Are we connected?

• Author: Wood, A. Paul
• Position: Sale of an electric cooperative in retrospect

Are you tired, run down? Is the pressure getting to you? Are you ready to throw in the towel? Do you dread going to work in the morning, and flinch every time the telephone rings? If you answer yes to most of these questions, you could be headed for a sellout. These symptoms don't occur overnight. They build up over a period of months, years.

Bossier Rural Electric Membership Cooperative is no more. It's gone. It didn't happen overnight--it took nearly 12 years.

Why did this cooperative fail? In a short two-word answer, "high rates." With a 50 to 60% rate disparity much of the time, the cooperative's board, manager and employees simply wore down. Why did they want to sell out? After 12 years they were tired of the fight and in the end they were offered some incentives by the investor-owned utility who purchased the cooperative.

Once you start down the long death spiral it's hard to change course. Somewhere in BREMCO's 12-year death spiral, rate disparity caused the board to make some bad choices. These choices were in the area of cutting expenses for customer service, member relations and communications. At the press conference announcing the sale of the cooperative the board president stated that he had been working for the sale for about 11 years. That may or may not be true. One fact that is without dispute is that if you don't offer outstanding service, not just excellent service, but outstanding service; if your member relations and communications are not outstanding; if you are not involved in your communities and if your attitude is we will only sell electricity, we don't want to get in any other business, you are going to have a hard time surviving and if you have a large rate disparity on top of those things, I predict you will not survive.

Anytime you have a failure you look back and ask yourself, what could I have done? What signs should I have seen? Should I have known this was coming? In the case of BREMCO, there were not a lot of advance signals. The cooperative was attractive to the investor-owned utility because its service area encompassed a prime economic development area of the state. Their service area surrounded a major military installation. It ran along the Red River that had just been made navigable to barge transportation connecting it to the Mississippi.

The first clue we missed that signaled a sellout might be in the works or something unusual was happening at the cooperative was when it did not take advantage of...