CULLMAN, Ala. – The Cullman Electric Cooperative (CEC) held its 83rd annual meeting at Northbrook Baptist Church in Cullman Saturday morning. One of the highlights was CEC President Tim Culpepper’s announcement that rates will not increase this year.He drew applause from the audience when he announced that, for the first time in seven years, the Tennessee Valley Authority, from which CEC buys electricity, did not increase its rates. He then announced that the Board of Trustees had decided not to increase rates.
Approximately 1,500 CEC members signed in at the registration table and overall attendance, including guests and family members of registrants, was anticipated to reach upwards of 3,000. Outside the church, visitors found CEC equipment displays, inflatables for the kids, free food and drinks, live music by Avenue G, a bucket lift photo booth and other activities, along with a chance to view the surplus 2003 CEC Ford Ranger utility truck raffled at the meeting. Inside, visitors were treated to live gospel music by The Freemans.
On the agenda for the meeting were elections for three of the nine seats on the CEC Board of Trustees:
- District Two – Kathy Scruggs opposed incumbent Sheila Sizemore. Sizemore was reelected with 4,115 votes to 2,057 for Scruggs.
- District Four – Incumbent James Fields was unopposed.
- District Six – Incumbent Daryl Calvert was unopposed.
Auditors reported that 330 votes were cast on Saturday morning, added to 6,110 mailed in before the meeting, for a total of 6,440 votes cast in the election.
During his address, CEC President Tim Culpepper told the audience that the co-op’s customer satisfaction rate reached 88 out of 100 in 2017 (the most recent year available), a number higher than several prominent national companies listed in the slide show.
Culpepper called the rate, “better than most other utilities, and better than a lot of the businesses you might know,” and added, “but we know we can do better.”
He then addressed CEC’s reliability, saying, “We’ve had a tough year. We’ve had a lot of outages this year.”
Culpepper pointed out that 70% of CEC’s outages were weather-related, mostly due to trees blown down onto lines. Six percent of outages were caused by incidents involving animals, and five percent were caused by accidents such as cars hitting poles or people cutting down trees which then fell on lines. Another six percent of outages were planned. CEC even had to deal with an airplane striking one of its lines, according to Culpepper.
He went on to talk about proactive measures CEC plans to take moving forward, like identifying right-of-way areas that have not recently been cut, but might be grown up and need to be cut back earlier in the annual work schedule to prevent storm-related tree damage, and increasing the rate of replacement of old power line poles.
After announcing that rates will not increase, Culpepper went on to talk about how CEC is trying to handle the money that its customers pay. He pointed out that 73% of all CEC expenditures are for electricity, leaving only 27% for all administrative and payroll expenses.
Said Culpepper, “We try to be good stewards of that money, and work efficiently. We are, compared to most co-ops, we’re in the top 10% of doing the most with the least number of employees. We try to keep and run as lean an operation as we can. For every employee we have, there are over 400 meters that have to be taken care of. And that’s extremely, extremely lean, and we’re very proud of being able to offer the service that we do, with the way that we do it.
Culpepper closed by inviting members to contact CEC with any questions or concerns they might have.
For more on the Cullman Electric Cooperative, including contact information, visit https://cullmanec.com.
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