MONCKS CORNER, S.C. - While debate swirls in Columbia over who controls the makeup of the Santee Cooper board, chairman Guerry Green said again Monday that there are no plans to sell the state-owned utility.

"Nobody is interested in selling Santee Cooper," Green told Ken Ford, a former president and chief executive officer of the utility, during a board meeting. "That report you have in your hand is behind us now."

The report was a study by an investment bank released earlier this month that said the utility has assets of $5 billion and equity of $900 million.

The report by Credit Suisse First Boston was undertaken at the suggestion of the governor's office. Monday was the first meeting of the board since members have had a chance to study it.

But Ford told the board "this isn't going to go away." He said there were suggestions in 1985 and in 1989 that that Santee Cooper be sold.

"I just want the board to know everything they can possibly know about what the impact is," he said.

Green said talk of a sale "is just a great myth and hopefully that myth will go away."

"I am concerned many times in the report that people talk about taxes being paid to the state," Ford said. If anybody was shortchanged, he said, it was the counties.

"Let's go to Fairfield, Anderson, Berkeley, Horry and Georgetown and talk about it. If the check was laid down on the table today and it was distributed to the people that have been shortchanged property-tax wise, it would be divvied up, primarily to those five counties," he said.

The board also heard from the sister and father of Thomas A. Moore, 33, who died at the state-owned utility's water plant in Moncks Corner five years ago.

While investigators said he died of natural causes related to a slight heart abnormality, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said last week he is re-evaluating the report after Moore's family presented evidence the worker may have been exposed to an ammonia gas leak at the plant.

Rhonda Moore urged the utility to use more than one operator in the water plant at nights and on weekends.

"One person knowing how to operate that plant is not enough," she told the board. "In a post 9-11 world, this is unacceptable."

She said the plant needs two operators and security needs to be increased to make the plant completely secure and prevent tampering with the water supply.

Santee Cooper president and chief executive officer Lonnie Carter said he would get back to the family quickly.