Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to the Buzz, a podcast by Boone Electra Cooperative. The Buzz is a monthly message to our community celebrating what it means to be a member owner of your local electric cooperative, Boone Electric Cooperative, your co op, our community.
[00:00:26] Speaker C: Welcome back to the Buzz, Zach. I'm Zach Smith, communications specialist at Boone Electric Cooperative, and thank you for joining us for part two of our conversation about Boone Electric Cooperative's most frequently asked member questions with Boone Electric's assistant general manager, Vicky Kemna. We talked a little bit about the capital credits and the capital credit allocation notice and how that's one of many things that set us apart as an electric cooperative. One of the other things that's unique to the electric cooperative world, of course, is annual meeting, which we're getting ready for on September 10th this year.
And I have heard a lot of questions about annual meeting. We always get some that morning when people are coming in to vote, when they're registering, you know, who can vote, who can't. And one of the questions that I know I've heard during that, especially the last few years during the drive through process is, well, I live at this address or I live at this household that's served by Boone Electric. Why can't I vote?
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Great question. And yes, we've heard that many, many times.
Boone Electric and all electric cooperatives are founded on democratic principles. And you know, in a democracy you can register to vote and you are encouraged to vote in political elections either, you know, in April or November in Missouri. And everyone who is 18 or older can register to vote and vote in that democratic process. And while electric cooperatives are founded on similar democratic principles, our membership is based on the name that is on the account and that is the person or the business that gets to cast their vote. It's not everybody in who lives in that household like it is, you know, in a general political election for the federal government or the state government.
So that's a little bit different and kind of sometimes hard for people to understand.
And even if those we have a lot of members that say, well, you know, yes, the account's in my husband's name, but I pay the bill, or the accounts in my wife's name, but I pay the bill, it is the membership is tied to the name on that membership application form. So when you've signed up for service, whatever name you put down on that membership application, that is the person or the entity that is the actual member, and that is the only person that has the legal right to cast a vote in a cooperative election.
And yes, that is sometimes it's a little different than a general election that you're used to in the political realm. But it's important that it stays that way because. Because it's one member, one vote. As a member of Boone Electric, I don't want a company that may have 1000 meters getting 1000 votes and overruling my one vote. Because I am just as important as that one business who may have 1,000 meters. And they're no more important than I am as an individual member. And that's important for the membership to understand.
That rule is in place to protect the individual member.
So the co op isn't unduly influenced by a larger one larger company that may have more accounts with the co op.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: One way that I tried to explain it to people because the other thing that gets a little bit confusing, I think for folks is when we have a single membership versus a joint membership. And so you may have two people's names on the membership, but that's still an instance where it's, it's one membership, one vote. So either one of those two people on a joint membership can vote, but only one of them is allowed to cast that vote. In other words, if a married couple were to come into annual meeting to vote, one of those people may cast the vote, but not both of them.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:04:26] Speaker C: And I think that confuses people sometimes too, because you see two names and so it's in your mind, it's like, okay, well, there are two members, but it's. It's two people's names on one membership.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: So that's one where I know we have often in the communications world, when we talk about the cooperative principles, especially refer to it as one member, one vote. And that may have unduly reinforced the idea that every single person whose name is on that account has a vote when it's one membership that they're representing.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Maybe think of it as a way of. As a joint checking account. If husband and wife have a. Their names on a joint checking account, it's still one checking account.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: So it's the same situation as our, as our membership.
[00:05:08] Speaker C: And if for some reason you are on a single membership and want to change it to a joint membership, that's as simple as contacting us here at Boone Electric. And we can, we can get all that sorted out before September 10th.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. The, the person named on the account would have to authorize the, the additional person to be named as a joint. But we can definitely do that and take care of that for the member before September 10th, before annual meeting, please.
