Hanover — On the brink of what one candidate described as “a watershed moment” for the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, a mix of veteran and former employees of the 80-year-old co-op, longtime customer-members and current and former members of the organization’s Board of Directors took turns Saturday stating their cases for election.

During the 30,000-member co-op’s annual meeting at Hanover’s Richard W. Black Community Center, several of the 10 candidates pursuing one of the five openings on the 12-member board pointed to recent controversies, including the unexplained firings of two longtime employees in 2014, as a major reason for a shake-up, or at least a re-evaluation of the board’s mission.

“The Co-op was forced to settle with the National Labor Relations Board, having attempted to punish employees for discussing unionization,” freelance writer and writing teacher William Craig, of Thetford, said. “The board failed to correct management’s blatant interference in the last (union) election. And regardless of confidential employee matters, those controversial firings demonstrated unprofessional (human resources) practice, which has exposed the Co-op to an expensive lawsuit.”

Those and other labor-relations issues, as well as concerns about financial management of the Co-op’s four food stores and service station, sparked the creation of the ad-hoc group Concerned About the Co-op, three of whose members won election to the co-op board last spring.

This year, Concerned About the Co-op is endorsing Craig; book publisher Phil Pochoda, of Lyme Center; organic farmer and former Norwich Selectwoman Liz Blum; Norwich’s Donald Kreis, who is a former co-op board president; and Ann MacDonald, a former employee as well as a former member of the board.

A sixth member of the group, Sean Clauson, is running independently.

Meanwhile, the co-op board’s nominating committee has declared Pochoda, Kreis, current employee Kevin Birdsey, current board member Benoit Roisin, former board member and current employee Edwin Howes and Thetford resident Dana Cook Grossman as “suitably qualified” to run for board membership. Roisin, an engineering professor at Dartmouth, joined the board in 2015 to fill the final year of a departing member’s term, and is seeking one of four available three-year terms.

Grossman, a 43-year member of the co-op and a former editor of Dartmouth Medicine magazine, cautioned against letting “special interests” distract the co-op from its broader mission.

“It’s a $70-million-a-year organization,” Grossman said. “It provides over 400 jobs with pay and benefits well above grocery industry averages. It’s been a leader in supporting local agriculture and the availability — still — of high-quality produce, even for the neediest among our Upper Valley neighbors, through the Willing Hands nonprofit.

“But though our co-op engages in many such good works, we members must keep in mind that the co-op itself is not a nonprofit. It is a business, in an industry the runs on razor-thin margins. If it is to continue serving those of us who love shopping there, the members of its board must focus on stewarding it thoughtfully — but as a business.”

Blum said that the board cannot live up to the co-op’s core principles without creating employment policies that include just-cause procedures for management’s dismissal of employees, and without encouraging “greater involvement by members and employees.”

Addressing employees in attendance directly, Kreis pledged that he will advocate for “standards for the way management treats you.

“Without you, we’re just a grocery store,” Kreis said. “The co-op will never be able to pay you what you’re worth.”

At the end of the annual meeting, the co-op board gave parting gifts to board members who are not seeking re-election: including Treasurer John Rosenquest, Susan Sanzone Fauver and President Margaret Drye, the cooperative’s longest-serving director at 13 years.

After receiving a bouquet of co-op carrots and kale, as well as an Andrew Pearce wooden bowl, Drye said that she hopes that the new board, in whatever form, avoids what George Washington referred to in his presidential farewell address as “the distraction of factions.”

“I am concerned that we will forget that we are stronger together,” Drye said. “We need a board that can generate consensus and common vision in a time of transition.”

 

Co-op members can cast their votes for the board through April 30. For more information, including statements from each candidate, visit mycoopvote.com/.

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.

Correction

In remarks she made at the annual meeting of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society on Saturday, outgoing Board of Directors President Margaret Drye said, “I am concerned that we will forget that we are stronger together … We need a board that can generate consensus and common vision in a time of transition.” An earlier version of this story quoted her incorrectly.