An independent national report compares Tri-County to 815 electric cooperatives. Here is what the results mean for members.
Stewardship usually gets heard as a money word. Spend less. Cut where you can. Hold the line.
That is part of it, but it is the smallest part. To Tri-County, stewardship also means managing well everything the membership has already entrusted to this Cooperative. That is roughly $1 billion in poles, wire, substations, trucks, technology, and the crews and staff who keep all of it running.
An outside look at how we are doing
Measuring an organization against itself only tells one part of the story. This year the current leadership team received its first independent national benchmarking report, a comparison of Tri-County against 815 electric cooperatives across the country on 135 measures of financial health, operating efficiency, and cost.
That is not a trophy. It is a checkup, and it confirms what the past two years of work were supposed to produce.
The improvement did not reach every measure. Some of those gaps reflect deliberate choices, such as spending more on right-of-way maintenance than in any recent year. Others are still on the list of things to fix. Better to say that plainly than to hand members only the good half.
What the progress actually bought
Reducing debt was never the accomplishment. Neither was ending reliance on the line of credit, lowering interest expense, or strengthening cash flow. Those were milestones.
What they really did was create options.
Those options cleared tree trimming backlogs that had been building for years, the single biggest driver of outages on a system like this one. They covered millions of dollars in unexpected storm costs without giving up ground on other work. They kept system modernization moving.
None required an increase in base rates. None of that happened because the Cooperative suddenly had extra money. It happened because disciplined decisions created the room to make better ones.
The measure that matters now
The financial turnaround is behind Tri-County. The standard is now different, and it is the one that members actually experience. Fewer outages. Shorter outages. Power members can count on.
That is a harder number to move than a balance sheet. Trees grow back. Storms come through. Equipment fails at three in the morning. But a cooperative with options can respond to those things instead of simply enduring them, and that is the difference two years of stewardship has made.
Members will hear Tri-County come back to this word in the months ahead. That is on purpose. It is the simplest way to explain the thinking behind the work the Tri-County team does every day.
Thank you for your continued partnership.
Scott Spence, President and CEO