The Power of Connections

• An expanded, hardened dispatch area that can continue to safely dispatch crews if a storm would damage the building. • A spacious community room that can be configured to accommodate a wide range of meetings from eight to nearly one hundred people. • Expanded member and employee parking areas in the space occupied by the previous office building, which was demolished. The renovated original warehouse remains a part of the campus. • Energy efficiency to save on day-to-day operational expenses. It was important to the board to anchor CREC’s facilities in the localities where the cooperative already had a long-term presence. Having the new headquarters remain in Troy, a community CREC had called home for eighty years, along with keeping the branch office based in Lake Saint Louis, just reaffirmed the cooperative’s commitment to the communities it serves. “We’ve got a lot of employees who live here, have gone to school here, and are raising families here,” states Tracy. “This has been home for them their whole lives, and it was really important to us that we remained a part of this community.” Powering Through a Pandemic In 2020, the COVID-19 global health crisis challenged every facet of CREC’s operations. “We have processes for dealing with a system outage and other scenarios, but there was no playbook for COVID,” says Tracy. “It changed the way that we did business and are still doing business.” When the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020, the co-op temporarily closed its offices to the public. Office employees worked from home for several weeks while linemen and outside personnel adapted to modified work

GIS Assistant Patty Williams set up her office at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Doug Tracy was one of a few who continued to work on-site at the Troy office during the early days of the pandemic.

30 Cuivre River Electric Cooperative