Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now.
I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's News Director.
Our guest on this episode is Terry Wimberley, President and CEO of the Paris Board of Public Utilities, the public power utility for Paris, Tennessee. Terry, thanks for joining us.
Terry Wimberley
Thanks for having me on today. Thank you.
Paul Ciampoli
Terry, to get our conversation started, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about the Paris Board of Public Utilities in terms of its history, the number of customers served by the utility and the services that are provided to those customers.
Terry Wimberley
Paris Board of Public Utilities, we were formed in 1938.
So that was five years after the TVA Act was passed. TVA was going to be bringing power into our region, the city of Paris here, they wanted to make sure that electricity could reach out into the rural areas. They knew that's what TVA was put here to do, and so they wanted to tap into that.
So the city actually bought the small electric system back from a private entity and brought it back into the public side and they set up a special board, the Board of Public Utilities to operate the utilities instead of keeping that under the government governance of the City Commission.
And so that's why we were formed in ‘38. So we began with 2,000 electric customers pretty much centralized to the small downtown area.
Today we serve a little over 23,000 electric customers and have certainly been successful in getting that out to the rural areas. We serve the full footprint of Henry County here in Tennessee and so that's 23,000 electric customers now.
We also provide water services as a part of what we do for our community. We have 5,000 water customers primarily inside the corporate limits of Paris, just a little bit outside that and then we have sewer services also to about 4,000 customers here.
We are a multi service utility and we're also partnering – it’s a new partnership that is just underway with a telecom company to provide high speed Internet. We will not have Internet customers ourselves. We will build out fiber infrastructure that they would lease out from us and we will be able to provide Internet to our community through a telecom.
And so we're building out about 500 miles of fiber infrastructure to our community, so really three core services and then partnering to get some high speed Internet into the community as well.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks, Terry. Just a quick follow up.
So with respect to the high speed Internet project, is there a timeline on completion on that?
Terry Wimberley
Construction began in May. We think all of the main backbone will be built out by the end of ‘25, so 500 miles in a little over six months. We will actually start connecting end users to their Internet within the next two weeks and so by the end of the year, we will pass 10,000 of our 23,000 meters with that offering and we'll do that by the end of 25.
Paul Ciampoli
I wanted to also give you the opportunity to talk about any ongoing projects -- obviously besides the high-speed Internet project -- that are being pursued by Paris BPU.
Terry Wimberley
I tell folks that we are in an era of spending a lot of money on capital things. But when you think about the fact that we are about 90 years old in our infrastructure, you know, when all of that was being built out in the 40s and 50s and even into the 60s, that would be electric infrastructure, that's water lines, wastewater lines, all those things.
But now those are 60 and 70 years old. And so we're in the era of our utility where we're spending money on projects to make sure that our infrastructure is sustainable.
So a good example is the rehab we're doing on our India Road substation. It's one of 12 distribution substations that we have here within our system. It's a 1960s model substation and we’re calling it a rehab project, but basically we took the thing almost back to the ground. We're putting in all new breakers, a new transformer, all new bus work. We're basically rebuilding a substation in place.
We've got it switched out where we can do that. So that's a $2.7 million effort again on one of 12 of our substations. We've already done a few. We've got others scheduled in the future.
So it's a great example of how we are just making sure that our infrastructure is going to be here for the next 90 years. So that's a good example on the electric side of how we're going about that.
I did mention the fiber build -- that's a $17 million investment in fiber infrastructure. We're actually going to pass more devices out on our electric grid that we can control and monitor and bring back data and controls to those devices. We're even going to connect to some devices out on our water system and our wastewater system to be able to bring back data and to be able to monitor what's going on in those systems. So we're excited about those kinds of things.
Also that fiber infrastructure is going to be a hedge on our next version of AMI. We're doing power line carrier now bringing meter reads back through the power line itself, but you know what is that next generation of AMI? Is that talking to each meter through fiber?
And if so, we've got the backbone in place to do that and a communication path to those meters.
There's the lease revenues from the telecom company that's going to fund the project and eventually be able to put revenues back into the electric funds and create a supplemental revenue stream there.
And the idea with that whole thing would be electric rate stability with that project. So that's a big project that's on the way now.
