SouthEastern’s commitment to its membership begins by helping them keep their electric bills as low as possible and their service reliability as high as possible, consistent with sound business practices.  Service is delivered to members at cost and any margins that exist at the end of a respective year are allocated for return to members at a future date.

However, what we offer to the communities we serve goes far beyond "just keeping the lights on." It’s neighbors helping neighbors and involves cooperative personnel providing "Live Line" electrical safety programs to literally thousands of area grade school students.  Providing such programs has a cost, but the cost of not providing them could be much greater.  "Service" means not only making sure the electricity is flowing, but also making sure that the community and its residents are as safe as possible.

Another advantage of being locally owned is that our members can resolve questions about service and bills locally.  They even have the option of coming into our local Eldorado office and discussing them with a local employee "eyeball to eyeball" if they so desire.  This is in sharp contrast with our investor owned neighbors who have closed local offices and consolidated their operations with distant or even out-of-state facilities.

The recent blackout of 2003 makes "locally owned" look even more attractive than it has in the past, but interestingly the lights had not yet come back on in Times Square when some politicians became instant engineers and started giving their opinions on what was needed to fix the nation’s transmission system.

Our nation direly needs energy legislation that will promote increased reliability and which addresses the need to upgrade, rebuild and replace much of national electric transmission grid.  Most importantly we need legislation based on common sense and legislation which  protects consumer interest, but unfortunately because of the blackout, there is a rush to come up with an instant fix for a complex problem and it is obvious that the country is ripe for manipulation, price gouging and miscalculation.

There is even proposed legislation which would mandate Federal Energy Regulatory Commission oversight of small utilities including your Cooperative, which owns less than 20 miles of transmission.  This is not only analogous to using an elephant trap to catch a mouse, but would also result in significant annual fees for your Cooperative and not contribute at all to solving the electric grid dilemma.

Let’s hope the investigation of the blackout is not used to advance the agendas of a few special interest groups that will not serve the nation well.