85th Annual Meeting Recap — Watch the 10/3/2025 Business Meeting Here:

Good after­noon, and wel­come to Coastal Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tive’s 2025 busi­ness ses­sion for your annu­al meet­ing. My name is Lou Green, and I’ve been asked to help guide us through the busi­ness ses­sion, so we’ll call the busi­ness ses­sion to order. Well, so far, the mem­bers of Coastal Elec­tric have been reg­is­ter­ing for the meet­ing. You reg­is­tered all day yes­ter­day, 7:00 to 7:00, and then this morn­ing from 8:00 to 12:00. And now we come to the busi­ness ses­sion where we con­duct the busi­ness of your orga­ni­za­tion every year. Thank you for join­ing us online. I’m going to ask Mr. Jamie Copeland, who is a board mem­ber, to come for­ward and offer our invo­ca­tion for the meet­ing.

Hey, every­one. Let us pray. Heav­en­ly Father, we thank you for this beau­ti­ful day for the suc­cess of our annu­al meet­ing. We give you thanks for your pres­ence through­out this meet­ing and pray that our thoughts and actions will be pleas­ing in your sight and to ben­e­fit the coop­er­a­tive and our mem­bers. We thank you for the employ­ees of our co-op for the ser­vice they pro­vide to our mem­bers. We pray that you will guide and pro­tect them as they per­form their many duties. We pray for the lead­ers of our com­mu­ni­ties, our state, and our nation that they might have the vision and the courage to take actions to improve and pro­tect the lives of our cit­i­zens. We give you thanks and ask for our pro­tec­tion of our first respon­ders, includ­ing the police and fire and res­cue. We ask for your care, pro­tec­tion, and guid­ance for our mil­i­tary as they work to main­tain our free­doms and help oth­ers to expe­ri­ence free­doms that we enjoy. We thank you for all the mem­bers, employ­ees who par­tic­i­pat­ed in this two-day elec­tion in this vir­tu­al annu­al meet­ing. Father, we pray and con­tin­ue future progress of our coop­er­a­tive as we work to pro­vide safe, reli­able, and afford­able pow­er to our mem­bers.

All these things we ask in Christ’s name. Amen.

Amen.

Thank you, Mr. Copeland. If you have not met him before, I’d love for you to meet Jamie Bun­ton. He is your chair­man of the board, and I’d like to invite him for­ward so he can intro­duce the reminders of the board. We would do a pledge of alle­giance first. Yes, we would. He’s also the one in charge of keep­ing me straight. So here we go. Let’s say the pledge of alle­giance, and I’d invite the peo­ple here to stand for the pledge of alle­giance. And you may wish to stand at home as well. Let’s say that togeth­er. I pledge alle­giance to the flag of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca and to the Repub­lic for which it stands, one nation under God, indi­vis­i­ble, with lib­er­ty and jus­tice for all. Thank you very much. You may be seat­ed. Now, Mr. Bun­ton.

Thank you, Lou. This time, I’d like to intro­duce every­one to their rep­re­sen­ta­tives and the trustees here at Coastal.

Dis­trict 2, myself, Chair­man, James Bun­ton. Dis­trict 9, Ian Pad­gett, Vice Chair. Dis­trict 6, Mr. Ter­ry Hoff, Sec­re­tary.

Dis­trict 3, John­ny Frank, Trea­sur­er.

Dis­trict 1, Mr. Lav­erne Polk. Dis­trict 4, Mr. Jamey Copeland. Dis­trict 5, Mr. Bill Smoak. Dis­trict 7, Mr. Wen­dell McDon­ald.

And last but not least, dis­trict 8, Mr. Jim Bryant. Thank you all for serv­ing. Mr. Lou.

Well, to be able to con­duct busi­ness at your busi­ness ses­sion, you need a quo­rum. And the quo­rum for Coastal this year is 452 mem­bers com­ing by and reg­is­ter­ing for the meet­ing. Well, I’m glad to say we are well above that, all the way up to 835 mem­bers who reg­is­tered over the last cou­ple of days. So we’re in good shape with the quo­rum. Now, I have sev­er­al pieces of infor­ma­tion that were sent to you or made avail­able to you, can be made avail­able to you that we need to approve. But with­out going through a lot of vot­ing for it, I think you would be will­ing, if you will, with­out objec­tion, to approve the notice to the mem­bers, which was sent to all of the mem­bers of Coastal Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tive. In addi­tion to that, the proof of mail­ing of the notice, the proof from the post office that says, Yep, all of them were mailed. And third­ly, the min­utes from the 2024 annu­al meet­ing of last year. So with­out objec­tion, if there is none, we’ll con­sid­er those accept­ed and approved. Now, I’d love for you to give some of your atten­tion to your CEO, Mark Walling. Each year, he gives you an update on what’s been going on with the coop­er­a­tive, and we wel­come him for that now.

