years and Legal Career
To know Rubin is to understand that he really loves being a lawyer: the work, the process, the skills, the impact he’s been able to have. “I decided to use my legal career to help poor people and rural people in Vermont and indigent criminal defendants, and raise my kids here. It’s been great!” he said.
Rubin enrolled at Harvard as a “Massachusetts Democrat,” but the Vietnam War sharpened his politics, and in Cambridge he could observe the roots of privilege and insularity in power systems. “I’d see these Harvard guys in the Kennedy administration wrapped up in the Vietnam war and not hesitating to destroy hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “That was really evil. So I just kind of gave up: I’m not interested in playing that game.”
After law school at the University of Pennsylvania and working on welfare rights cases and landlord-tenant disputes in Boston, he found his way to Vershire in 1972. Soon after he moved to Plainfield, where friends worked at Goddard, communes were forming, and anti-imperialist politics were strong. Rubin recalled walking into the courthouse in Chelsea and saying to himself, “I want to practice law in these courthouses.” He explained, “Trying cases in rural Vermont counties is what I wanted to do. You know the clerks, you probably know the jurors, you get to know the judges.”
He represented the individuals who started the Plainfield Co-op, which Rubin is pleased to see thriving today in its new location in the Plainfield Hardware building, and did other local work before joining the public defender’s office in Washington County in 1977. “A lot of public defenders do the work for a few years and then they leave,” Rubin observed. “Our office has provided it to Washington County for 40 to 50 years.” In 1980, he helped organize the law firm Rubin Kidney Myer and Vincent, which has the contract in Washington County to provide public defense to people who can’t afford private services. “One of the things we’ve prided in our law firm is to provide the best criminal defense to indigent people statewide,” Rubin said.
His practice also encompasses private criminal defense and plaintiff personal injury law. Rubin is well respected among lawyers: he holds the highest possible ethics rating and was awarded a national honor for public service from the American Association for Justice for a case that eventually reached the US Supreme Court, in which Rubin helped hold accountable a pharmaceutical company whose defective drug injured a Vermonter.
Rubin’s History with WEC
Rubin eventually crossed paths with Barry Bernstein, who served as WEC’s President for years. Bernstein is credited by Rubin and other former and current Board members as the primary leader in the effort to flip WEC’s Board to progressive leadership and harness public power as a mechanism for environmental and structural system change.
As member-owners, Bernstein and Rubin saw a problem with the Co-op being run by, according to Rubin, “good ol’ boys who are using it for their own benefit, and giving themselves contracts.” So they organized a slate of candidates to run for the Board. The Co-op leaders at that time wouldn’t share the membership lists so Rubin and Bernstein’s candidates could campaign. “So we sued them,” Rubin said, “and the court ordered them to turn over the membership lists.”
Unhappy with the court order, some of the “good ol’ boys” tried lobbing hate-filled insults. But don’t start with Rubin unless you know how to dance. “I was referred to by one as a ‘New York Jew commie,’” Rubin said wryly. “I had to point out: I wasn’t from New York.”
The Co-op’s members eventually elected a progressive majority to the Board, which then made a series of historically important decisions, including getting out of a contract with the Seabrook nuclear power plant, and investing in the Coventry landfill gas to electricity plant. More recently WEC’s Board got involved in the sale of Central Vermont Public Service (CVPS) to Green Mountain Power (GMP), in order to increase public utility representation on the board of VELCO and create VLITE.
VELCO and VLITE
Rubin’s interest in the Co-op was never about poles or wires, he said. “What it was about for me was seeing the Co-op as an instrument of progressive change.” It was always about political control—wresting political power and utility ownership from a few, and returning it to the public.
The sale of CVPS to GMP in 2012 prompted a political struggle. “GMP wanted to buy CVPS and go on their merry way, and it didn’t happen the way they wanted it,” remembered Rubin, who credits Bernstein with leading the opposition. The state’s utilities required reorganizing in order for the sale to go through. In the negotiation, and directly due to WEC leadership, GMP no longer maintained a majority on the board of directors of VELCO, the state’s distribution utility-owned transmission utility. VLITE—the Vermont Low Income Trust for Electricity—was created in the process, and elects three members to VELCO’s board. “As part of that deal, VLITE got 37% of the stock in VELCO,” Rubin explained. “The transmission industry in the state of Vermont has been taken out of private hands and collectivized, and VLITE gets about $1.2 million a year in dividends.”
It’s $1.2 million annually that did not previously exist, and that flows to people who don’t typically have access to grants or venture capital. Rubin, who served until recently on VLITE’s board, enjoyed the variety and the ability to fund innovative ideas. He describes the trust’s mission as supporting nonprofits that further the state’s energy plan, with an emphasis on grants and programs that benefit low-income populations. “We put pellet stoves in the Northeast Kingdom and insulate houses and take asbestos out of their ceilings,” he offered. “The VLITE board is basically committed to using the money efficiently and productively with as little overhead as possible.”
The Community Fund
If the story of VLITE sounds at all similar to Washington Electric Co-op’s Community Fund, there’s a connection. Rubin had advocated from time to time for WEC to give money away. A lot of corporations do, and it’s part of being a responsible member of the community, he reasoned. But WEC is a member-owned not-for-profit, and Rubin admitted that Treasurer Don Douglas told him repeatedly that the Co-op can not just give away its members’ money.
Eventually WEC leadership decided to start returning equity to its members in the form of capital credits, which Rubin supported. A certain percentage of equity is required by WEC’s lenders; more goes toward capital improvements and to reduce rate increases. But the equity itself, Rubin pointed out, belongs to members.
So as the capital credits program began, Rubin saw an opportunity to both return equity to members and to create a simple mechanism to support local nonprofits. He and other Board members suggested asking members to donate their capital credits and to create a Community Fund with those donations. “We set up a way to say ‘just keep it’ every year, and it worked. It’s easy, and it’s been great. I just wish we could give away more,” he said.
About 14% of WEC members say “Just keep it,” and every year, the Community Fund gives tens of thousands of dollars to nonprofits active in WEC’s service area.
The Future of the Fire
To some extent, Rubin sees the Co-op’s political fire tempering over time. It makes sense, he reasoned. Leadership’s first job is to focus on reliability. It’s hard to run a small cooperative when the effects of climate change are worsening storms and outages, and it’s hard managing the needs and expectations of a new generation of members.
But the kind of opportunities for progressive system change that drew Rubin to Co-op governance are still present, he thinks, even without good ol’ boys to organize against. Senator Bernie Sanders’ consistent message about economic inequality has remained popular with Vermonters for years, he pointed out. “There’s an opportunity for the Co-op to embody that message as well, in its own way. We’ve seen it in making power more socialized.”
Vast collective power ownership exists—in systems like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the country’s largest public utility. Socializing systems is doable, he points out: it takes some money, and it takes the right leadership at the right time. “The wealth and corporate structures are highly concentrated,” he acknowledged, and capitalist pressure on systems and political parties is too massive and entrenched to dismantle directly. “That’s pessimistic,” he said, “but what you can do is make changes locally. You can create models of economic progressivity within Vermont. One is the way the utilities are organized.”