Guest Opinion: LCEC: Service to customers the primary mission
You don’t always think about your electric company when you flip the switch and the lights come on. You tend to think about them mostly when you get the monthly bill or when the lights are out (and hopefully when you see them out and about helping in the community). I have been a leader at LCEC for more than a decade and I am a resident of Cape Coral. I am immensely proud of the LCEC team of nearly 375 professionals who strive to maintain excellent service reliability – despite relentless lightning and thunderstorms – and low rates for our 208,000 customers/members throughout Southwest Florida. This is the main focus of our corporate mission and we spend a great deal of time and energy to continually improve in these areas.
LCEC rates are now among the lowest in Florida, following a third rate reduction in less than two years that went into effect on July 1. Our rates today are nearly 12 percent lower than the state average, and are the seventh lowest among all 56 utilities in Florida and lowest among Florida cooperatives.
Service to customers/members has been our primary motivation since we were founded in 1940. As a not-for-profit electric cooperative, we have no profit motivation, no investors to serve, nor any need to generate revenues for some other purpose. Our customers are also our members, and it is our mission and responsibility to return savings to them whenever financially prudent. We have been able to retire more than $230 million in equity over the years, returning that money directly back to customers/members. Putting money back into the pockets of customers/members is just one of the many benefits of cooperative membership.
It is also our responsibility to keep the lights on and our communities running. Meeting that responsibility while keeping rates low and providing a return to our members is a complex task, one that requires constant maintenance and upgrades to our electric grid, negotiation of beneficial supply contracts, a laser focus on customer service, and implementation of business practices that enhance our efficiency and performance.
Our members play an important role in keeping costs low as well. When customers utilize green payment methods and online self-service it helps to reduce operating costs. Running appliances and equipment in off-peak hours (before noon and after 9 p.m. during the summer and between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. in the winter) allows LCEC to reduce wholesale power costs from our power supplier.
LCEC is governed by a Board of Trustees. Trustees are customers/members and represent the cooperative membership as a whole. Many of our employees are also members. They live and work in our communities and take pride in managing a highly effective and reliable electric system. I hope you’ll join me in thanking them for the work they do every day to make the LCEC system one in which we can all be proud.
– Denise Vidal is the LCEC director of Finance and Accounting and Chief Financial Officer