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February 2010 That Reminds Me
Our beginning
 by Emily Schilling
Editor
This month marks a monumental anniversary for Indiana’s electric co-op members. The Indiana REMC Act was introduced in the Indiana Legislature 75 years ago this Feb. 21. The bill, the first of its kind in the country, opened the door for the formation of rural electric membership corporations.
The Indiana Farm Bureau general manager at the time, I. Harvey Hull, and Frederick Barrows, the Farm Bureau Cooperative attorney, authored the 25-section bill.
 Hull, a tenacious visionary whose own farm was electrified in 1922, was the driving force behind Indiana’s rural electric movement. While traveling with a Farm Bureau group in the Scandinavian countries in 1934, Hull learned as much as 65 percent of rural Norway and Sweden was electrified. Meanwhile, less than 10 percent of rural America was energized then. Hull discovered the reason for Scandinavia’s good record — the consumers owned their electric lines. In other words, those countries had electric cooperatives.
“If they can do it, so can we,” Hull decided. Upon learning long-term, low-interest government loans were financing the Scandinavian co-ops, he surmised rural Americans could get power the same way.
Though most thought Hull’s ideas were not feasible, he convinced Farm Bureau’s board that he was on the right track. The legislation he and Barrows crafted was, as he put it, “a combination of imagination, some hunches, and a realization that the new electric co-ops must be protected as much as possible against the predatory tactics that were sure to be used against them by the existing commercial utilities.” In other words, there was a provision in the bill protecting electric co-op territory from being taken over by other power companies. (Other states didn’t include such provisions and later suffered the consequences.)
The Indiana REMC Act passed the Indiana House unanimously on Feb. 27, 1935, passed the Senate nine days later and was signed into law by Gov. Paul V. McNutt on March 9, 1935. When the law was passed, it was still unclear how electric co-ops could be financed.
However, two months after the Indiana law passed, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the national law establishing the Rural Electrification Administration as a relief agency. Congress could spend $1 million on rural electrification projects. With that, Indiana had a source for funds, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Written By: eceditor
Date Posted: 1/26/2010
Number of Views: 159
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