Our wastewater treatment plant, we have a $5 million replacement of all of the electrical components that are on that campus, all of the electric to all of the buildings, all of the electric to pumps and motors. We're also putting in controls out to all of those places where we can bring back and have SCADA control for the first time.
That plant was built in the mid 80s. So for the first time we're going to be able to have SCADA control of all of the pumps and motors inside the wastewater treatment plant. Again, it's a utility that's trying to just keep up with the technology and really keep up with sustainability and keep things moving forward and just being here for the community -- that's sort of what we were asked to do in 1938 is to take care of the utilities for this community and so you know we're doing that at the wastewater treatment plant.
We’ve got two projects going on. We’ve got an $8 million water distribution upgrade going on where we're upgrading -- really replacing water lines in the oldest part of town in the downtown area and just beyond there.
Again, the water lines are old and needing to be replaced and so we're making an effort at that.
We're spending two and a half million dollars on a project that's just getting underway in our wastewater collection system.
It's just another basin, the next one in line. We've already spent about $20 million over the last five years on the collection system, we've got more planned.
It's a very expensive rehab to be replacing sewer lines. But again, we're basically doing that. We're replacing what was once built because it's no longer sustainable, has reached its end of life. So that's a two and a half million dollar project.
We're using American Rescue Plan dollars for that project, so we're grateful to get some help with that.
And on the water and wastewater side, we're always looking for USDA loans or state revolving fund monies or any kind of grants that we can get to help with that because the millions that are being spent in water and wastewater certainly having a pretty big rate impact on those customers.
And so we're certainly spending a lot of money but looking for how we can do it wisely and have as little of impact on the customers as we can.
And then I'll mention one other capital project thing that is just about to get underway. We've gone out to advertise for bids just this week on a $5,000,000 addition to our building.
We sit one block off of the court square here in Paris, TN. We have a vacant lot next to us where we have our kiosk and a little bit of parking. We're going to use that vacant lot.
We're going to build a two-story building there that's going to be storm rated, a FEMA rated building where it's one of those things where we just want to make sure that we're going to be here to serve and if the unfortunate circumstance comes through where a storm hits our downtown area -- we're in a very old building here -- and it's compromised for whatever reason that we're going to have a building that's going to be standing and so our server room is going to be in that protected building where all of our servers are up and running.
We're going to have our command center also built into there where we run our storm restoration efforts, those kind of things. And so again we're preparing for the future with really the first storm rated building that we've ever had in our history.
But as I watch things happen to other utilities -- our neighbors just a few year years ago to our north -- Mayfield, Kentucky, got hit in their downtown area and they had damage or complete loss to their admin building and water plants and wastewater plants and all the things. So we see that and we're just trying to prepare for what might come.
And again, the word I keep using is to just be sustainable. We want to be here and ready to serve because that's what our mission was in 1938 and it really hasn't changed. That's just who we are and what we continue to do and plan to do into the future.
It feels like to us we've got a lot going on with our utility here in PariI and when I write it all down and see it all on paper, I'm reminded, yeah, there's a lot going on here.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, no, it's certainly an impressive array of projects you guys have going on so thank you so much for the details on those projects, Terry.
I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about the utility’s relationship with the community and its customers and give you the chance to provide examples of how the utility engages with the community and customers.
And in preparing for this interview, one of the things that jumped out at me is that the utility offers a Customer Academy. So if you could provide additional details on the Academy as well as other examples of community engagement.
Terry Wimberley
I like talking about that Academy. I was in front of Tennessee Municipal Electric Power Association folks about 3 weeks ago at our annual conference and I was on a panel and got to talk about our Customer Academy and I think it's gotten the attention of several others. They're asking about the details of that.
We're always looking for new ways to engage with our customers. We recognize very quickly and easily that misinformation and lack of information leads to wrong perspectives about us as the public utility provider. And that's hard to watch.
And so we're like how do we work on that? And we realize that we can't win all of the social media battles that are out there. But what we see is how can we educate more? How do we get the right answers to the people?
And that's where the Customer Academy -- that's where it was born out of. We've modeled it much like a Citizens Police Academy. I think people have maybe heard of those where they get to go in and see the Police Department and…shoot some guns at the range or whatever.
