Fair and 71° F

The winter is gone and before long the heat will be back on. We will soon be feeling the “heat” from Tri-County Electric Cooperative, who, by the way, ranks in the top 10 highest priced power companies in the nation.

The following information was obtained from the Department of Public Utilities in November 2007. Prices may have increased. Tri-County Electric charges its members $103.87 per 1,000 kilowatts. SCE&G charges $99.95 per 1,000 kilowatts and DPU of Orangeburg charges &77.10 per 1,000 kilowatts, but we all can’t live in Orangeburg.

Tri-County is a co-op founded by the people years ago when people in the county and suburban areas could not get electricity. SCE&G is owned by its stockholders, and they are working for a profit. Tri-County members are the owners, and get dividend checks.

By the way, when is the last time you got a check?

Tri-County is governed by no one except the board members we elect, unlike the Department of Public Utilities and SCE&G. Tri-County board members decide our fate and spend our money as they please. We must be more conscious of who gets our vote. You will be better served if you go to the annual meeting to vote rather than receive your supposedly free door prize.

Just for an example. A cashier working at a convenience store making $8 an hour in August would have to work a week and more just to pay the light bill. The elderly and disabled on fixed incomes have it even worse. It’s hard for people to choose between air conditioning in August and school clothes for their children. The elderly choose to sit under fans instead, so they will have money left for food and medicine. We are in one of the poorest counties in the nation with the 10th highest electric bill in the country. This is bad for the members and small businesses. People have no money left to buy hardware, furniture, clothing, etc. In Orangeburg, we would have more, but again, we can’t all go there just to get a break on the electric bill.

And there is the Round-Up Fund that hardly anyone knows about: a fund that you are automatically included in whether rich or poor. You can choose not to participate in this fund, but you must contact Tri-County. Tri-County rounds your electric bill to the next dollar and takes your change difference. For example, if your bill is $10.01, it will be rounded up to $11 and Tri-County gets 99 cents for the fund. This fund, according to the Tri-County Web site, focuses on needs such as food, shelter and clothing, plus health care and other community services.

Just to mention a few, according to the Tri-County Round-Up donations list, monies have been going to projects such as DHEC Smoke Detectors ($400), Calhoun Academy ($4,000), Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department ($5,400), Calhoun County Library ($10,000), Elloree Museum ($2,000), Lower Richland Athletics Association ($5,000) and other special interests such as SMART ($5,000) and youth baseball teams ($6,000). A transplant fund only got $2,500. The donations list shows no monies spent for food, clothing or shelter.

You decide your yourself, but in 2007 over $90,000 was spent in donations, and it appears that most of the money went to special interests. These are, I think, nice gestures; however, this money would be better spent assisting the elderly and disabled on fixed incomes that have to decide between utilities, food or medicine, and the poor who just can’t afford these prices.

There are people in the county on SCE&G who live on the same road across from a Tri-County member who pay less for their electricity just because they are on SCE&G lines. It is not fair for a Tri-County customer to pay more than the neighbor. It should be, at the very least, equal.

It is high time Tri-County Electric Co-op revisit some of its decisions and start using some of the resources already on the payroll instead of contracting the work out to high-cost companies. They need to revert back to some old standards when times were tough, because times are definitely tough now in Calhoun County.

— Glenn Walling, Tri-County member, St. Matthews

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