Kyle Roadman, EPUD General Manager
Greetings Emerald Customer-Owners,
Spring is here and it really does feel like a new beginning. Earlier this month we learned that our neighbors at SUB chose not to appeal their latest defeat in court. Although I remain cautious given their history on this issue, I sincerely hope this indicates a willingness to stop this wasteful behavior. After 20 years of court battles the time has come for this to end.
I want to personally thank every customer who reached out to SUB and City of Springfield officials during this latest episode. Your voice surely made a difference in their decision making.
For a recap of this saga, I encourage you to read this recent article in the Eugene Weekly.
Now, on to more positive topics.
2022 Year in Review
During the April Board of Directors meeting, staff provided a 2022 Year in Review presentation. This annual event aligns with the release of our independent financial audit and provides a chance to assess the overall state of our business. I’m happy to report the 2022 version was full of good news.
- 📈 Audit Results: First, our 2022 audit results came back clean once again, with an unmodified opinion and no reportable findings. This is a testament to the great work of our staff to safeguard the utility’s assets and ensure financial results are published fairly and accurately.
Audit summary from our external auditor, Moss Adams.
- 📊 New Dashboard: This year staff created a high-level dashboard to display results across different areas of the business. I’ve included this below along with some additional comments:
- 💰 Financial Performance: 2022 was one of our strongest financial years ever. Revenues came in far over budget, while costs were largely flat. As a result, we increased our cash reserves and further strengthened our balance sheet. And we did all this without a rate increase for the third consecutive year.
- ⚡ Power Supply Performance: Despite record high wholesale market pricing for electricity, our power supply costs finished below budget. This is primarily the result of our low-cost federal hydroelectric supply (it was a good water year), but also the result of our internal hedging and risk management program.
- 👷🏻♂️ Workforce Performance: Our total number of positions and overall labor costs both finished below budget. On the safety side, I’m proud to note that our total days away from work decreased significantly in 2022.
- 🔌 Reliability Performance: We weren’t able to execute as much capital spending as planned due to supply chain shortages. However, we plan to roll all of this work into future years. We’ve also begun tracking outage “hot spots” across our district, and were happy to see the number of these areas decrease in 2022.
We’re already building on these strong results here in 2023 and I look forward to reporting more good news throughout the year. Stay tuned and thanks as always for your support!
Please stay safe,
