The committee paid for and has published ads in the July 23 and July 30 editions of The Cairo Messenger questioning certain financial issues at the EMC, including the salary of former EMC President and General Manager Thomas A. Grady EMC’s coverage area includes Grady, Decatur and Thomas counties. Deep South Guns and Pawn is owned by Cairo businessman Gordon Clyatt, who says he is a member of the committee. The group is calling itself the “Take Back Our Grady EMC Committee” and has made petitions available at the three locations of Deep South Guns and Pawn in Cairo, Thomasville and Bainbridge. Grady EMC was created in 1936 when 175 farmers got together and decided to form their own REA in South Georgia.A committee of disgruntled members of the Grady Electric Membership Corporation has launched a petition drive in the hope of obtaining signatures from a minimum of 10 percent of the approximately 13,100 members of Grady EMC in order to elect a new board of directors and eject the current management. Those initial members incorporated Grady EMC in 1937 with the goal of providing power to South Georgia. More than 77 years later, we serve over 13,000 members through over 3,000 miles of power lines in Grady, Decatur and Thomas counties. While much has changed with the passing of time, our purpose today is the same as it was when we were founded …to provide safe, reliable and affordable power to the members we serve!Īs late as the mid-1930s, nine out of 10 rural homes were without electric service. The farmer milked his cows by hand in the dim light of a kerosene lantern. His wife labored over a wood range and washboard. The unavailability of electricity in rural areas kept their economies entirely and exclusively dependent on agriculture. Factories and businesses, of course, preferred to locate in cities where electric power was easily acquired. For many years, power companies ignored the rural areas of the nation. Today, about 99 percent of the nation’s farms have electric service. Most rural electrification is the product of locally owned rural electric cooperatives that got their start by borrowing funds from REA to build lines and provide service on a not-for-profit basis. REA is now the Rural Utilities Service, or RUS, and is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Grady EMC provides monthly bills to all of our members. This bill includes account information, the account holder’s name and address and the date the bill is due. Also included is a bar graph of usage over the previous 12 months. Any additional meters connected to the account, which would include any yard lights, a detail of the kilowatt hours (kwh) of usage and, if you have net metering, any buyback kwh as well as the cost of those services (reimbursements) would be shown on the bill. The state of Georgia imposes a seven percent tax on your electric service, so your total bill is the charge for the amount of electricity used plus a customer charge, which represents the minimum cost to provide service regardless of electric sales, and the state tax. Payments received after the identified due date are subject to an additional service charge. Accounts that remain unpaid ten days after the due date are subject to disconnection. For any questions or further information regarding your bill please call Grady EMC at 229.377.4182 (select option 2) or e-mail us at Power Cost Adjustment is directly linked to our wholesale cost of power. Since Grady EMC is a private, not-forprofit electric distribution cooperative, we strive to ensure our costs are as low as possible throughout the year while providing safe, reliable service. One way we ensure these costs are low is by passing on savings through our Power Cost Adjustment. This allows the cooperative to incrementally increase or decrease our retail rates with the changes in our wholesale power costs. Some utilities set these rates higher to ensure excess margins throughout the year however, at Grady EMC we actively manage our power costs and pass on any savings we have through our wholesale power bills to our members. Each month we review our wholesale power bills and calculate our wholesale power costs, which is based upon the average of the previous two months. For more information, please call our Grady EMC offices at 229.377.4182 and request member services or e-mail us at EMC and other power companies throughout Georgia rely mostly on conventional power stations like coal-fired plants to generate electricity.
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