ACSR to Meet, Discuss Proxy Votes, AP&L Plant

The Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility will meet today for the first time this semester to discuss the proxy issues it will consider this spring and to renew its discussion of whether to recommend that Harvard oppose a proposed Arkansas power plant.

The ACSR will also meet with the student Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and Community Affairs to discuss the student group's role in its decisions.

ACSR chairman Stanley S. Surrey, Smith Professor of Law, said yesterday he doubts the ACSR will reach any decisions in today's meeting.

Since the ACSR last discussed Arkansas Power and Light's proposed coal-burning plant near Pine Bluff, Ark., in January, AP&L has filed a new 1000-page environmental impact statement on the plant.

AP&L issued the statement after the Arkansas Public Service Commission rejected its initial environmental impact statement last fall, giving AP&L a list of 128 questions the original statement left unanswered.

Surrey said yesterday the ACSR has not yet examined the new AP&L impact statement, but that "the statement is being looked at by informed people in this area." He declined to name the people looking at the statement.

The ACSR is discussing the plant in response to a request last fall from an Arkansas community group that Harvard help oppose the plant.

Harvard is the largest single stockholder--with 560,000 shares, worth about $9.3 million--in Middle South Utilities Inc., a New York City holding company that owns AP&L and five other Southern utilities.

The Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN) asked Harvard to pressure AP&L to install additional sulfur dioxide controls on the plant's smokestacks and to provide expert testimony on the plant at the public service commission's licensing hearings.

Some of the areas the ACSR may be making proxy recommendations on this spring are resolutions:

* To have corporations that made illegal contributions to President Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign, including Phillips Petroleum, ensure that no such donations be made to future campaigns;

* Asking oil corporations, including Gulf Oil and Exxon, to report on their energy production and profit levels;

* Asking corporations including General Electric and General Motors to provide information on their employment of women and minorities; and

* Asking companies including Gulf and Exxon to give up their holdings and operations from South African nations that have racially disciminatory governments.

Sabino Rodriguez III '74, an undergraduate ACSR member, said yesterday the South African proxy resolutions are the "big thing" the student ACSR will concentrate on this spring.

An ACORN spokesman said yesterday that five of the additional 19 colleges and universities owning AP&L stock that ACORN asked last month to help oppose the plant have said they will investigate its environmental impact.

Steven L. Kest '74 said Princeton, Cornell, and Vanderbilt Universities and the Universities of Wisconsin and North Carolina have promised to look into the plant's environmental impact