Directors re-elected at Tri-County annual meeting

COUDERSPORT– Tri-County Rural Electric Cooperative members re-elected three incumbent board directors during the utility’s 71st Annual Meeting Saturday, July 14, at the Coudersport Consistory.

Tri-County members re-elected Ferd W. Irish of Coudersport, Alfred G. Calkins of Troy, and Donald H. Blackwell of Blackwell to represent Districts 2, 6 and 8, respectively.

Three of Tri-County’s nine board seats were up for election this year. Directors are elected to three-year terms.

Guest speaker at the co-op’s annual meeting was humorist Bob Farmer of Louisville, Ky. Farmer is the publicist for Farmers’ Almanac.

About 400 members and guests attended the meeting, during which election results and business reports from the cooperative’s management team and directors were presented.

Craig Eccher, Tri-County president and chief executive officer, updated members about the cooperative’s activities and achievements of the past year and gave an overview of the electric generation situation for electric cooperatives and investor-owned electric utilities in Pennsylvania.

While many of the investor-owned electric utilities in the state will be facing much higher generation pricing when rate caps expires in 2009 and 2010, Eccher told cooperative members on hand for the gathering that they can expect to see relatively stable generation prices for the foreseeable future.

“For Tri-County and the other rural electric cooperatives in Pennsylvania, the outlook is good,” he said. “Your generation rates might tick up a little bit, might tick down a little bit, but they will be relatively flat going forward.”

Eccher explained that Allegheny Electric Cooperative, the wholesale power supplier for the 13 electric cooperatives in Pennsylvania and one co-op in New Jersey, owns a mix of low-cost hydroelectric and nuclear generation that provides nearly 70 percent of the electricity needs of its member cooperatives. The remaining 30 percent must be purchased on the open market.

“The challenges for Allegheny will be to strategically purchase that remaining 30 percent block of power and secure additional generation resources to meet the future power needs of the state’s electric cooperatives,” Eccher said.

He added that Allegheny Electric Cooperative, which owns 10 percent of the PPL nuclear generation facility in Berwick, is exploring options to further limit its exposure to open market pricing.

During a reorganizational meeting that immediately followed the annual meeting, James R. Davis of Elkland was re-elected board chairman. Gerald A. Kite of Austin was re-elected as board vice-chairman, and Alston A. Teeter of Milan was re-elected secretary-treasurer.

Unlike investor-owned utilities, Tri-County is a non-profit organization, owned by its consumer-members. A democratic organization by nature, the cooperative conducts an annual meeting each July to update consumer-members on the progress made during the year and to conduct director elections.

Annual meetings also provide consumer-members with the opportunity to offer input and voice concerns before the board of directors and management staff.

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