So we've kind of modeled it after that kind of thing -- a Citizens Academy -- we call it a Customer Academy. So last fall we began that initiative to bring some folks into our facilities and educate them on their local utility. So we advertised that opportunity.
We took applications from the public, from our customers. We took the entire month of June to bring those applications in. There was not a lot to it, just identifying themselves, stating why they wanted to be in the class. There was not a lot to that.
We named a class of 12 in early July. Our class size is sort of limited, I guess, by where we were going to take the group each week.
We were going to do one of our sessions in our water treatment plant, so we certainly were limited with size there, so we started with a class of 12. It worked out pretty good.
Classes ran for six weeks starting in mid-September, running through the month of October.
We did it on Tuesday nights for two hours from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm and so each of those Tuesday nights, this group of 12 would come in and spent some time with our departments working out our curriculum and what we would do for those two hour sessions and how we would share about our utility.
The first night was basically an introduction – a history of how we got started, just an overview of our entire utility, our governance, those type things -- just kind of get them introduced to who we are as their utility.
The second night we hit on all the administrative stuff, policies and billing and customer service and our policies there.
We have an HVAC loan program, right, all of those just different things and services that are about the administrative side of who we are.
The third night we did metering and engineering and they learned how their meter is read.
They got to see our SCADA system on the electric side and how we communicate with substations and devices out on the line -- they got to see how our outage management system works and we did some fake outages to see how that worked.
We also let them splice some fiber. We've had some dark Internet that we've leased out through the last 15 years and so we we've got our own splicing trailer. We were already in that business. So we showed folks -- get their hands on, let them splice some fiber, which was quite interesting to a group of customers. The next three nights were electric water and wastewater.
One of the cool things we did on the electric night, they saw our lineman do a pole top rescue, which we train on annually, so they got to see a demonstration of that.
One of the big things that night was just helping people understand our strategies during storm power restoration times because you get into a multi-day storm and people think they should be next in line and to understand how we work through the larger circuits first and we work our way down to the smaller onesie, twosie outages. It was a very good perspective there to share with them.
The fifth night we were at the water treatment plant and they got to see the plant, how water is treated from the wells all the way to the finished water.
We talked about our water distribution system as well. Challenges with infrastructure, which is a lot. We're spending a lot of money there and they learned a little bit about TDEC regulations. Obviously, we're highly regulated in treating water and so we got to share a little bit about that.
And then the last night was at our wastewater treatment plant. They got to see all of how wastewater is treated from taking it in from the system and delivering it back to the environment.
And we talked about TDEC and EPA regulations there as well, highly regulated. We did a jetter demo on cleaning out a section of sewer pipes, so they got to actually see us cleaning a section of that -- again, just getting their eyes on things.
Our goal of that whole thing was to create advocates for our utility if they could see us in detail, take the curtain back and let them see behind that and how we operate, what we're about, help them to better understand us and create advocates. And that was our goal.
I will tell you a success story from that. It might have been a month or so ago when during a high use time where TVA called us and said, hey, why don't you put out a voluntary reduction of power during these hours?
Well, we've done that before. That generally is a little bit of a lightning rod for our customers to get some arrows at, shoot at us about a lot of different things -- we're not going to participate with that, we're not going to help with that, until you lower rates -- all these things and so it generally triggers some unhappiness out there in social media world.
One of our class members from our Customer Academy last fall weighed in on one of the threads and in support of us was doing her own educating of our customers.
She also pointed to our Customer Academy that's coming up. Applications were actually open at that time for our next class and said, you folks need to go, you'll appreciate them and will learn a whole lot more about the things you're complaining about if you'll go be a part of that. So I think there couldn't have been a more firm testimonial that we had created advocates with our Customer Academy program.
We're doing our second class. We're going to start it up in a couple of weeks in September and get started with that. It was a great success and we think it accomplished what we meant to do. We just need to do more than 12 at a time, it feels like to me.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, and you read my mind in terms of what the follow-up question I was going to have is that there's this huge potential positive ripple effect from people who participate in this.
And to your point, you've effectively got ambassadors who can talk about all the great things the utility's doing and kind of put things in context.
Terry Wimberley
Yeah, I think it really hit home with a lot of my colleagues when I shared this story recently with the TMEPA group and they're saying send us your materials, how you did it. I think some of my local power company friends here in the Tennessee Valley are going to probably be standing up some customer academies as we move forward. So that's kind of fun to watch.
