MESO Honors Collinsville Electric Dept. July 15, 2005 -- Collinsville, OK -- www.cvilleok.com

Collinsville Electric Department Receives
Electric Operations and Reliability Award

July 15, 2005 -- Press Release -- Shane Woolbright, Executive Director

Municipal Electric Systems of Oklahoma (MESO) announces that the Collinsville Electric Department was named as the 1st Place Winner in the association's annual Electric Operations and Reliability Competition. Fairview was recognized in the category for cities under 10,000 population for calendar year 2004 and won for having the best employee safety record of those cities as well as achieving an outstanding level of service reliability.

Collinsville was recognized for outstanding distribution construction standards, excellent customer service, and very low margin of customer service disturbances. Collinsville employees meet the requirements of their work with professionalism and safety due to 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.

Although electric line work is among the most hazardous of industries for workers, Collinsville line crew members worked the entirety of 2004 without missing a single day due to injury which marked the third consecutive year of injury free work by the department.

Collinsville scored well in reliability. The City typically identified, responded to, and corrected a power outage problem in less than one hour and 15 minutes. By having local ownership of the electric system and crews located within one mile of customers, customers don't wait for electric service crews in Collinsville.

MESO Executive Director Shane Woolbright presented the award to the City of Collinsville. Said Woolbright, "Collinsville Electric has demonstrated a continuous effort in the past decade to be a high quality public power system. This is evidenced by such actions as training of employees in system preventive maintenance and having employee develop programs to prevent problems from overvoltage and overcurrent. Collinsville has also recently installed computer programs to track all system interruptions and issue reliability reports that staff can use in doing system planning.

"The current construction standards and employee training standards of the utility are superior, and that effort has resulted in the outstanding reliability citizens receive and the presentation of this award."

MESO is an electric utility trade association representing cities in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas. The association's member utilities provide non-profit electric services to some 700,000 people in the three states.