Electric Co-op Today

MARCO ISLAND, Fla.—When Fred Hubbard, president and CEO of Choptank Electric Cooperative, reflects on his co-op’s acquisition of a neighboring system, one of the things that come to mind might come as a surprise: squirrels.

An example of the lack of right-of-way maintenance that Choptank EC discovered when it took over a muni leased to an IOU. (Photo By: Choptank Electric Cooperative)

“We had probably 100 to 125 outages that were linked to squirrels,” Hubbard said. “So now, any time we do anything with a transformer lead, it gets a squirrel guard.” In 2006, the Denton, Md.-based co-op took over the St. Michaels municipal system, which for 25 years had been leased to Delmarva Power. Soon after, Hubbard detailed the acquisition at the 2007 CEO Close-Up.

He returned this year for a learning lab titled “An Offer You Can’t Refuse? The Sequel.”

In addition to the four-legged pests, Choptank inherited a far greater problem: Rights-of-way had not been maintained for nearly a decade.

“We basically had to go in and reclaim the right-of-way and not just trim,” Hubbard recalled, noting that it didn’t exactly get them off on the right foot with the new consumer-members. “Snip-snip is what they wanted us to do and we didn’t do that.”

As a result, Choptank was not especially appreciated by the new consumer-members for a while. But the co-op won them over by providing the type of service that St. Michaels’ 1,500 residents were not used to.

“The IOU had one serviceman covering about a 50-mile area,” Hubbard said.

“Choptank created an operations field office with a serviceman, line crew, operations person plus a supervisor.”

Tags: CEO Close-Up, Investor-Owned Utility