Thank you, Lou, for that intro­duc­tion. Well, once again, I’d like to thank every­one for par­tic­i­pat­ing in mak­ing our 85th annu­al meet­ing a suc­cess. It’s hard to believe how quick­ly a year flies by. It seems like we were just here cel­e­brat­ing our 84th. I want to start out, as always do, and give a brief update on our finan­cial con­di­tion. We’re con­tin­u­ing to expe­ri­ence some mod­est growth, which makes things eas­i­er when you have some growth and increase in sales. As of the end of July of this year, we had 12,271 active ser­vices. Total util­i­ty plant grew by $1. 1 mil­lion, which is about one and a half % from March 31st of 2024 through March 31st of It now totals just over $74 mil­lion that the mem­ber­ship has invest­ed in this sys­tem. As I said, we are hav­ing a very good finan­cial year present­ly. Our ener­gy sales have been very strong this year. We start­ed out the year, as you may remem­ber, back in Jan­u­ary, with a very cold first month of the year. We’ve had a rel­a­tive­ly hot sum­mer. June and July were rel­a­tive­ly hot, August did we tend to cool a lit­tle, thank­ful­ly, but this has dri­ven our ener­gy sales year to date up over 6% ver­sus the same time frame last year.

This strong finan­cial posi­tion has allowed the board to, again, autho­rize $300,000 to be retired in cap­i­tal cred­its this Decem­ber. This year’s retire­ment will be from cap­i­tal cred­it allo­ca­tions for the years of 1997, ’98, and part of Those checks will be mailed out in ear­ly Decem­ber. Look for those and spend that mon­ey wise­ly. So again, remind­ing you that if it’s less than $5 because of how much you con­sumed, it will be a bill cred­it. So pay atten­tion to that as well. Last year’s annu­al meet­ing, I did share that a rate increase, unfor­tu­nate­ly, was going to have to be imple­ment­ed it in Jan­u­ary, pri­mar­i­ly and almost exclu­sive­ly, in fact, due to the ris­ing costs of our whole­sale ener­gy. Again, Coastal does not gen­er­ate the ener­gy that we dis­trib­ute to our mem­bers. We pur­chase that and then redis­trib­ute it to you to use at your home or busi­ness. We were told to expect some­where around a 6–8% increase, and in fact, year to date, it’s about 6.5%, so they were rel­a­tive­ly accu­rate on those esti­mates. Well, when all was said and done, we end­ed up hav­ing to raise your rates about 6.5% to the aver­age res­i­den­tial user.

We were able to absorb some of those costs and tried to min­i­mize the impact to each and every one of you. For 2026, our providers for whole­sale pow­er have indi­cat­ed a prob­a­bly a five and a half % increase in ’26, which we knew was com­ing. We do believe the next two years fol­low­ing that will be rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble flat. So hope­ful­ly, if we can get through this next year, we will be able to sta­bi­lize things some­what. At this time, we have every effort being made to con­trol expens­es such that we won’t have to raise rates in 2026 to absorb this five and a half % cost increase that we are expect­ing. Keep in mind, though, that five and a half % is an esti­mate. There are many fac­tors that can affect that, weath­er being one. If you don’t have much cold or hot weath­er, ener­gy sales will slump, and so that dri­ves cost up. There’s also fuel price volatil­i­ty. The gen­er­a­tors either burn coal or nat­ur­al gas or some oth­er small com­po­nents of fuel, and those can be volatile depend­ing on what is going on in the world. So these are esti­mates. Based on the esti­mates we have at this time, though, we feel like we will be able to move through ’26 with­out any addi­tion­al rate increas­es.

I assure you that we are doing any­thing and every­thing to keep your costs down, keep them sta­ble while con­tin­u­ing to pro­vide the high­est qual­i­ty ser­vice pos­si­ble to the mem­bers. We will not let the ser­vice qual­i­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty suf­fer due to cost increas­es that we expe­ri­ence in oth­er areas. That leads me to talk­ing about reli­a­bil­i­ty as an engi­neer. I always like to talk about reli­a­bil­i­ty. Last time this week, we were sit­ting around here look­ing at fore­cast, and the hur­ri­canes that were brew­ing in the Atlantic were not look­ing too favor­able. As you may recall, we had to can­cel last year’s annu­al meet­ing and then resched­ule at a lat­er date due to Hur­ri­cane Helene. We were say­ing to our­selves, Oh, no, here we go again. For­tu­nate­ly, we were blessed and those storms went out to sea. We had beau­ti­ful weath­er these last two days in which to con­duct the annu­al meet­ing. As far as the reli­a­bil­i­ty, though, again, we haven’t had any major events for 2025 thus far. Hope­ful­ly, we can wrap up the remain­der of the year. Hard to believe it’s only three months left, but hope­ful­ly we can sus­tain very good weath­er and con­di­tions and not have any major events the rest of the year.

