Organization/Company: Needles Public Utility Authority
Title: Electric Line Crew Supervisor
Location: Needles, California
When did you start working with WAPA? Exactly 10 years ago I called WAPA and asked to partner with
them. At the time, I didn’t even know what services they provided. I’ll never
forget who answered the phone; it was Penny Casey. Since then I have been
working with everyone in the Desert Southwest office in Phoenix. They walked us
through everything and partnered with us on many different programs.
In 10 years, WAPA has been flawless. I cannot name one single incident
in any aspect of our work with WAPA that has not been flawless. Contacting WAPA
was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
What is the most interesting thing you have worked on with WAPA? The very first project we did was to build a 69-kilovolt
line and tie it into our system. WAPA also took over our load balancing and
power purchasing and we went from having access to one vendor to having access
to around 27 vendors.
Partnering with WAPA reduced our
rates from 15.8 cents per kilowatt-hour to 4.65 cents per kWh, and power
outages dropped 96 percent. I cannot overstate the value of public power, and
the value that WAPA brings to this community.
How does WAPA support your industry or business? The support of WAPA for our
utility is absolutely unbelievable. Every single thing we are doing in our city
could not be accomplished without WAPA. In 42 years in this industry, I have
never had a relationship with any utility as positive as this. It would be
impossible to overstate the value of WAPA to this city.
