RELATED: To learn more about the person hired as the next leader of FRECC, click on this link.
BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
GLASGOW NEWS 1
The primary nugget of knowledge Bill Prather wanted his successor as president and CEO of Farmers Rural Electric Cooperative Corp. to have is relatively simple.
“My No. 1 advice is: We’re a member-owned electric cooperative, and never forget who you work for and why you’re in business,” Prather said. “You do that, and you’ll make the right decisions and stay focused.”
That successor, Tobias “Toby” Moss, was named in mid-December and he is scheduled to take over the helm Monday.
In the interim since, Prather graciously spent some time with Glasgow News 1 sharing a little bit of his background, reviewing bits of his 15-plus years in the community and in role he was about to vacate, and providing a glimpse of his immediate postretirement plans.
Pre-Glasgow
Prather started as the president and chief executive officer of FRECC on Aug. 20, 2007, with quite a volume of experience under his belt.
“Prior to coming here, I had spent about 26 1/2 years at Owen Electric Cooperative up in northern Kentucky and then two years at East Kentucky Power [Cooperative] right prior to coming here,” he said.
GN1 asked what prompted his interest in the field.
“I grew up in the building and hardware business. My mother and father had a lumber and hardware business in Henry County, up in the northern part of the state, and basically from the time I was old enough to sweep floors and stack lumber and do things that a kid could do, up through when I graduated from college, I worked. All my spare time and summers and things, I worked in the family business, so I’ve always jokingly said my first career was in the lumber and hardware business,” Prather said.
He worked with his dad for about a year after college and decided he’d like to try something different before committing to that business, and his father agreed.
“I’d always been interested in the electric utility industry. I just had an interest in it. I had been exposed to it some through the building of homes and things of that nature, so I just went to the local electric cooperative to see if they had a job, and it just so happened they had a senior accounting position open that they were recruiting for at that time, and they interviewed me on the spot and I went to work for them two weeks later. That was Feb. 9, 1979, and I’ve been in the industry ever since,” he said. “Accounting and finance, that was my primary background, but before I came here, I had had the opportunity to work in pretty much every functional field within an electric co-op that there was, and so I had supervised the construction department and part of the engineering department for a while and had worked in the field with the guys, and I understand how to tamp a pole and frame one and all, so when I came here, I had a pretty broad understanding of what the business was about.”
People
“We’ve worked hard to improve the co-op. We’ve had a lot of turnover since I’ve been here, a lot of folks retiring, so we’ve done our best to hire the best folks that we could have here to give them the ability to do their jobs, give them the resources they need and give them good direction about the results that we wanted, and I think we’ve seen that happen here,” Prather said.
Farmers RECC currently employs 61 people, including him, he said.
“When I came to work here, we had about 70 employees,” he said. “One of the focuses I’ve had is every time we’ve had an employee that’s left for whatever reason, whether retiring or whatever, I’ve always taken a look, a hard look, at the organization, what this employee was doing. Those are opportunities for you to re-engineer, or to change the way the organizational structure is or to do something better in a different way.”
That practice paired with the increased utilization of technology, Prather said, has increased performance and productivity of employees.
“It’s just been a focused effort from the standpoint of trying to be as efficient as we possibly can be in the organization, because our member-owners pay for everything we do here, so I have always been very focused on — I try not to ask our member owners to pay anymore than they need to each month for their electric service, so I’ve always tried to be a good steward of their resources, because everything we have belongs to them, and they pay for it. We’ve always encouraged that in the organization, and we’ve had a good team who have always remembered that and been focused on that.
Service through technology
“We have employed a tremendous amount of technology in the past 15 years. Our members now have the ability now to go on the web and they can virtually do anything online with us that otherwise they could come in the office to do. We have options like prepaid service that we didn’t have back then. I think one of the biggest things that we’ve provided has been our online outage information and viewer to where folks can see what’s going on during storms, and can see if we’re having a lot of outages. They can see whether crews have been assigned to them or not,” Prather said.
The outage map, which also illustrates the power distribution organization’s service area in general, is available at this link.
“I think one of the big changes we made right after I got here was we completed deployment of our smart meter system, and we began what is referred to as cycle billing, so we relieved our members of having to read that meter every month, which was an inconvenience to a lot of folks,” he said.
It was especially inconvenient for older individuals, perhaps physically challenged, or those with a remote piece of property, for example, before that change took place around 2008.
“By doing the cycle billing, we spread the billing process out over a month in equal cycles, which helped us to levelize our workload but also it gives the member an option of when they would like to be billed and when they’d like to have their due dates and so forth,” Prather said. “So I think the technology improvements we’ve made here have allowed us to stabilize our workforce as far as number of folks, but it’s also made us much more productive and really expanded the services to our members.”
