(Estherville)– The new President and CEO of Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative has been on the job about a month now. Tim McCollough has had nearly 20 years of experience in the electric industry and comes to ILEC from Fort Collins, Colorado, where he worked with a municipal utility. A native of northwest Iowa, McCollough says he’s glad to be back in the area and is excited to be working for a rural electric cooperative…
“I’ve always been interested in the cooperative member-owned model to deliver power. I think it’s the best model that’s out there having worked for investor-owned utilities where the primary concern is shareholder value. It’s a little bit disconnected from the customer. The municipal model is better and I enjoyed that for more than a decade, but I love the member-owned model. And so I’d been looking to get into the cooperative electric business for most of my career, so this was a great opportunity for me to join a well-run member co-op. It’s a great promotional opportunity, it’s a step in my career that I’ve been wanting to take and as I said before Armstrong, I graduated high school from this area, so it fit the bill to bring my family back to rural northwest Iowa and so all those layers made it an ideal position for me.”
McCollough says the past year was another very successful one for Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative and he’s looking forward to building on that in the future…
“We had another kind of historic event at the last board meeting. The board of directors for Iowa Lakes Electric voted to return, last year they returned $2.5 million in power supply rebates and margins and load management rebates. This year they approved and will be returning $2.1 million. So for an average member at the residential level that could mean over $100 of credit on the February bill that will come out in March. So we’re excited for the financial position that Iowa Lakes is in. We outperformed our budget last year and we have a commitment ongoing if we outperform our budget we return those electric margins directly to our members.”
McCollough encourages ILEC member-owners to attend the cooperative’s annual meeting April 9th in Spencer. He says more information on that will be coming as the event gets closer.
