More power together

At YEC, your voice mat­ters and car­ries weight. We enjoy hear­ing feed­back from our mem­ber­ship because it guides our board of direc­tors and lead­er­ship team when plan­ning for the future of your co-op. Our goal is to take every nugget of infor­ma­tion we can to make the best deci­sions for the good of our mem­bers and local com­mu­ni­ties. For exam­ple, we heard the need for inter­net from sev­er­al mem­bers, so we recent­ly began the rur­al inter­net project. This will bring broad­band to approx­i­mate­ly 5,000 mem­bers who pre­vi­ous­ly did not have access to high-speed inter­net. The more peo­ple we have that speak up, the more informed we are about what mat­ters most.

At the most basic lev­el, we look to address indi­vid­ual con­cerns from the source. If we aren’t serv­ing you and your needs, we aren’t uphold­ing our promise to look out for you. While your con­cern may lie with your elec­tric ser­vice or with a com­mu­ni­ty-wide issue, we are here to lis­ten and to serve. This fun­da­men­tal rule is some­thing we live by at YEC and is the basis of grass­roots efforts.

The South Car­oli­na House Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and Sen­a­tors from our area work the same way. We have 13 local men and women who make up our del­e­ga­tion. I encour­age you to famil­iar­ize your­self with your sen­a­tor and rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the updat­ed list in this issue of South Car­oli­na Liv­ing. My hat is off to them. Not only am I thank­ful that they aim to serve you with the same men­tal­i­ty of your co-op, but they also help look out for our mem­bers. Most recent­ly, they have been respon­sive and sup­port­ive regard­ing the San­tee Coop­er inves­ti­ga­tion orig­i­nat­ing from the two aban­doned nuclear units. They are help­ing us fight to pro­tect our mem­bers, keep­ing your impact min­i­mal and your rates low—and it has worked. YEC’s rates have been flat for 10 years and will be slight­ly low­er for mem­bers this year.

We were found­ed on grass­roots, address­ing the need for elec­tric­i­ty in rur­al areas. Folks joined togeth­er to make their voic­es heard. More than 80 years lat­er, we still care about what you have to say. We have stream­lined this process and have rep­re­sen­ta­tion for each coop­er­a­tive at the State­house, mak­ing the coop­er­a­tive pres­ence known and respect­ed. I appre­ci­ate our del­e­ga­tion always tak­ing the time to lis­ten when we talk, keep­ing the con­cerns of our mem­bers high­light­ed in their work.

If your pres­ence is ever need­ed again, could we call on you to join oth­ers to rep­re­sent your co-op and help car­ry the voice of our com­mu­ni­ty? Let me assure you that the co-op voice is a mighty one and we’d love to have each and every mem­ber togeth­er with us if the need ever aris­es because we’re stronger togeth­er. We will always hold true to the men­tal­i­ty that the voice of the peo­ple mat­ter and we’ll always have your back, even in the halls of gov­ern­ment.

Sin­cere­ly,

 

 

Paul Basha
Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer

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Support your co-op

At YEC, we’re always pre­pared to go to work for you in any storm. Although we can’t pre­dict if the need would ever arise, we’d like to know we can call on our mem­bers to sup­port their co-op. Join your fel­low YEC mem­bers on our grass­roots con­tact list. Vis­it yorkelectric.net/grassroots to enter your infor­ma­tion. We’ll call you if we need you. Until then, we’ll keep your infor­ma­tion safe.