ALCORN COUNTY ELECTRIC POWER ASSOCIATION
THE CEO’s REPORT FOR THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MEMBERS
AUGUST 14, 2018
Good morning. Another year has quickly passed by and it is now time for another annual report. I now submit the 84thAnnual Report of the Alcorn County Electric Power Association. The 2017/2018 fiscal year has been another year of slow to no growth in our membership base; however, the work goes on for your Association. We continue to improve and strengthen the electric plant. The line crews have changed out 161 bad poles and converted several miles of single phase lines to more efficient 3 phase lines, which will provide better reliability along with better voltage regulation.
This year has also brought changes in our employee group. Peggy Winters and Sheila Hopkins chose to retire this year. Their dedication and service will be missed but we wish them well in their new adventure. We also had an employee resign. As a result of these changes we hired 5 new employees and they will be split between the office and the outside crews.
The financial position of ACE continues to be strong. The Electric Plant is steadily growing and is now at $92,235,173.54 up from last year’s value of $89,639,287.33, a growth of 3%. We are continuing to reduce Long-term Debt with this year’s debt at $1,606,834.81 down from $2,264,016.38 last year. This year’s Cash Flow Statement indicates that even though ACE had a good year with net income of $1,249,721.47, we invested all of that amount plus an additional $342,983.94 back into the Association.
The Engineering Department continues to stay busy designing new locations for automatic switching, which will continue to shorten the duration of power outages or switch power feeds to prevent outages. This process is costly and very technical; however, the benefits to the membership are unmeasurable. Also, this year we began using a new outage management system. This new system has simplified the reporting of an outage and makes it more efficient for the crews to respond to the outage directly, without having to hunt for a problem. Our crews continue to use the mobile service order system. This system requires that all our trucks be equipped with iPads to stay in constant contact with our office to allow quicker responses to our customers’ requests. The Meter Department is making progress on the meter conversion from PLC to RF meters and this project is now 80% complete.
Our members continue to take advantage of our prepay program, we now have over 2,200 members on PayWise. With the increase in PayWise customers, along with our members becoming more comfortable using electronic payment systems, our collection methods are continually changing. Today our in-office payment collections are down to 37% of our monthly collections, which is a decrease from 54% just 3 years ago. The number of members using our 3 kiosks continues to grow, now up to 22% of our payments come through the kiosk and the online payments have increased to 29%. The remaining 12% of the payments are on bank draft.
This year presented our employees with an opportunity to show their concern for their fellow workers at other electric cooperatives. Clay Electric in Keystone Heights, FL suffered major damage from Hurricane Irma and ACE sent 9 employees to assist in restoring power to their membership. Dixie Electric Power Association was hit by a snowstorm that caused major damage to their system and ACE was able to assist in their restoration by sending 4 employees to Laurel, MS.
In closing, I would like to thank our Board of Directors for their continued support of the ACE management team, allowing us to run your Association in a way we believe will be most beneficial to the membership. And thanks to the membership for supporting your Association.
Respectfully submitted,
Eddie L Howard, CEO
