Out of the twenty-five electric cooperatives currently operating in this State, SouthEastern is unique in the fact that it is the only one that has a Board of Trustees; all others have a Board of Directors.This situation exists because the original incorporators of SouthEastern believed that serving on your Cooperative’s Board commanded a higher level of responsibility than the term “director” implied.

Although some might say there is no significant difference in the meaning of the two words, I have worked for your Board for some fourteen years and I can assure you they take the term “Trustee” and their positions very seriously, as well they should for an entity that collected some $47,685,000 in revenues from its members in 2003.

Historically about 70 cents out of every dollar collected from our members has been spent on wholesale power purchases and the remaining 30 cents has been entrusted to your Trustees to spend wisely on behalf of the other member owners of the Cooperative.

To give each member an overview of how their dollars are being spent, it is important to note that over the past ten-year period encompassing 1993 through 2003, the value of your Cooperative’s total utility plant value has been increased by forty million dollars.In addition some twenty-three million dollars has been spent on the maintenance of existing electrical facilities.That amount includes tree-trimming and our expenditures in this specific area have increased dramatically from $794,000 in 1993, to almost $1.6 million in 2003.

SouthEastern’s total debt for the same ten-year period has increased by less than three million dollars.

The reason all of this information is important for the average member lies in the fact that cooperatives, in general, operate on a principal of averages.If that were not the case, almost every member would be paying a different rate for electricity based on the specific investment required to provide service to their respective homes.For example, if a member lived next to one of our distribution substations, he or she would pay less for electricity than someone who lived ten miles away.Obviously such a situation would produce thousands of different rates and be unmanageable; therefore we categorize members by groups and charge them accordingly, based on the average cost to serve the entire group.

Your Cooperative’s membership base encompasses a wide spectrum of members, some who literally have hundreds of thousands of dollars at their disposal, while others live on just a few hundred dollars per month and struggle to make ends meet.

SouthEastern’s mission is to provide each and every member with the most reliable service possible at a price that is as affordable as possible.Prudent expenditures of funds collected from our membership is a necessity for meeting that mission.

To learn more about your Cooperative, please plan on attending SouthEastern’s 66^th Annual Meeting which will be held on Tuesday, August 3^rd.Registration begins at 6:00 p.m. and the business session will start at 7:00.