Toward the middle of this month, keep an eye on your mailbox for your Annual Meeting Notice and Annual Report.
The Annual Meeting of the Members of Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative September 9, and your Notice is your registration card. Similar to the new format we introduced last year, we will hold the meeting at our office and provide drive-thru registration. We will register members up until the start of the business meeting that Saturday morning.
Unlike last year, we will have plenty of bags for all members, regardless of when you register.
As with all our Annual Meeting Notices and Annual Reports, it is chock full of information. I encourage you to read all of it. It pertains to the stability and financial health of your Cooperative.
One part of the Notice I strongly encourage you to read is the President’s Report. In there, our board president, Marilyn Davis, provides a good update on the progress of our fiber network buildout. She also dis- cusses why we started this project and how important it is to all of you, our members.
Coosa Valley Electric started building a fiber network and created a broadband internet service company so that we could provide you with the fastest, most reliable internet connections available, anywhere.
As Mrs. Davis states in her Report, we are 80 percent complete with the initial buildout of our network, and we should be finished by the end of this year. This puts us ahead of our initial, 5-year projections by nearly two years.
If you have not yet signed up for our broadband service, and it’s available in your area, you are missing out on something special. Our broadband service can bring you blazing-fast speeds and the most entertain- ing content from any streaming service you choose — audio and visual alike.
As I look back over the past 3 years at what we’ve been able to accomplish, it is truly a wonder we were able to build our fiber network at all. We’ve had to overcome a global pandemic, work stoppages, materials shortages that still haven’t gotten much better, a war in Ukraine, labor shortages amongst our contractors, inflation, and a host of other issues. We’ve been able to over- come these obstacles while still building our fiber network, doing a complete renovation of our office and the office for our subsidiary organizations, launching a brand-new company and still doing our jobs running your electric cooperative.
We’ve done all this while still maintaining our affordable, reliable electric service.
We have been able to do this because we are blessed with a truly astounding group of individuals whose skills and abilities never cease to amaze me.
When you get your Annual Meeting Notice in the mail, clip out your registration card and please make plans to swing by and drive-thru register. You’ll get a $15 bill credit, and you’ll be entered in the drawing for door prizes and our Grand Prize, which is a $1,000 bill credit.
If you’d like to attend the Annual Meeting in person, you may do so. We will have seating available. You may also tune in on Facebook. We will stream a live broadcast of the meeting using our very own Coosa Valley Technologies provided internet connection.
If you have questions or concerns about your Cooperative you’d like addressed, please email those to Coosa Valley to my attention, and I’ll do my best to make sure we discuss those during the business session.
We thank you for the opportunity to serve you and look forward to seeing you.