AmerenUE's director to take reins of Ameren

ST. LOUIS -- Thomas Voss will succeed Gary Rainwater as president and chief executive officer of Ameren Corp. effective May 1, the St. Louis-based utility said Monday.

Rainwater will remain with Ameren as executive chairman. Voss is currently chief executive officer of AmerenUE, the company's Missouri utility. Warner Baxter will replace Voss as CEO of AmerenUE.

Rainwater has served as CEO for five years.

"Gary Rainwater will continue to serve Ameren as he has throughout his 30-year career with great distinction," Patrick Stokes, lead director of the Ameren board, said in a statement.

The board of directors also nominated Voss as a director, along with Ellen Fitzsimmons, senior vice president of CSX Corp., a transportation supplier. The election will take place at the annual shareholders meeting on April 28.

Ameren serves 2.4 million electrical customers -- 1.2 million in both Missouri and Illinois.

Rainwater has helped lead Ameren through three acquisitions that tripled the firm's customer base over the past decade, Stokes said. He also praised Rainwater for moving quickly to increase liquidity through spending cuts and other means in response to the economic crisis.

Rainwater also has overseen some difficult times, including the Dec. 14, 2005, breach of Ameren's Taum Sauk reservoir atop a Southeast Missouri mountain, which sent more than 1 billion gallons of water into Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park and the Black River. No one was killed but a family of five was injured and the park was badly damaged.

Last year, Ameren agreed to a $180 million settlement with the state over the disaster.

Ameren also has had to deal with three massive outages in recent years, including one in southern Missouri after a late January ice storm knocked down hundreds of poles and left thousands without power. The company moved quickly to dispatch linemen -- its own and others borrowed from other utility companies -- to get the lights back on.

Rainwater, in a statement, praised Voss.

"His deep industry knowledge and hands-on experience in areas ranging from energy trading to non-rate-regulated generation to nuclear power make him an ideal choice for the CEO position," Rainwater said.

Baxter moves up from executive vice president and chief financial officer of Ameren and president and chief executive officer of Ameren Services Company.