The dedication of employees at Missouri public power utility Carthage Water & Electric Plant “fundamentally changes the role of a General Manager from managing people and situations to enabling people to meet the goals they set for themselves,” says Chuck Bryant, CWEP’s General Manager.
“The greatest joy I have as General Manager is to work with about 90 of the most genuinely selfless, kind, hard-working, and dedicated people you will ever find. Carthage is so fortunate to have these people spend a career focused solely on making the lives of their friends, neighbors, and family better every day,” he said in a Q&A with Public Power Current.
As General Manager of CWEP, Bryant oversees the electric, water, wastewater, and fiber-optic systems for Carthage, Missouri.
CWEP was established in 1898 when citizens voted to issue bonds for the erection of a city-owned and operated electric light plant.
The original power plant housed two 90 kilowatt dynamos and was slowly expanded until 1927, when a new power plant was built. This power plant still stands today, housing nine Nordberg & Cooper dual fuel engines with a capacity of 35 megawatts.
CWEP owns and maintains approximately 177.5 miles of distribution line and approximately 8.5 miles of transmission line through the Carthage area.
AMI, Fiber-to-the-Home Projects
The utility has two rather large projects “that we either just finished or are close to finishing,” Bryant noted.
The first of these is an AMI project “where we replaced each electric and water meter with a new AMI meter. The project took us about a year in the planning stage, where we visited with other utilities to learn from their experiences and get a vision for what we would like to see in our finished product,” Bryant said.
After going through a request for proposals process and selecting a vendor, “it took us approximately a year and a half to change out all of the meters. Our customer service staff is already using the data to help customers understand their bill and their energy usage, and soon we hope to have staff dedicated to studying and analyzing more of the AMI data to help us better understand and improve our system.”
The other large project CWEP is working on is a fiber-to-the-home project.
CWEP has offered fiber services to local businesses for many years, but in 2020 its Board of Directors “decided to take the leap and expand our fiber offerings to all of our electric service territory,” Bryant said.
The first stages of the project were mainly spent building the backbone of the fiber system, “and we are now in the final stages where we are actually hooking up our customers. We found that once the public knew we were expanding our fiber offerings, the requests for service piled up very quickly through simple word-of-mouth. As such, we have not had to do very much advertising yet, but that will be our next step once we can catch up with our waitlist. Our customers love the price point, fast speeds, and local customer service and in my opinion, this project has really helped set Carthage up for the future.”
Reliable Public Power Provider
CWEP is an American Public Power Association-designated Reliable Public Power Provider.
“CWEP is very proud of our Reliable Public Power Provider designation,” Bryant said.
“We began applying for the award many years ago, and have been fortunate to receive the diamond-level designation several times. For us, gaining this designation isn’t something we simply focus on during the application period. Rather, we use the application to help guide our decision-making, as far as ‘best practices’ to follow and a reason to always continue to improve.”
Achieving the diamond level RP3 award “is a true team effort, as everyone must buy in and be involved on a daily basis in order for us to meet our goals. Thanks to the RP3 process, we have really grown as a utility, in each of the four focus areas,” Bryant said.
“I would highly encourage utilities to participate in the application process because even if you cannot achieve the award in your first year, you will learn so much about what steps you can take to improve your utility, and I would bet your utility becomes stronger as a result.”
Connecting with the Carthage Community
Bryant also discussed how events such as CWEP’s Public Power Lunch, which is held during Public Power Week, are an effective way to stay connected with the Carthage community.
“One of the best things about being a hometown utility is being out in your community, and for us, Public Power Week is one opportunity for us to get the community involved in knowing more about their local utility and the services we provide,” he said.
“We typically provide power plant tours, highlight jobs in electric utilities, host trivia events, and conclude the week with a luncheon in our parking lot where we grill hotdogs and hamburgers for our customers. We set up displays and set up some of our bucket trucks for customers to take bucket truck rides, which is always a huge hit.”
Public Power Week “is just one example of our involvement with the community. You will spot our trucks in all of the local parades, staff volunteering time to be at special events, sponsorships to help local organizations, and for the holiday season, you’ll see our crews covering over 100 trees in one of our parks with over 20 miles of Christmas lights for a fun display we call ‘Sparkle in the Park,’” Bryant said.
He added, that “’Serving our Community’ is our utility’s motto, and we do all we can to give back to our community each and every day. In almost 30 years of being in this business I have seen a lot of changes in our industry and in our community, but the constant has been the people and I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this outstanding organization.”
CWEP recently announced that in April it will launch a Customer Academy, a free, interactive four-week program aimed at engaging and educating its customers about CWEP's operations.
“CWEP is excited to offer our customers an up-close and personal look into how we operate and serve our community 24/7,” the utility said on its website. “Go behind the scenes with us, tour our historic facilities and learn directly from CWEP staff about how we deliver reliable power, water & communication services to your homes and businesses.”
All CWEP Customer Academy sessions will feature CWEP experts on each topic. The academy will consist of four consecutive, one-and-a-half-hour sessions on Wednesday evenings.
