The removal of Jeremiah Sloan as CEO of Craighead Electric Cooperative remains something of a mystery, even to the new interim boss, North Arkansas Electric Cooperative CEO Mel Coleman.
But Coleman said Sloan’s departure had nothing to do with a public outcry in January over the Jonesboro cooperative’s plans for property near its headquarters that contained a pet cemetery. Plot owners were upset with the prospect of gathering the gravestones they placed there and the fate of any still-existent remains after Craighead Electric announced construction plans for the parcel.
“This is not a pet cemetery thing,” Coleman said, though he said he did not talk to board members about the reasons behind Sloan’s departure. “The board did not tell me anything, nor did I even inquire. In situations like this, personnel issues are not a topic for conversation with the board. I do not know what the issue was, but it was certainly not that.”
Coleman, who took over as interim CEO on July 26, said the cooperative is looking to move forward. “I can tell you that things are going extremely well,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s a happy group of dedicated and very talented employees. I think it’s a great co-op.”
Coleman took over executive leadership of Craighead Electric under a reciprocal shared management agreement with NAEC. North Arkansas is based in Salem (Fulton County), about 90 miles northwest of Jonesboro.
The two co-ops’ areas meet somewhere around the line between Lawrence and Sharp counties, said Coleman, who has been with NAEC for 36 years, including 23 as CEO. “The management agreement was the brainchild of our national association, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association,” he said.
“In the event that one cooperative loses its CEO, the other one will fill in. On the management side, it’s very similar to what we do as co-ops when outages happen. If a co-op in south Arkansas has an outage, we send folks down to help restore power. If we have one, they send folks up here to help us. This is basically the same idea on the management side. And this agreement [with Craighead Electric] has been in place since 2012.”
Craighead Electric’s board, led by Chairman Terry Rorex, has said little publicly about Sloan’s departure, even though Sloan led the cooperative for more than two years and had worked there since 2016.
The news vacuum led to speculation that the pet cemetery issue played a role in the transition.
But the board did issue a statement thanking Sloan for his leadership of CECC and Empower, the utility’s broadband provider.
“The positive impact he made during his time here has positioned both companies and their employees to continue to provide world-class service to members and their communities,” the statement said, wishing Sloan luck as he pursues “the next chapter of his professional career.”
Coleman is a former NRECA president and sits on the boards of Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp., Arkansas Electric Cooperatives Inc., subsidiary Ermco Transformers and Today’s Power, the solar energy subsidiary in North Little Rock.
Coleman is running both co-ops from his office in Salem, making trips back and forth to Jonesboro.
The board will begin a search for a permanent CEO at the end of this month, Coleman said. “With 36 years in this business, I’ve seen it before,” he said. “I’ve seen it take four months, or even six months. But I would expect this to wrap up by the end of the year, and for a new CEO to be in place. It’s the responsibility of the board to do their due diligence in the search, and that’s what they’re going to do.
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