A Memphis Light, Gas and Water board member defended president and CEO Doug McGowen’s leadership after Memphis mayoral candidates were noncommittal about the job security of some mayor-appointed city officials, including McGowen.

“Politics don’t need to be involved in MLGW,” Commissioner Mitch Graves said after an MLGW board meeting Wednesday, Aug. 16. 

During the mayoral debate, co-hosted by The Daily Memphian and WKNO-TV Tuesday, Aug. 15, moderators asked the five candidates present — Karen Camper, J.W. Gibson, Michelle McKissack, Van Turner and Paul Young — to raise their hands if they supported keeping McGowen at the helm of the utility.

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None of the candidates raised their hands. 

The Memphis mayor appoints the utility’s highest-ranking employee for a five-year term. McGowen, who had been the city’s COO, was appointed last fall, but the city’s next mayor will have the power to remove McGowen at any time. 

Young said he didn’t raise his hand because he won’t commit to firing anyone right now, while Gibson criticized McGowen’s lack of experience in the utility industry. 

Wednesday morning, after the MLGW’s regular board meeting, McGowen said he hadn’t watched the debate or caught up on news coverage of the event. He said he was at a community event Tuesday evening talking to MLGW customers.

“I’ve got a lot of things to do, and this is not among the top things for me right now,” McGowen said.

Now nine months into his tenure with the city’s public utility, McGowen has led MLGW through some of the worst storms and outages in the city’s history.

More than a third of MLGW’s worst outages have happened in the past 18 months. Less than two weeks after McGowen took over as president and CEO, Shelby County experienced its first-ever rolling blackouts, due to requirements from the Tennessee Valley Authority. 

“(McGowen’s) been a great leader so far,” Graves said. “Unfortunately, over the last nine months, we’ve had a lot of storms, and he’s inherited a lot of things that should have been updated years ago.” 

During recent outages, McGowen has repeatedly said he’s eager to get out of storm recovery mode to focus on long-term fixes. The utility already has a five-year infrastructure improvement plan, but McGowen said they need to think further ahead. He also unveiled plans in May for a 20-year outlook dubbed MLGW2045. 

Graves commended McGowen’s leadership and attributed recent outages to infrastructure that has been neglected long before McGowen was appointed. Trees and other foliage are the largest cause of area power outages, and MLGW hasn’t met its annual tree-trimming goals since the late 1990s.

“There’ll be a lot of things happening sooner rather than later. But it’s going to take time to rebuild our infrastructure and give confidence to the citizens here.”

Mitch Graves

McGowen previously said MLGW’s failure to keep up with tree trimming has increased outages fivefold. In July, he secured Memphis City Council approval for $227 million worth of contracts over five years to fix the issue. 

“There’ll be a lot of things happening sooner rather than later,” Graves said. “But it’s going to take time to rebuild our infrastructure and give confidence to the citizens here.”