Rocheport’s seat on the Boone Electric Cooperative board was on the ballot this year, and both candidates for it live near Rocheport. Randy Mueller won it by 59 votes.
Boone Electric posted the results of its Sept. 10 annual meeting on the co-op’s annual meeting page. The co-op says 2,501 members registered, down from 2,821 at last year’s meeting, according to the 2025 meeting minutes.
The board races
Boone Electric’s nine-member board has three districts. Each year one seat in each district is up for a three-year term. Rocheport falls in District 2: the co-op’s bylaws define it partly as Township 48 North, Ranges 14 and 15 West, and federal land-survey maps put the town in those two townships.
- District 2: Randall “Randy” Mueller, 1,047; Thomas Trabue, 988. Mueller is a physician and medical director of Shelter Insurance, and practiced emergency medicine at Boone Hospital for 30 years. The co-op’s candidate profile says he lives on 50 acres in the Rocheport area. Trabue is a professional engineer who recently moved from west Columbia to the Rocheport area. He also ran for a District 2 seat last year and lost to Michelle Motley, 1,472 to 737.
- District 3: Paul Dickinson, 1,014; Matthew Morasch, 947. Dickinson is director of security, safety and emergency management at MU Health Care and a retired Columbia assistant police chief. Morasch, a retired Jefferson City public works director, also ran last year and finished third.
- District 1: Darin Schnarre, 1,419; Jon Bequette, 666. Schnarre, a Centralia farmer, has served on the board since 2017 and is its vice president. He was the only incumbent on the ballot.
The co-op’s board page now lists Mueller in District 2 and Dickinson in District 3. All six candidates were put forward by the co-op’s nominating committee. None ran by petition.
The bylaw changes
Members passed all four proposed bylaw amendments. The most debated was Amendment 3, which passed 1,466 to 640, about 70 percent in favor. It is the petition change we wrote about before the vote. A member who wants to run for the board without the nominating committee’s backing now needs signatures from 1 percent of the membership instead of one-quarter of 1 percent, and all of them have to be gathered within 30 days of the first one, according to the co-op’s amendment text. With roughly 28,000 members, that works out to about 280 signatures instead of about 70, according to KOMU. The amendment also moves the nominating committee’s work earlier in the year. The committee’s slate must now be posted 120 days before the meeting instead of 90.
Before the vote, State Rep. Gregg Bush, D-Columbia, and the advocacy group Renew Missouri opposed the change. Renew Missouri’s policy director told KOMU it would make Boone Electric “the most restrictive cooperative in the entire state.”
The other three amendments were less contested:
- Amendment 1 (1,732 to 366) clarifies how a quorum is counted at members’ meetings.
- Amendment 2 (1,713 to 372) adds director qualifications. Directors and candidates may not hold, or run for, a paid elected public office, and they must follow the board’s policy on conduct.
- Amendment 4 (1,698 to 374) sets rules for when directors may attend board meetings by phone or video.
Members also approved the minutes of the 2025 annual meeting, 2,154 to 53. The amended bylaws are posted on the co-op’s bylaws page.
Boone Electric serves all of Rocheport. The board meets on the fourth Wednesday of each month, and members can reach the directors at BoardofDirectors@BooneElectric.com.
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