Money matters
“I think we’ve been able to do a lot, and we’ve just had minimal rate changes through the years. That’s one of the things I think we have been able to do over the past 15 years is, basically, we’ve brought our rates into parity with the utilities that surround us. We’re lower than many of them, and we’re pretty much at parity with Kentucky Utilities, so I think that’s been a good accomplishment that our employees have been able to do all these things, and we’ve been tightly focused on costs,” he said. “One of the things that I’ve always said is, ‘If we’re going to spend a dollar, let’s make sure we get that dollar back – and hopefully more – as a return on our investment either monetarily or in improvement of service to our members, that we’re spending those monies well.’ So that’s one of the things I’ve been pleased with, is that we’ve been able to make improvements … with really modest increases in costs through the years.”
Prather said he’s only the fifth manager Farmers has had in its 84-year history.
“I think that each one of my four predecessors worked hard to accomplish and provide the members with the level of service and the types of things they wanted during those time spans. And I’ve done the same thing during my time as CEO,” he said. “I know in my 43-plus years’ career, I have seen members’ expectations and members’ desires change pretty dramatically through those years. I’m old enough to remember what I call the pre-VCR days. In those days, if the lights blinked, no one cared. It didn’t bother you because we didn’t have the electronic equipment that we have today, and we weren’t digitally as dependent on things as we are today. But through those years, I have seen the expectations for reliable service increase dramatically, and so each one of the managers have had different things occur through those time spans that they’ve dealt with, challenges that they’ve dealt with. I know that each one left it in good shape before me, and I’m trying to leave it in good shape for Mr. Moss.”
Key distribution improvements
“We basically take [the electricity] those last few miles from the transmission and substation, we take it to the ultimate member-owner and provide the service. I think there’s some major things that we’ve done to improve the distribution system and the transmission system that serves our distribution system. We have done a tremendous amount of system maintenance over the last 15 years, particularly in the area of right-of-way clearing,” Prather said, naming examples of ongoing types of work. “Some of the most major things we’ve done – and we’ve done this in conjunction with East Kentucky Power from the standpoint of our own engineering needs and things we’ve determined – we’ve put in three new substations in our service territory over the last 15 years.
“We put one up in the Jonesville area of Hart County, and that was to improve the service up in the northeastern part of Hart County and strengthen that. We put a new substation in in Bon Ayr, over in the western part of Barren County, and we also put a new substation in down in Roseville, southern Barren County.”
The substations help provide better reliability and also voltage and service to the members.
“Along with that, there was one major transmission improvement that we made. We had a new transmission line built between our Cave City substation and the new Bon Ayr substation, and that line actually helped us complete a circle of transmission all around the Glasgow area,” Prather said. “What it does is it helps us to have a redundant transmission feed. If one area breaks down, we can back feed from another area.”
The same can apply when they have a scheduled outage to work on something, so that redundancy helps improve reliability in more than one way.
In addition, he said, EKPC recently completed an updated transmission tie with the Tennessee Valley Authority up to the Fox Hollow distribution station.
“That upgraded facility will help in the growth of our demand here, and also it’s a redundant line that will help us in case one fails, we’ve got another,” Prather said. “Those three new substations and then those two big transmission projects have greatly improved the reliability of our system for our members in the last 15 years, so we’ve been appreciative of East Kentucky’s work down here in this area on helping us to do that.”
Not all about the job
During his time in this area, Prather’s roles have extended beyond that of president and CEO of FRECC.
“I was honored to serve for several years in the chamber — served on the board and then the chain leading up to I was president in 2017. I’ve been honored to be asked to serve in those positions. I think that giving back to this community is important,” Prather said.
He also served as chairman of the T.J. Community Foundation board several years, but he’s not the only one at Farmers to take on such participatory roles.
“We serve portions of 11 counties. One of the things I’ve tried to do here, and I think we’ve been successful in it, the other counties we have a large presence in, like Hart County, Metcalfe County, is we have been very active in their chambers and in community activities in those areas, because we have a significant number of member-owners in those areas and so we’ve tried to make sure that we’re just as attentive those communities as we are here in the Glasgow-Barren County area,” Prather said. “I have an extremely good, smart capable senior staff and several of them serve in capacities with the other chambers and in Rotary Clubs and things of that nature. We have tried to be involved in those types of civic organizations and be a positive presence in those communities.”
This report is to be continued with Part 2 on Sunday, including discussions of two major community projects in which Prather and FRECC played a vital role and of some of Prather’s plans.
Comments