Paul Ciampoli
Terry, wrap up question for you. I wanted to talk about the topic of workforce and as you know this is kind of an ongoing challenge for all types of utilities these days.
So with respect to the topic of workforce, I wanted to see if you could talk about the strategies that Paris BPU has implemented -- specifically addressing retirements and recruiting the next generation of employees.
Terry Wimberley
I think our utility’s gotten over a big hump of retirements. We've turned that corner.
About half of our 84 employees are less than 10 years of tenure, so we've had to really figure out how to find folks and recruit folks and get them in here. Obviously, recruiting and retaining is important. It's big. We're seeing more turnover than we really ever have.
So what do we do? What are we doing about that?
Well, obviously we're looking at wages. We have to stay competitive. One of the things we're looking at and we're looking at hard is raising our entry level pay on especially some of our lower level positions because we need to attract a better pool of candidates and we think that one of the ways that we can maybe pull some folks away from current jobs is to be competitive with pay.
We're looking at possibly offering a pension plan for those employees who are not already on a pension plan. We closed our plan about 12 years ago. We had a pension for all.
We closed that plan down and moved all new hires -- we grandfathered everybody in, but all new hires would go on to a defined contribution plan, 401K style, and we would contribute to that and we've tried to contribute generously to that, but it's still not a pension plan.
And so we're wondering if maybe going back and picking up some type of form of pension across the board for all employees would help with both recruiting and retaining. We're actually in the middle of a study.
You think about utilities closing down those pension plans because they were costly and they are, but we're looking at how do we possibly look at bringing that back. And again, we're trying to be creative.
We're trying to figure it out because this is a challenge for all of us. I sell this to our current employees and to recruits as well. We're selling our mission of service, we sell our story because what we do as a public utility is important.
And so we talk about employment that truly makes a difference in the lives of other people. And to work here is kind of a special thing. And there's a lot of pride in being a part of Paris BPU and bringing those services to the people we know, the people we go to church with, the people we're at the ballpark with and selling that.
I'll tell you about a new initiative. It's just getting started. We're trying to figure out how to develop in our own internal talent, what are we doing to grow our people? And it's something that we've not focused enough on. That's also a retainment effort, right? To show investment in the current people that we have so that maybe we can keep them.
So we've titled this initiative Ignite BPU, that's BPYOU, and we really are wanting to pull together some folks that can ignite BPU, ignite our utility, but also we want to ignite them to bigger things.
So we've got 11 employees that will come into a cohort that will move together over about a seven month period. We'll run from September to March. We'll meet monthly with that group and we're just going to expose those 11 employees -- worked with department heads to pull in folks from every department and expose them to a deeper look into our utility as a whole, right?
They come from their own angles, their own departments. But to understand the whole utility. We're going to do personality assessments, help them to understand themselves better, have more self-awareness and understand coworkers and how personalities work, guest speakers. We're going to bring folks in that will grow and develop our people. We'll talk about culture and just leadership topics, those kind of things. We're going to take them on some excursions to other utilities. We're going to visit another multi service utility in our second month. We're going down to Jackson and visit with those folks.
It's a brand new initiative just trying to develop internal talent for our future leaders and just to show investment in these folks to make them feel like, you know, this place is investing in me and I want to stay loyal to them and invest in the utility back.
So the challenge is there, but it causes us to have to be creative and more proactive in our thinking and so our Ignite program is a great example of how we're doing that in that space.
Paul Ciampoli
Terry, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.
And my goal overall with this podcast is to provide our listeners, other public power utilities with knowledge and tips for perhaps changing operations and I have to say that this has been one of the best episodes so far in terms of the breadth of conversation in terms of things that I feel like our listeners will be able to take away a lot of tips from our conversation.
One example, obviously, is the Customer Academy, among other things. So I wanted to really thank you again for taking the time.
Terry Wimberley
Thanks for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
Sure thing. And I'm going to be sure to circle back to you at some point in the future where we could revisit some of those projects and other things that are going on at the utility.
Terry Wimberley
Sounds good, Paul.
Paul Ciampoli
OK, great. Thanks, Terry.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, graphic and digital designer at APPA.
I'm Paul Ciampoli, and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
