Kicking Off A New Year

There is something exciting about the start of a new year. Here we are, at the beginning of 2024. Wow, it seems as if we just started 2023 not that long ago. I don’t remember who told me, but many years ago I was told that as you get older, the time seems to go by much more quickly. I fully agree with that statement; I expect many of you reading this feel the exact same way!

For the last several years, I have used this column to highlight a number of goals that your cooperative has for the coming year. For those of you who don’t remember, or who just don’t know, your cooperative has a pretty detailed process for setting both short-term and long-term goals. These processes result in the creation of annual United Objectives that your board of directors reviews and ultimately has the responsibility to approve each year once presented and discussed. These annual objectives set our direction for the coming year. The board of directors approved the 2024 objectives in their regular November board meeting just after Thanksgiving.

For this month, I want to spend time on just one of those objectives that we will be working on in 2024 that will affect a portion of the membership. That objective is the reconstruction of the Cleburne office location. Back in 2020, I let the membership know that we were going to begin the design of the Cleburne office reconstruction. The design project and process did begin, but in the winter of 2021, before completion of the design, winter storm Uri hit. As our members know, the winter storm Uri event caused our power supplier, Brazos Electric Cooperative (Brazos), to file for bankruptcy.

Not knowing the outcome of the bankruptcy of a company that we partially own, we put many projects on hold, including the Cleburne office reconstruction project. At the completion of the reorganization of Brazos and its exit from bankruptcy, the board of directors restarted the design of the project, which was recently completed and the results submitted to the board of directors for review and potential approval for moving the project into the construction phase. The board of directors did approve the project to move into the construction phase in the same meeting they approved the 2024 United objectives. So, how does that affect the members?

In review of the many options to deal with our issues at our 40 year-old buildings at the Cleburne site, we determined that the most cost-effective approach would be to reconstruct the majority of the facility on the same location it sits today. In order for us to do that, we have to demolish the facilities onsite in a scheduled format. The front building where we serve members will be demolished in February. All employees currently officed in the front building will shift to other office locations, including Joshua, Godley, Burleson and Mansfield. The back building will stay in operations during construction of the new facility. Once the new facility is completed in the latter part of 2025, the back building will be demolished. During construction, the back building will stay in operation only for construction purposes; members will not be able to access that back building for the purposes of handling cooperative business. Members needing to do business with the cooperative will most likely do that at the Joshua office location (only 3 miles north of the Cleburne location) or they can go to any other office—the next closest offices being Burleson and Godley.

While the Cleburne office reconstruction project will take some time, it will provide some much-needed benefits to the membership once completed. The lobby will be more open to members and be designed to handle members more efficiently. The office will have a drive-through service option to assist members who do not wish to get out of their cars to pay their bills or conduct related business. The night drop will be more effectively located in the drive-through area. The community room will be expanded, giving our members and community more opportunities to use such meeting space. These are just a few of the member-facing updates that will be seen with the new facility.

There are a number of very key benefits for the operations of the cooperative. First, with the continued growth of our electric and internet systems, we need to hire more employees, but we have nowhere to put them. The newly reconstructed office will not only have enough space for our current employee needs, but also our needs well out into the future. Over the years, we have had to turn our meeting spaces in Cleburne into office space; this project will restore our meeting space and expand for future needs of the employees and members doing business with the cooperative. The newly reconstructed facility will also become home again to our core system operations center, something that was moved to the Burleson office over a decade ago. Now that we serve over 102,000 electric locations and over 22,000 internet locations, both of which continue to dramatically grow, we need a larger and more comprehensive system operations center than we have in place now. This will give us the opportunity to better serve the combined needs of electric and internet going forward. There are many other benefits to our cooperative’s daily business functions that will also be realized once the construction is complete and we move into the space—I will not list all of those out because it would take up too much space in the magazine, and you would probably stop reading at that point anyway. But know this, we wouldn’t be moving forward with this project if it wasn’t sorely needed. We don’t take this type of project lightly. We have waited as long as we could to do the project, because it is a costly project.

The Cleburne office location will be closed effective at the end of the day on Friday, Jan. 19. We hope to reopen the location in the middle to end of 2025, but we have no completion date to share at this point in time. We will do our best to minimize the amount of time it takes to complete the project. So, all this said, for those members this will directly affect, I want to say thank you in advance for putting up with the disruption while the project is in progress. We strive to provide exceptional service and value to our members each day and we fully believe that the Cleburne reconstruction project, once completed, will be a key component to the future of meeting that expectation. I pray each of our members have a blessed 2024.

Please be safe, and God bless!