Archive for category: General Information

With the 2013 Annual Conference, KMEA started what has now become a popular tradition – recognizing member cities’ capital improvements. Last year, we were honored to recognize Baldwin City’s city-wide water and electric meter upgrades, Garden City’s completion of several major projects, including construction of the Jameson Energy Center, Oberlin’s progress with their ongoing electrical infrastructure improvement plan, Garnett’s replacement of 100 city street lights with new, more efficient, LED lights, along with celebrating 100 years of generating electricity. We also had the privilege of recognizing Pratt’s project of overhauling their steam unit, and Russell’s retro-fitting three generating units and beginning a multi-year project to upgrade and improve reliability of their electrical distribution system.

KMEA is aware that many of you are continuously making improvements to your municipal systems and we would like to recognize those of you who have made capital improvements to the electric or gas utilities in your communities at our November 5-6 Annual Conference. Whether the capital improvements are new improvements just underway, project updates since last year or progress toward a multi-year project, we want to shine the light on you. Please help us by sending photographs and a clear description of your improvements to Patrick Ryan at ryan@kmea.com by October 12^th

Interestingly, a news clipping about Solar Energy, preserved as a keepsake during the days of the Korean War, was recently shared with KMEA. Note the caption of the article from the Tuesday, April 7, 1953 Pacific Stars & Stripes publication, titled “Solar Energy Switch Hailed by Scientists.” Back in 1953, the solar energy conversion efficiency was very low, however, the concluding sentence of the article makes a rather prophetic statement: “The new method (solar energy) converts about 1 percent of the sunlight absorbed into chemical energy. But there is no obvious reason why the efficiency cannot be increased to such an extent that the method may become of economic importance.”

Today, the conversion rate is in the neighborhood of 25% and new technologies continue to emerge that could harvest more of the sun’s energy. The industry has been considering solar energy for decades and is still dealing with the “economic importance” issue.   We are thrilled to have APPA’s Paul Zummo as one of our featured speakers at the KMEA Annual Conference, who will be giving a solar presentation.

KMEA is pleased to announce that a new application is available to its electric and gas members. In the near future you will be receiving an email with a link to allow you to access ShareFile. ShareFile is a document server that will allow KMEA to post documents for each city in a secure manner. Each city will be allowed as many users as they want with access to the system at no charge. Each member city will be given access to different areas of the system based on the projects the city belongs to. KMEA plans to use this system for a wide range of documents, from daily operational information and monthly meeting documents to billing invoices. Documents that might be too large to fit in an email attachment can be easily accommodated on the ShareFile system. It is our hope that this new system will create easier access for our members to retrieve information and documentation. Please feel free to send any questions to Neil Rowland (Rowland@kmea.com)

Chris Lowe, Baldwin City Administrator and KMEA Executive Committee Vice President, recently announced that he has accepted the position of Town Manager of Monument, Colorado, a city of about 5,800, north of Colorado Springs. Baldwin City has been home to Chris and his family since July 2011, when he was hired as Baldwin City Administrator. Chris’ dedication and commitment to improving Baldwin City is evidenced by his long list of accomplishments. Numerous city revitalization projects were completed during Chris’ four years, including street reconstruction, expansion of the public library, upgrades to the municipal golf course, city parks and city power and sewer plants, just to name a few. Chris also improved the city’s finances and renegotiated the city’s wholesale water agreement with the city of Lawrence, reducing Baldwin City’s wholesale water rate by 25%.

In addition to his leadership and contributions to Baldwin City, Chris faithfully served on the KMEA Executive Committee from 2012 to 2015. This past May, he was elected to an officer position, as Vice President of the Executive Committee. Chris’ last official day in Baldwin City is September 21. Please join us in congratulating and extending our best wishes to Chris on his future success in Colorado.

As you read this, hopefully the latest edition of the “Power Factor” newsletter has hit your email inbox. That’s right! “Power Factor” has been transformed into an e-newsletter. As an e-newsletter, we are moving to a more progressive news format; another step forward in our communication strategy. E-newsletters enable us to share updates more frequently and in a more timely fashion than the quarterly distribution of the past. Through our weekly website news blogs, you always have the opportunity to receive real time news every week, however, if you miss an update on the website, we will capture it for you in the “Power Factor” e-newsletter. Please note – if you did not receive the e-newsletter, it was by mistake due to an erroneous email address. It is very simple to subscribe, however. Simply scroll towards the bottom of the kmea.com website Home page and enter your email address where it reads “Sign up for the Power Factor Newsletter.” If your incoming emails are automatically routed to specific categories such as primary, social and promotions, or you have spam or junk mail folders, you might take a look in these places first. The Power Factor e-newsletter was emailed Friday, August 7^th.