By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
The Overton Power District Board of Directors unanimously approved the renewal of the district’s employee insurance plan at a meeting held on Wednesday, September 17. The proposed renewal of the 2015 policy includes a rate increase of about 4 percent as compared to the 2014 rates. But the overall cost to the district was actually reduced in the proposed policy by $22,000, due to a reduction in staff at the district.
The total cost of insurance for 2015 was quoted at $744,029. The cost for 2014 was $766,030, according to OPD Assistant Manager Terry Romero.
“Typically the rate goes up a little bit every year,” said Romero in the board meeting. “Last year we did not see an increase at all. But this year we are seeing just a little over 4 percent.
The coverage is similar to last year except that the deductible is increasing a little for employees.”
“I’d kill for a 4 percent increase in my business,” commented OPD attorney Byron Mills. “Last year our increase was more like 50 percent!”
During the public comment period at the beginning of the meeting, two Mesquite residents expressed concerns that district staff had not sought competitive bids on the insurance plan. “I’d really urge you to go out for bids and do a survey and have somebody else give you some type of bid on (insurance plans) rather than reviewing such a large contract without any secondary bids,” said David Ballweg, who is also a candidate for the OPD Board Mesquite district 5 seat.
Mesquite resident Mike Young also wanted competitive bidding on the proposal.
“I too am concerned about renewal of an insurance policy without bids,” Young said.
Young related that his HOA in Mesquite had sought for bids from insurance providers on the association policies and had saved considerable money in the process. “The first year we did that, we saved $20,000 and the second year, we saved $30,000,” Young said. “Everybody had to sharpen their pencil. And the original bidder came back with a much lower figure for the second year.”
During discussion on the item, OPD Board member James Pugh asked what the staff’s past procedure had been in selecting the insurance plan.
Romero explained that the proposed plan is being administered by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), through insurer United Healthcare. The NRECA is the national service organization for more than 900 rural electric cooperatives across the country.
“We went out to bid on our plan two years ago,” Romero explained. “The problem is that we are considered a high risk industry. So we had some companies deny us.
There were several that would insure us but the cost was always more than what the NRECA offers. That’s because with NRECA, we are bundled with employees from the whole Association, throughout the United States. We can get better rates because of that.”
Romero added that the NRECA generally does its own competitive bid process, getting rates from various companies. But with a group of thousands of employees nationwide, they can get better rates than the OPD can get on its own with its 45 employees, Romero said.
In other business of the board, OPD Engineering Manager John Jensen gave a report on the power outage which took place on September 8, due to a major flood event caused by excessive rains in the Moapa area. He reported that all 14,835 OPD customers were out of power for about eight hours.
Jensen said that a complicating factor in the outage was the loss of a communications switch. Because of this, district crews lost remote control capabilities to substation facilities. “We were dispatching crews to the different substations to take care of the switching for us,” Jensen said.
This was problematic as many of the roads to access those sites had sustained damage in the floods, he said.
“Due to the flooding we were unable to get to our 240 kv line for quite some time,” Jensen said. “NV Energy reported they had the same problem trying to get people out to there because of the amount of flooding. Once they and our people were able to locate and assess the magnitude of the damage, a contingency plan was agreed on to feed through an alternate route, the old 69 kv line through the Sheep Mountain switch (near Coyote Springs).”
Again, because of flooding, neither OPD nor NV Energy crews could go out and man the switch near Coyote Springs, to verify that it was operational. So Lincoln County Power District crews were dispatched to the location, Jensen said. Once the 69 kv line was energized, a limited amount of power was available to Moapa/Glendale customers and to power up the OPD infrastructure.
Jensen said that this eventually allowed a portion of Mesquite to come online as well. “Our main goal was to get the (Mesa View) hospital energized and any emergency units that needed power, like the police department, fire department, that sort of thing,” Jensen said.
Pugh asked if OPD does any regular emergency drills with NV Energy and Lincoln County Power, since the district is dependent on those entities in an emergency. Cooper said that the three entities have regular communications and strong relationships between them. He commended the crews from all three entities for their professionalism and dedication in this situation.
Jensen said that the outage had highlighted some frailties of the OPD system. “We are taking actions now to rectify them,” Jensen said. “We have been identifying a checklist of things we need to take care of in the future.” Cooper stated that OPD staff would be working on ways to remedy problems that came up in the flood event. “You know we haven’t had an outage this long for a while and when our server and things ran out of battery power we remedied those problems or found how we can solve them,” Cooper said. “We’ll be bringing those ideas back to (the board) and asking for some funding to take the steps to keep things running.”
OPD Board Chairman Larry Moses congratulated district staff for their efforts in the outage. “As a rate-payer and user of Overton Power, I’d like to congratulate you guys, too, for doing a great job,” he said. “We were down, the lights were out and we thought we were going to have to go for days without power with rolling brown outs and things of that nature.”