I do want to, though, let you know that we con­tin­ue to invest in the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem that serves you. We con­tin­ue to spend and invest mon­ey on smart grid tech­nol­o­gy. This helps us to restore your pow­er quick­er in the event that the major lines are tak­en out by trees, storms, light­ning, what­ev­er the event may be, even car wrecks dur­ing sun­ny days some­times. We are also improv­ing reli­a­bil­i­ty by tak­ing tak­ing advan­tage of relo­ca­tion of lines that are some­times hard to access or maybe go through the woods where they are much more like­ly to be dam­aged dur­ing storms or through trees and wind dam­age. We’re also, although this is a more expen­sive alter­na­tive, we are, in fact, bury­ing some over­head lines to improve storm resilien­cy. This is a very expen­sive task, so it is a slow process, but there are cer­tain places where it’s cer­tain­ly jus­ti­fi­able and cost-effec­tive to do so, and we are pur­su­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties. With that, I will wrap up. I appre­ci­ate all of your par­tic­i­pa­tion in this year’s annu­al meet­ing. I want to thank all the peo­ple that helped to pull it off, the employ­ees, the vol­un­teers, law enforce­ment that helped us.

We had quite a few retirees that have been very good at com­ing back and help­ing us each year, and we cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate their help. Again, thank you, and thank you, Board, for allow­ing me to serve anoth­er year as a CEO here at Coastal Elec­tric. I will turn the meet­ing over now to our attor­ney, Mr. David Black. 

Thank you, Mr. Walling. Pur­suant to the Coop­er­a­tive’s bylaws, the busi­ness and affairs of the coop­er­a­tive are man­aged by a board of nine mem­bers. One of the impor­tant things we do at the annu­al meet­ing is to elect board mem­bers. We cur­rent­ly have three seats to elect to the board of trustees this after­noon. Pur­suant to the Coop­er­a­tives’ bylaws, notice was pre­vi­ous­ly fur­nished to the mem­ber­ship via mail­ing. The fol­low­ing three seats for Coastal Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tives Board of trustees are now open. Dis­trict 2, dis­trict 4, and dis­trict 5. The fol­low­ing can­di­dates have applied and have been found to be qual­i­fied by the Coop­er­a­tives Nom­i­na­tion and Qual­i­fi­ca­tions Com­mit­tee: dis­trict 2, Mr. Jamie Bun­ton, dis­trict 4, Mr. Jamie Copeland, and dis­trict 5, Mr. Bill Smoak. If only one indi­vid­ual is nom­i­nat­ed to run for elec­tion for a trustee posi­tion, then the indi­vid­ual pre­sid­ing at the annu­al meet­ing may announce that nom­i­nat­ed indi­vid­ual is elect­ed by accla­ma­tion and no vote is required. Because there is not a con­test­ed elec­tion for the three trustee seats, the can­di­dates are here­by elect­ed and seat­ed by accla­ma­tion. Con­grat­u­la­tions, Mr. Bun­ton, Mr. Copeland, and Mr. Smoak. Now, I turn the meet­ing back over to Mr. Green.

Thanks, David. And con­grat­u­la­tions, Mr. Walling and Mr. Bun­ton for the board and the board itself for being able to jug­gle three impor­tant things. One, main­tain­ing and build­ing a strong, eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable orga­ni­za­tion, yet at the same time, fac­ing those head­winds of increas­ing costs, being able to con­sume some of those costs, and at the same time be able to return cap­i­tal cred­its to mem­bers who own the coop­er­a­tive. That’s why I love the coop­er­a­tive busi­ness mod­el. So thank you all for doing such a good job there. Well, we come to the part of the pro­gram where we inquire whether there’s any unfin­ished busi­ness to come before the meet­ing at this time. I see none. Any new busi­ness to come before the meet­ing? If not, I’d enter­tain a motion that we adjourn. There’s such a motion. A motion, sec­ond, a sec­ond. With no objec­tion, we are adjourned. Now then, you can sit back and relax for a few min­utes while we get to to the point of bring­ing up the roll cage there and draw for the prizes because I know some of you tune in for that as well. It’s always fun to be able to give away some prizes, and thank you for par­tic­i­pat­ing in your annu­al meet­ing.