Valentine’s Day is coming up soon. At Clay Electric Cooperative, we love our members. You are special to us in ways that customers of regular businesses aren’t. As a member of a cooperative, you are part owner. At our annual meeting in August, our membership comes together to elect the directors who will guide and direct the cooperative forward. The money we collect from you through our rates goes directly to providing you with safe and reliable electricity. As a not-for-profit electric cooperative, each year we calculate how much it costs us to provide power to all our members, and the rest is recorded to be paid back to the membership as capital credits. Clay Electric will hold onto these funds for a time as a safety net in case of the need to make major repairs, deal with difficult economic and power market issues, etc. Each year, we look back and repay those funds to the membership. This year, we will be paying back the years 1982 and 1983.

You will have seen a credit on your January bills. Your board of directors is always balancing the collection of sufficient revenue to keep your cooperative fiscally healthy, taking the least amount of money from our members. With our end of the year calculations, the board decided the cooperative could afford to return a portion of FY 2022 revenue to our members. Clay Electric Cooperative returned $250,000 to our members on our January bills. We hope in these difficult times that this provided some small bit of reprieve following the holiday season and the extra expenses that come along with it.

This past year, we upgraded our billing system. Our new Meridian billing system is much “smarter” than our old system. It hasn’t been a flawless upgrade, as no technology has ever been implemented without bugs, but we are happy with the new system as we continue to get familiar with it. Part of this new system is a new payment app. In our new app, you can make payments and view your account information. The Clay ECI app is available for iOS and Android devices and can be downloaded through the App Store or Google Play. Just search “Clay ECI” and look for our green logo. Once downloaded, register your account and you’ll have access to your information anywhere you go. Please remember that our members who also receive water from Clay County Water, Inc. will need to register those accounts separately as they are managed separately to our electric accounts.

Don’t forget to be on the lookout for your member number in the center section of this magazine. There are three member numbers hidden in Clay Electric News. If you find your number and give us a call you win $5 off your next bill!