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News & Views from Your Elected Representatives
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Board Meeting
January 22, 2002
The meeting was called to
order at 7:01 pm by President John Elliott. The meeting Agenda and Consent
Calendar were approved with the exception of the Financial Report, Operations
Report, Member Services Report and Annual Customer Contact Summary, which were
removed at the request of management.
General Manager, Bob Speckman, stated that the
department reports are removed from the Consent Calendar every January for
year-end discussion.
The Financial Report included the Balance Sheet,
Statement of Operations, Checks Written Report and Credit Information.
Questions followed.
The Operations Report highlighted the year-end summary
information and construction activities. The average minutes of interruption
time in 2001 was 13.04 minutes - down from 40.45 minutes in 2000. It was
reported that Salem Electric's numbers are far lower than Public Utilities
Commission projections.
The Annual Customer Contact Summary was reviewed for
2001. A total of 414 contacts were received, with 80% of them being problems
related to customers' equipment or unfounded situations. There were 88
compliments received throughout the year.
The Member Services Report reviewed the Residential
Conservation Incentive Program, which has over 1,600 members signed up to date,
resulting in high energy savings.
Salem Electric's website received over 230,000 hits in
2001, with the average length of visit posted at 14 minutes. At the conclusion
of the department reports the remaining Consent Calendar items were approved by
the board.
Angie Thomas, the Leadership Youth representative,
updated the board on her past month's activities and introduced Karen Amico,
her mentor at Leadership Youth.
Bob Speckman reported that the National Rural Electric
Cooperative Association has selected the Oregon statewide association to
receive an award for its grassroots outreach program. Salem Electric
participates in the grassroots effort to inform our elected officials on issues
of concern to the cooperative membership.
Speckman also apprised the board of the upcoming
North- west Public Power Association annual meeting.
In preparation for the Salem Electric annual meeting,
Speckman discussed the idea of continuing to have employees make presentations
to the members about their jobs and provide quality information to the members
about the company.
The board agreed with this format. The board approved
a revised Miscellaneous Fee Schedule for field service collections and
short-term service requests that are under 30 days.
There were no members who wished to address the board,
and the meeting adjourned at 8:25 p.m.
Jeff Anderson
Secretary/Treasurer
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Education in the electrical industry - how does it come
about? How does it present itself to our total communities day after day? The
opportunities are endless if we take advantage of communication processes, the
media, television, publications, radio, books, conversations, workshops and on
and on.
Having gone through all of these communication
elements, your elected directors of Salem Electric strive to sort through all
that we read, see and hear to determine what is real for this moment in time,
to have the vision and insight to make intelligent decisions. We try to
recognize the subtleties behind the written word, the fast-breaking news, to
pick and choose; it isn't always easy, given that our world is changing so
rapidly.
What if, suddenly, we were a nation without
communication, without electricity? We would be a people in crisis. It would
change the way we look at our world. We would live from memory of how things
were, like the reminiscences of the American Indian, or as the fictional
characters of Brigadoon who return to their Irish town every hundred years
where nothing has changed.
Back to the reality of Spring 2002 and the pursuit of
information available today.
Communication allows us to see what's coming down the
pike. We learn that Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been suggested as a repository
to store spent fuel and radioactive waste, currently stored at over 131 sites
in 39 states, a plan as a protection from terrorism. Nevadans are angry, and
are fighting the proposal.
New wind turbines in Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Washington
and throughout North America are generating clean, renewable, earth-friendly
power. A new turbine erected in an Iowa city generated more electricity in its
first two weeks of operation than the city's first wind turbine generated in an
average year.
Multiple sources of energy are being explored and
tested, such as biomass, geothermal, solar and fuel cells, with necessary
pollution control equipment required in coal-fired plants in New Jersey. In
Tennessee, soybean-based oil is replacing the petroleum-based mineral oil in
conventional transformers. This new product is safer should a spill occur,
leaves no hazardous waste and is better for the environment.
At customers' request, a utility in Santa Clara,
California purchased electric commuter buses through a fund supported by the
consumers who pay 2.85% of their electric bill to the fund. The Breathe Easy
Express buses, as they are called, are more comfortable, quieter, and have no
diesel smell. New trends and new products are always on the horizon. An
innovative program of cartoons promoting electrical safety for school children
has been implemented in some areas.
A note of caution lest we become too comfortable, too
complacent in our world. We should expect the unexpected. We've seen the
ill-fated deregulation crisis in California. We've seen the collapse of Enron,
where greed, lack of ethics, unbridled ambition and a loss of focus, allowed a
few executives to rob many thousands of their life savings. No one stepped
forward to say, "You can't do this!" Those in the know looked the
other way. There were no meaningful investigations of Enron from 1997 to 2001.
We will learn from Enron. The giant did not have
appropriate oversight by federal regulators. Co-ops continually ask congress to
include consumer protection in the legislation it writes. Cooperatives focus on
the customer and have the ability to adapt. America's 930 consumer-owned
co-ops, with 17 in Oregon (the newest being the Umpqua Indian Utility
Cooperative near Roseburg), tend to nurture the customer. That is as it should
be. We are the customers.
Alicia K. Bonesteele
President
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