[00:05:32] Speaker C: Before September 10th.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And if you are a single, have a single membership, you can sign the proxy form that will be included in the Rural Missouri magazine and have someone else. If you're not able to come to annual meeting and cast your vote yourself, you can sign a proxy of someone who is above the age of 18, who lives in your household. So if that person can attend the annual meeting, they can cast your vote for you on your behalf. But we have to have that signed proxy.
[00:06:03] Speaker C: That proxy process is also kind of a unique mechanism for annual meeting. And if you need more information on that, keep an eye on your mailbox. You'll be receiving your issue of Rural Missouri very soon with Boone Electric Cooperatives plugged in pages. Which one of those pages in this coming issue is, is going to have a lot of information for you about how to fill out that proxy form, who exactly has to fill it out, who has to bring it and that, all of that information. And if you have any questions after reading that, please feel free to contact us.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: And that kind of brings us to another frequently asked question is if I vote absentee, which is another option to vote if you're not able to attend annual meeting. We have an absentee voting period. And so we get this question a lot too is why can't I get my registration prize, my $20 bill credit if I vote absentee? And the reason for that is we give out registration prizes and the bill credits that we've. We've gone to since the last several years as a way to get people to attend annual meeting to count towards our quorum.
[00:07:14] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: It's not something that we do just to get give out bill credits to all of our members.
[00:07:23] Speaker C: We're.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: We're incentivizing people to attend so that we can have a legal annual meeting. So we have rules in place where we have to reach a quorum number. And so to incentivize folks coming to what could be just a normal boring business meeting, we have encouraged members to come by giving them bill credit. Absentee voting in our bylaws does not count towards the quorum. So therefore, those members who vote by absentee are not eligible for the bill credit that we give out on the day of annual meeting. But if you are a member and you fill out a proxy and someone in your household brings that proxy to vote at annual meeting, then your account would get the bill credit for that because they are counting towards the quorum. You know, we've always had annual meeting a lot of people refer to it, or they used to refer to it as the. The Boone electric picnic. And we had, you know, we gave out food, and we used to have a carnival, and we had registration prizes and all that was an expense. It was a large expense. But we did that to incentivize people to attend because we. We didn't want to have a annual meeting that we would have to do over again because we didn't have enough people show up.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So that is. That is why we have those things at our annual meeting. You know, we just can't give a bill credit to everybody because, you know, there's a reason why they're getting the bill credit is for their attendance at the annual meeting.
[00:08:57] Speaker C: And that's another one where I've heard some wild misunderstandings of that concept, which I can understand where they come from. But people sometimes have the misunderstanding that the bill credit is incentivizing you to come vote, but the bill credit is actually just to register. You can come in, register the day of annual meeting, that bill credit automatically gets applied to your account. You can drive right through the garage and never look at the iPad to cast a vote. It has nothing to do with the actual voting, only to do with reaching that quorum number, which legitimizes the meeting. And yeah, like you said, we don't have to organize everything and set everything up to have it again. And by the same or the opposite side of that coin, when you come in to vote absentee, you are not registering on the day of the meeting to meet that quorum number, but you're voting.
The ballot that you cast is still counted in the tabulation of the results.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: So that is correct. The registration prize, the bill credit, has nothing to do with the voting aspect of annual meeting.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Correct. It only goes to serve the purpose of reaching quorum.
[00:10:04] Speaker C: Yes, this is switching gears entirely, but it is a question that we get a lot that they hear. Definitely a lot in the operations and engineering side of the building. I'm building a new home and need an easement to bring power to my house. But my neighbor isn't cooperating. What do I do?
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Oh, gosh.
[00:10:25] Speaker C: Open that whole can of worms.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Yeah, this is a big can of worms.
And I am not an easement expert by any means. There's a lot of legal aspects to obtaining an easement, But I do know I can touch on at a very high level why we need an easement and why what the easement process does for the co op down the road as far as maintaining and construction, constructing power lines. Unfortunately, people don't like the earth moved on the property that they. That they own. But I encourage all members to take a step back from the emotions of that and think about how their property got electricity to their house 40, 50 years ago, whatever the case may be. Right.
