What could have been a routine agenda item took on a life of its own at the Dec. 10 meeting of the Amador Water Agency as its board of directors squabbled over who would lead the group during the upcoming year.

District 1 Director Bill Condrashoff was selected unanimously to be the new president, replacing current president Terence Moore from District 5.

It was during the next phase of voting for a new vice-president that the proceeding turned contentious.

Debbie Dunn, the District 4 director, was nominated for the position, as was District 3 director Don Cooper. But when it came time for the vote and Dunn found herself about to lose, she called for more discussion and lambasted Moore and District 2 director Gary Thomas, who nominated Cooper, for failing to live up to what she said was a promise to her that she would be the next vice-president.

"You think it's okay to put your heel on my forehead and say, 'Whoops, we changed our minds,'" said Dunn, adding that she was all but promised the vice-presidency a year ago and spent countless hours at meetings of other related agencies in order to prepare. She also accused Moore of trying to steer the rest of the board away from her with a recent e-mail in which he purportedly supported Cooper.

Moore told the board he did not remember making any promise of the vice-presidency to Dunn and told her she attended other meetings because she wanted to.

"You're a meeting-goer," he said. "You attended meetings because you wanted to. I'm not sure we made a commitment to Debbie," Moore added. "I can't recall."

"I did what you told me to do," Dunn said.

Condrashoff was quick to jump to Dunn's defense, disputing Moore's assertions that no promise had been made to Dunn and told Moore he would like to jog his memory.

"Some of us do recall this," Condrashoff said.

Thomas said his reason for nominating Cooper was he was worried about "continuity" on the board, including the fact that Dunn faces re-election in a General Election next year.

Cooper, citing personal reasons, admitted to not attending as many meetings as Dunn but told the board he felt that his 35 years of experience at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. made him a good candidate.

After many back and forth comments, including several from audience members who seemed to clearly support Dunn, Cooper withdrew himself from the race and cleared the way for a final vote, 4 to 1 for Dunn, with Thomas voting no.

AWA Interim General Manager Gene Mancebo was again appointed to the position of board secretary and Cris Thompson will continue as clerk of the board.

In other actions during the meeting, the board voted to spend $31K to buy two propane-powered backup electrical generators to ensure the safety of their computer servers.

A report prepared by Financial Services Manager Michael Lee said his recommendation to buy the generators came in response to questions raised during the Nov. 12 meeting. Lee reported that the computer servers in use by the AWA to house mapping, engineering and customer information are susceptible to damage if they are not shut down properly and that the current back-up systems only give office staff about ten minutes to turn them off before they crash.

He added that power-line fluctuations and electric outages caused by recent weather events had drained the battery back-up systems and caused several hard shut downs, including one which caused "irrevocable harm to our engineering server, which houses all our map data and programs."

Lee estimated the cost of that one occurrence would be approximately $10,000 to repair and explained that, if AWA had to replace servers damaged during power outages, the cost could be anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 per server.

The AWA currently has more than 20 servers.

The next scheduled meeting of the AWA is Jan. 14.