A slate of liberal candidates won control of the board of Arizona’s largest public utility this week, according to preliminary results posted on Wednesday, emerging from a surprisingly contentious race that attracted national attention.
The winning candidates, who campaigned as the Clean Energy Team, drew support from the Sierra Club and the actress Jane Fonda as they ran against a rival slate backed by state business leaders and Turning Point USA, the conservative group Charlie Kirk founded.
The utility, the Salt River Project, delivers power and water to millions of customers across metropolitan Phoenix, and its board determines how much households will pay for those precious services in one of America’s hottest and driest cities.
Two of the Turning Point-endorsed candidates also prevailed, winning their races for board president and vice president, who act as conduits between the elected officials and the utility’s management. Still, members of the power district board aligned with the Clean Energy Team will now hold an eight-to-six majority, meaning proponents of renewable power will control the utility’s policymaking for the first time.
“Starting when we’re sworn in, S.R.P. will be the largest utility in the country with a majority vote of clean energy supporters,” said Ken Clark, who is one of the team’s newly elected candidates and will represent a swath of north-central Phoenix. “There has been a pent-up demand, especially in Arizona, for people to have their energy freedom, to have solar panels, batteries and more energy-efficient measures.”
The Salt River Project’s elections, open only to property owners, have always been low-turnout affairs, held separately from other state and local races. This year’s was different, thanks largely to Turning Point’s funding and organizing, but the results suggest the group’s strategy may have backfired: Liberal organizations used Turning Point’s involvement to raise awareness about the contest and urge participation from new voters.
“I oppose everything they stand for,” said Bill Callan, a 55-year-old Tempe resident, referring to Turning Point. He has been eligible to vote for three decades but did not cast his first utility ballot until Tuesday, saying, “It’s never mattered before.”
The clean energy candidates support a faster transition to renewable resources, incentives for the installation of solar panels and higher rates for data center developments. Their opponents represented the utility board’s traditional leadership, which has been wary of solar and other renewable technologies and has argued that abandoning fossil fuels would raise prices and lead to blackouts.
The newly elected board president, Chris Dobson, and vice president, Barry Paceley, have spent years in utility leadership and have advocated a mix of energy sources, including natural gas. They have said that they are not ideologues, and Mr. Paceley said before the election that outside groups, like Turning Point, were not involved in their campaigns.
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Paceley said the Salt River Project has been “the most successful utility in Arizona.”
“Our first focus will always be to provide the most affordable rates with the highest reliability and striving for the most economic and sustainable methods of power generation for today and well into the future,” he said.
In a statement, a Turning Point spokesman, Andrew Kolvet, celebrated Mr. Dobson’s and Mr. Paceley’s wins and said they would blunt the effect of “radical California-style energy and water policies.”
Mr. Kolvet attributed their success in part to Turning Point’s work “knocking doors and chasing ballots in some of the bluest parts of Maricopa County.”
The election is officially nonpartisan, but the surge in spending from interest groups injected the race with the sort of political rancor more commonly found in Arizona’s statewide elections.
For the first time in residents’ memory, utility election fliers appeared in their mailboxes by the bundle and campaign signs sprouted at seemingly every intersection, each brimming with accusations about a candidate’s political donors or purported rate-hiking ambitions.
Mr. Clark, with the Clean Energy Team, lamented “the boiling down of people to these two-dimensional beings” and said he and his allies would be able to find common ground with the other six board members.
One priority for the new majority, he said, would be to examine the utility’s arcane voting system. The Salt River Project still uses election rules that date to 1903, nearly a decade before Arizona became a U.S. state. Only property holders are allowed to cast ballots in the utility’s election, and the more land they own, the more votes they get.
The clean energy side argued that the system favored the business-backed establishment candidates, who tend to attract the support of larger landowners.
But when first-time voters like Armella Gaines, a Glendale resident, heard about the election — and her right to cast a ballot — she was more motivated to participate, to counter what she saw as an unfair system. Ms. Gaines, who supported the Clean Energy Team, was one of more than 35,000 who voted, more than quadruple the typical turnout.
“When I got the fliers,” she said, referring to mailed campaign literature, “I thought, ‘Oh something different is happening this year.’”
Reis Thebault is a Phoenix-based reporter for The Times, covering the American Southwest.
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