Someone provided an easement to them to bring power across the countryside from the substation to get power to their home.
And my first response is, I really wish everyone could be more neighborly and we don't have to create an argument or a fight. I think generally people are good and they have good hearts, but people get very protective of the things that they own, and they don't want a power pole in their yard or their field or whatever. So our field engineers, when we meet with a person who's building a new home or a new shed or whatever the case may be that needs power brought to their structure, we meet with them and we tell them, you know, this is where we need to build the power line so that we can better maintain it and more efficiently maintain it in the future. Because at some point, we're going to have to get access to that location again, either during the middle of the night, during an outage, or just doing regular maintenance during the day, at some point, we're going to need to access that property. So we have to have an easement to give us the right to be there. Right. But we rely on the homeowner to get those easements for us from their neighbors. So if we have to build a power line that crosses their neighbor's property, the homeowner that's requesting the new service is responsible for getting that easement on our behalf. And sometimes that can cause problems for the homeowner. And I know it's frustrating, and we will do everything that we can to work with the homeowner, and we will even talk to the neighbors. But I, without getting into all the legal parts of an easement, I would encourage anyone that's listening to this to think about how they got electricity to their home. Because there are a lot of easements that were given and prescribed. That's a legal term, prescribed easements for them to get electricity from the substation, because, you know, nobody has a substation in their front yard. That'd be the only way that you would need an easement to get electricity to your home is if you had a substation built in your front yard.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: And if you don't like an easement, you really are not going to like having a substation there.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Yeah, you're not exactly. Exactly. So it is an issue that we hear a lot about. And I know that it's frustrating for new home builders, but we will do whatever we can to try to make the process as smooth as possible.
And we will be happy to talk to the neighbors and try to explain the situation and also try to find a location that makes the most sense for both the homeowner and us, you know, in the location of our facilities in the fields. So, yeah, easements are. They're tricky. They can be tricky.
[00:14:08] Speaker C: Yeah. I can't imagine. But they are important. I mean, as you mentioned earlier, at some point there's going to be maintenance required, whether it's of vegetation in that area or the equipment itself. These days, I can't think of anybody who wouldn't need power. Everybody needs to be connected to it and at some point everybody's going to probably need it turned back on for them. So it's an important part of the process. Painful as it can probably be sometimes.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Yeah. My hope is that people just get along, you know, that's what, that's what we want.
[00:14:38] Speaker C: It would be so much better.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Rainbows and lollipops.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, speaking of rainbows and lollipops, the last question that we have, at least for today, I didn't pay my bill on time and my power was disconnected. Why are you so mean? How's that for rainbows and lollipops?
[00:14:55] Speaker A: We try not to be so mean, but there, unfortunately, sometimes we do have to disconnect power for non payment of an electric bill. You know, I'm here for straight talk, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot it to you straight. And there's not many times where you can go to a gas station and get gas and then pull away from the pump without paying.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: And even though you can't see your electricity and it doesn't look and smell like gasoline, it's still a fuel and you still have to pay for it. It's not free.
So when you use electricity, unfortunately we have to bill you for that use of electricity because we have to pay for the electricity that we are providing for you. We have expenses. We have to pay our power supplier for those kilowatt hours that are going to your meter to power your home. If you don't pay as a member, someone has to pay for that.
[00:15:54] Speaker C: And in an electric cooperative, that someone
[00:15:56] Speaker A: is everybody else, everybody else, all the other members.
So we do have policies in place that cover our cost.
And when we, you know, would have to disconnect someone for non payment of their electric bill. We try not to be mean about it. We're not mean. The people that work in the front office and our utility service workers, they're a group of the best people that I know.
[00:16:19] Speaker C: We're probably the two meanest people in the cooperative. We probably are.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: We probably are, Zach. I for sure am sometimes in my role, unfortunately. But if a member doesn't pay their electric bill, that cost gets distributed amongst all the members. And while we're one member, one vote, we are also all in this together.
