Over 600 members attended Lorain-Medina Rural Electric Cooperative‘s 89th annual meeting on July 8, held virtually over Zoom for the fifth year in a row. Along with annual cooperative updates from LMRE’s president/CEO and board chair, the results of this year’s uncontested election for the District 3 seat were announced to meeting attendees.

Gary Broderick, a resident of Eaton Township, was announced as the new District 3 representative on the LMRE board of directors. As his petition was uncontested, no full-member election was needed, per a provision in the code of regulations. Broderick will be replacing former board member Ken Diedrick, who officially completed his term at the annual meeting. Diedrick had announced his intention to retire from the LMRE board at the 2024 annual meeting. Additionally, Joe Swinko, representing District 6, and Rick Dumperth, representing District 9, were both re-elected to the board of directors following an uncontested race.

This year’s annual meeting focused on the future, with both Board Chair Eaton and LMRE President/CEO Ed VanHoose discussing the cooperative's vision for the future. Eaton acknowledged the community impact that member-funded programs like the LMRE People Fund and America’s Electric Cooperatives PAC have on the cooperative community.

Additionally, Eaton discussed LMRE’s strategic future. “The board recently completed a strategic planning process to guide the co-op toward adopting advanced technologies while maintaining the high level of service you expect,” he said. “New initiatives include a technology plan to enhance service communications and efforts to strengthen our political presence on the national stage. Along with these new priorities, our core values of safety, competitive rates, and reliability still remain at the heart of everything we do.”

LMRE President/CEO Ed VanHoose highlighted differences in energy policy, reliability, and financing, as well as expounded upon the new metering technology and a new technology plan being introduced to the cooperative as part of LMRE’s strategic vision. Additionally, VanHoose also discussed the importance of energy efficiency during the meeting.

“We have an agreement in place that we should go down a path where we have smart metering that’s capable of providing better energy efficiency measures than what you’ve seen today, and possibly could even imagine going forward,” he shared. “Things that I haven’t even seen will be enabled by doing this.”

VanHoose also congratulated the student scholarship winners on their accomplishments.

If members missed the meeting, a recording of it will be available on the Lorain-Medina Rural Electric website, www.lmre.org, in the coming weeks. For more information, members can go online or contact the Lorain-Medina Rural Electric office at 440-647-2133.