Ensuring Your Voices are Heard
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by Barry Hart
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This month, Jefferson City looks forward to the 2012 legislative session getting underway at the state Capitol. I’ll be one of the many carefully watching what takes place at the statehouse.
One of the most important roles for the Association of Missouri Electric Cooperatives is to represent electric cooperative members at the Capitol. Our purpose is to keep tabs on any legislation that could adversely affect rural people and to propose new legislation that will be beneficial.
Our efforts are guided here in Missouri by a Legislative Committee composed of managers and directors from electric cooperatives around the state. This ensures we have input from the various state regions and oversight from the grassroots.
The people on this committee, and others from neighboring electric cooperatives who provide input, have the pulse of the state’s rural areas. They know the issues that are important to their members, and they certainly let us know what these are.
We do the same thing on the national level, with help from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. NRECA also has a process to ensure the member at the end of the line has a role. Its resolutions process starts at the grassroots level and eventually gives the national association its marching orders.
Recently, a blue-ribbon committee revised the resolutions process in order to ensure members’ voices were heard, loud and clear. Laclede Electric Manager Ken Miller represented Missouri on the committee.
One of the most pressing problems for rural people, they tell me, is the lack of broadband service in parts of rural Missouri. While this situation is improving, much work needs to be done.
There are currently four electric cooperatives — Sho-Me Power, Co-Mo, Ralls County and United — that are actively involved in bringing true broadband service to their areas. Other cooperatives are watching to see if these business models might work in their service areas.
There are a number of good reasons why every electric cooperative is not involved in this effort. But we all agree one of our roles can be to help remove any barriers that stand in the way of bringing this much-needed service to rural Missouri.
During this legislative session, we will be supporting a bill that will ensure broadband service can follow the same rights of way used for power lines. This makes a lot of sense. If those building the broadband infrastructure in the state are forced to seek new routes for their lines to follow, nothing will get done.
Many other organizations are backing this proposal. At its annual meeting in December, the Missouri Farm Bureau passed a resolution in support of this common-sense approach.
If you feel the same way, please join in this effort by contacting your elected officials and asking them to support bringing broadband service to rural Missouri.
At stake is the future of our students, farmers, small businesses, local governments and emergency responders who need the same kind of access to the Internet and communications services that city people take for granted.
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