MESO Press Release

Municipal Electrical Systems of Oklahoma (MESO) announces that the Electrical Department of the City of Collinsville was named as the 1st Place Winner in the association's annual Electric Operations and Safety Competition. Collinsville was recognized in the category for cities under 10,000 population and placed for having the best employee safety record of those cities as well as achieving an outstanding level of service reliability. The Collinsville electric department had no lost time in the past year, a perfect record.

Collinsville was recognized for outstanding distribution construction standards, good customer service, and very low margin of customer service disturbances. Collinsville employees meet the requirements of their work with professionalism and safety due to the employer efforts. These efforts include four years of rigorous field experience and testing for each line worker before he achieves journey lineworker status. In addition, employees do safety reviews before each job and attend monthly training and safety sessions in addition to other training provided by the utility.

The time frame for the award was for calendar year 2008. Collinsville scored well in reliability with crews normally responding to and correcting a customer outage within 80 minutes. By having local ownership of the electric system and crews located within one mile of most customers, residents in Collinsville don't wait long for electric service crews to respond to problems.

MESO General Manager Shane Woolbright presented the award to Collinsville. Said Woolbright, "The City of Collinsville has demonstrated a continuous effort in the past decade to be the highest quality public power system. This is evidenced by such actions as training of employees in system preventive maintenence and having employee development programs to prevent problems from overvoltage and overcurrent. Improved tree trimming practices play a big role in reliability as well."

"The current construction standards and employee training standards of the utility are superior, and that effort has resulted in the outstanding reliabilitycitizens receive and the presentation of this award. It should be noted that good service and 100% employee attendance have a connection."

MESO is an electric utility trade association representing cities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. The association's member utilities provide non-profit electric services to some 7000,000 people in the three states.