By Richard Martin, Editor-at-Large

It has not been a good year for the Intermountain Rural Electric Association and general manager Stan Lewandowski. On Saturday, even as thousands of IREA customers were still without power in the wake of Friday’s massive spring snowstorm, the Association held its annual meeting at the Ute Pass Cultural Center in Woodland Park – an event marked by a board election that represents the biggest challenge to Lewandowski’s authority (some would say “rule”) in his 35 years as GM.

The subject of several unflattering press profiles recently – most notably this long feature in Westword – the 71-year-old Lewandowski runs the state’s large rural electric cooperative, serving more than than 130,000 customers, or “members” in IREA parlance, in the far-flung suburbs surrounding Denver.

IREA customers enjoy the lowest electricity rates of any co-op customers in Colorado, and for three decades the association’s board of directors served as a Politburo for Lewandowski’s highly efficient and authoritarian management style. That changed two years ago when Mike Kempe, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, joined the board, and Lewandowski has made no secret of his contempt for both Kempe and his conservation-and-renewables positions on the state’s energy future.

Now three more reform-minded candidates, led by for school principal Mike Galvin and supported by an activist group called IREA Voices, are running for the seven-person board.

Scheduled to retire in 2011, Lewandowski has threatened to resign early if they win. And their election would mark a dramatic shift in direction for the association, which has refused to budge from its reliance on cheap energy from coal.

The briefest review of recent press coverage, and of the IREA Web site, makes it clear that Lewandowski operates the association as his personal fiefdom and a vehicle for his controversial views on energy policy – in particular on global climate change, which Lewandowski thinks is a crock cooked up by liberal scare-mongers. The association has resisted all attempts to adapt its policies for a new century, for example by dropping out of the Colorado Rural Electric Association last year when that group supported a bill to allow co-ops to voluntarily implement incentives for energy conservation. Lewandowski uses the association newsletter and its Web site as pulpits for anti-climate-change nonsense, he contributed some $100,000 of association funds to global-warming skeptic Patrick Michaels. IREA invested $336 million in Xcel’s new addition to the Comanche coal-fired power station, which will almost certainly be the last major coal project to be built in the state.

Lewandowski has also refused to let the co-op accept funds the Obama Administration’s energy-stimulus plan, which he claims “will be proven to be one of the biggest mistakes ever recorded.”

Tiring of such rearguard battling, state legislators have introduced a bill to require co-ops with more than 100,000 customers – a category with one member, IREA – to conserve 10% of their electricity use by 2020. Lewandowski, needless to say, has dismissed the legislature’s authority to dictate association policies. (The bill was sent to the House Appropriations Committee earlier this month.)

Stan Lewandowski has achieved much in his 35 years heading up IREA, playing a prominent role in the development of Colorado’s economy and in bettering the lives of many residents. Now, though, in a state that voted decisively for the “New Energy Economy” of Gov. Bill Ritter and that has become a center for renewable-energy technology, he’s become an anachronism, not to say an embarrassment. Regardless of the outcome of the IREA board vote, it’s time for him to retire.

Update: IREA election results seem to be boding well for Lewandoski. Results show incumbent (and Lewandowski supporter) George Heir has beaten IREA Voices candidate Charles Bucknam, and now we’ve learned that district 5 incumbent Bruff Shea has beaten challenger, and IREA Voices candidate, John Masson.