NRTC Board Elects Minnesota’s Tim Mergen as Chairman

Following today’s NRTC Virtual Annual Meeting, the NRTC Board of Directors met to elect new officers, including Tim Mergen, CEO and GM of Meeker Cooperative Light & Power Association in Litchfield, MN, who will serve a two-year term as chairman. Mergen, who has been vice chairman for the past two years, succeeds Shannon Clark, CEO and GM of Richland Electric Cooperative in Wisconsin as chairman.

Mergen enters the position with experience in deploying the advanced technologies that are attracting the interest of so many NRTC members. “We started connecting customers to our rip-snortin’ fast fiber broadband internet service in July of 2019,” he said during the annual meeting.

Jimmy Todd, CEO and GM of Nex‐Tech in Kansas, who has been board secretary-treasurer, becomes vice chairman. District 8 representative Lynn Hodges, CEO and GM of Ralls County Electric Cooperative in Missouri, becomes secretary-treasurer.

The board that elected the new slate of officers included one new member, Dustin Durden, GM and executive VP of Pineland Telephone Cooperative in Metter, GA, who fills one of the at-large District 12 seats representing NRTC telco members. He succeeds, Jeff Wilson, CEO and GM of West Carolina Rural Telephone Cooperative in South Carolina who has served the limit of 12 years on the board.

Four incumbent electric-industry members won reelection:

NRTC employed electric voting for the first time to conduct the elections over a three-day (Feb. 22-24) period. Each of the candidates ran unopposed.