Lawyers from Autry, Horton & Cole and McKenna Long & Aldridge worked opposite sides of a $55 million power company transaction with philosophical roots dating back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

The deal involved selling Sowego LLC, which owns a 100-megawatt power plant in Mitchell County, to the Georgia Energy Cooperative, or GEC, which is a coalition of energy producers providing power for rural areas.

Kenneth T. Horton Jr. of Autry Horton, who represented GEC, and Robert E. Tritt of McKenna Long, who represented Sowego, both said the deal took more than a year to put together because of the numerous approvals the parties had to obtain from entities including the Rural Utilities Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“It was not an asset purchase,” said Horton, but a purchase of the limited liability company which owns the plant. If his client bought only the plant, he said, it would not have preserved Sowego’s existing contracts for water, gas and other services.

The parties also had to get the approval of pre-existing lenders. The Sowego plant had been financed by Ambac Assurance Corp., and in 2001, Sowego issued bonds that Ambac purchased, said Horton, who worked on the deal with partners Charles T. Autry and Roland F. Hall. By purchasing the limited liability company instead of the plant itself, he added, GEC essentially agreed to repay the bonds through power purchase agreements but did not have to directly assume—or refinance—the loan.

The purchase was part of a larger transaction that brought two electric membership corporations, or EMCs—Grady EMC in Cairo and Three Notch EMC in Donalsonville—into the previously 13-member GEC. The two new EMCs were indirect, part-owners of the Sowego plant, Tritt said, and they inked additional power purchase contracts with GEC as part of the deal.

Each member of GEC will pay a pro rata share of the cost of acquiring the Sowego company based on their electricity usage. Payments will be made via a decades-long power purchase agreement, according to Horton.

The deal’s Roosevelt-era roots come from the creation of electric cooperatives, a power production structure that had its beginnings in Georgia when Roosevelt visited Warm Springs for polio treatments and discovered that power costs there were high because of the cost of transmitting electricity to rural areas.

His realization led to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which prompted the creation of cooperatives initially designed to generate reliable, affordable power for farmers.

Georgia now has 42 electric cooperatives, which Horton said serve about 70 percent of the state’s land area. The Sowego plant, he said, is a gas-fired “peaking plant,” which means it runs only during extremely hot or cold weather, when lower-cost, coal-fired plants cannot keep up with peak customer demand. All 15 GEC members, he said, will use the plant.