And it's unfair. Even though that I just don't really like that word fair. It is unfair to the other cooperative members who are paying their electric bill to have to pay for the members who aren't. So if you are finding yourself in a situation where you're not able to afford your monthly electric bill, I encourage you before you get that disconnect notice, if you know you're going to be running short of funds for the month, please call us or come into the office and we will do everything that we can to help you find assistance, maybe put you on a budget billing plan if you're eligible for that. We can even send our member service technicians to your home to investigate maybe why your home is using so much electricity and give you pointers on what you can do in your home to reduce your electricity bill to make it more affordable for you. So if members wait until they're disconnected to come and talk to us, we have late fees and things that are tacked on to the bill, just which just makes it worse for the member who already can't afford their electric bill. So I encourage everybody to come to us early and come to us often and talk to us and we'll be happy to help and try to figure out a way to make your electric bill manageable for you. We don't want to tack on those fees any more than you want us to, you know, include those additional disconnect fees and late fees.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: Sure. So yeah, there are always different circumstances for why somebody can't pay. And you mentioned a lot of the solutions to it. If the bill is too high, maybe your usage is being pushed up by something that can be fixed and that's where our member service technicians come in with the energy efficiency reviews which are free to all of our members. We can come in, take a look at things and figure out where there are some places that your efficiency can be improved in your home and that might help the bill come down. There are a lot of programs out there, especially through groups like CMCA with weatherization and things like that that can help people or energy billing assistance, even in some cases. And then we have a lot of different billing options that can really help people, depending on what their situation is. Prepaid is another one that I know we talk about a lot. Please call us before you have to start dealing with disconnect notices and things like that. It's a lot easier to sort some of those problems out before they become a problem than trying to deal with it afterwards and then catching up with those fees and things like you mentioned,
[00:19:15] Speaker A: it's a lot easier and it's a lot cheaper.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: The fees are added after if they're late or if they're disconnected.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: So, yeah, Another thing that I feel like I say almost every other podcast, the best distillation of the whole electric cooperative mentality that I've ever heard was shortly after I started in this industry and. And somebody at another electric cooperative said, I can't think of another business that wants to help you use less of its product. And so while there's always this, you know, again, kind of another myth or a misunderstanding that we're just out to take as much money from people as we can for many reasons related to the cooperative business model, we would love to help you use the amount of electricity that you need and not any more than that.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:20:04] Speaker C: So if you have any kilowatt hour more. Yes, exactly. If you have any questions about any of those topics, please feel free to Visit us online. Boonelectric Co op. Come by the office, 1413 Rangeline street or call us at 573-449-4181. I think that does it for now. As far as all of the questions that we can think of off the top of our heads sitting here for
[00:20:25] Speaker A: now, I'm happy to come back and answer any other questions that might that may pop up.
[00:20:30] Speaker C: Okay. Well, you will be now that you said that, but thank you for coming in and talking through those. Vicki. I know it's again, stuff that you've heard your whole career and stuff that I've heard in my much shorter career, but it bears repeating the answers to those things so that people don't get the wrong idea embedded in there for too long.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And maybe when I retire in a few years, I'll write the book and delete the names to protect the innocent.
[00:20:55] Speaker C: Absolutely. When you write the book, come back and we'll talk about the book.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome.
[00:21:00] Speaker C: Or all the stuff you couldn't put in the book.
[00:21:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: I have great stories.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: Well, we'll hear some of those next time. Thank you again, Vicki, for joining the show.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: My pleasure. Thanks, Zach.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: And thank all of you for joining us on this month's episode. Be sure to come back next month. And until then, we'll see you somewhere down the line.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Thank you for tuning in to the Buzz, a podcast by Boone Electric Cooperative. To subscribe or for more information, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram X and LinkedIn. And of course, you can always visit us 247 at Boonelectric Co op. Boone Electric Cooperative, your co op, our community.
