St. Charles earns top honor from municipal electric agency
On behalf of the city of St. Charles, City Administrator Mark Koenen and Electric Services Manager Tom Bruhl accepted the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency's President & CEO's Municipality of the Year award at the agency's annual meeting and awards banquet held in Springfield on Oct. 17.
The award recognizes St. Charles's commitment to reliable and innovative service to its electric customers.
St. Charles Electric Department serves more than 15,500 homes and businesses in the community. The utility is a member of the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, known as the IMEA. The IMEA is a joint action agency made up of 32 municipal electric systems and one rural electric cooperative. Its primary function is to provide wholesale electricity to its members, which they, in turn, supply to their communities' homes and businesses.
In presenting the award, IMEA Chairman and CEO Kevin Gaden praised the utility for continuing to take steps to upgrade and modernize its electric distribution system in an ongoing initiative to maintain an attractive, competitive position and help ensure future economic growth and development.
"It is an honor to receive this award," said Tom Bruhl, electric services manager for the city of St. Charles. "Our team is passionate about safely executing our mission of providing the citizens of St. Charles with reliable, cost-effective electric service. I am proud of the Electric Line, Meter & Communications, and Electric Engineering employees, who are recognized with this award."
Also at the annual conference, IMEA celebrated 30 years of service to municipalities. St. Charles is proud of our heritage in the organization that dates back to the work Pat Boyle, former director of the St. Charles Electric Utility for many years, did in the early days of IMEA's existence.
Gaden noted that St. Charles devotes significant resources to its reliability and customer service efforts and that the utility's reliability index performance is in the top quartile. Gaden also pointed out that the Electric Utility of St. Charles scored very high marks for value in the recent citywide customer satisfaction survey.
The city is a leader in promoting electric efficiency. Since 2009, the city has tapped into more than $340,000 available from IMEA to provide incentives for 21 projects that helped private-sector commercial industrial customers become more energy efficient. St. Charles secured funding from the Agency to improve electric efficiency at city facilities too. Altogether those electric efficiency projects are estimated to reduce consumption by just less than six million kilowatt hours annually.
Earlier this year, St. Charles initiated a system-wide modeling study of its entire electric system to further optimize system performance, maximize employee safety, and reduce the risk of electrical accidents and injuries.
"The Electric Services Division of St. Charles Public Works worked more than 62,000 labor hours in 2013 without a single lost time accident and proudly lives their motto of 'Safe by Choice, Not Chance'," said Gaden.