President's Message

By Todd Ware, President & Chief Executive Officer

Your cooperative's leadership creates annual goals to establish or confirm business direction. The goals pinpoint areas for improvement and growth. Continuously seeking progress and growth in all areas is crucial to the quality of service we provide to you, our members. Here are a couple of our goals we met in 2022.

SAFETY

It should be no surprise that safety is always at the top of our priority list. We are proud to report our Incident and Days Away, Restrictions and Transfers (D.A.R.T.) rates fell well below industry averages for 2022 and the five-year average. In addition, our team completed the Rural Electric Safety Achievement Program (R.E.S.A.P.) observation with excellent results. This reflects our safetyconscious culture and consistent efforts in this area.

MEMBER SERVICES

We strive to remain above the industry average in meeting your expectations and overall satisfaction. In 2022, our American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores were eighty-four for gas members and eightyfive for electric members. The utility sector averages a seventy-two on this scale of 0-100, according to the Customer Satisfaction Index Energy Utilities Study 202122. We review our ACSI results and participant feedback closely to help us improve our overall member service.

TECHNOLOGY

We worked on several impactful projects in technology and communications last year. Our electric members can receive personalized outage notifications. The text message includes outage updates and restoration times. Members can ‘opt in’ to this service and a variety of other notifications in the SmartHub app. We are now testing Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for our metered propane members. AMI meters automatically communicate reads with us and members won’t need to send us readings every month. This will be a great benefit to our metered propane members. Our Marketing and Member Services department evaluates how members use our social media pages and website to improve the way we communicate with you.

CAPITAL

For several years, our capital expenditure budget has remained around twenty million dollars and was used to replace infrastructure and update our systems. The extreme growth happening in Western Licking County, however, prompted our Board of Directors to approve a record-setting capital expenditure budget of nearly thirty million dollars for 2022. While our goals outline much of what our teams should focus on, the announcements of companies moving into our service territory challenged our leadership to redirect where necessary and refocus on different needs. The massive growth potential is exciting for our communities, and I am grateful for a staff that can shift directions quickly.

During times like this, the value of supportive members, directors and employees is imperative, and I am grateful to say we have both. The Energy Cooperative's future is bright. There will be challenges, but your cooperative’s leadership will face them working in the best interest of our members.