Citizens Electric moving headquarters to Perryville

PERRYVILLE, Mo. -- Citizens Electric Corp. will break ground this summer on new headquarters in Perryville.

The location will give the not-for-profit utility company, now based in Ste. Genevieve, Mo., more space and disaster-resistant areas to protect essential equipment during a crisis, said Barb Casper, Citizens spokeswoman.

"If you took all of our existing facilities now and put the square footage together, our new building will be about double," Casper said. Casper did not have the new facility's square footage available but said the bulk of the facility will be warehouse and vehicle storage space.

"We're unique among electric co-ops in Missouri because we are the only one that owns our own distribution system. Our warehouse needs are substantially greater," Casper said.

While a new facility has been discussed since 1999, Casper said recent tornadoes and floods in Missouri have made Citizens more cognizant of building to standards to withstand disasters.

"Getting the lights back on during a crisis is vital to the lives of Citizens' members. Currently CEC's critical equipment is located in a flood zone and is also vulnerable to and earthquake or tornado. When things are at their worst, we need to be at our best," Citizens CEO Van Robinson said in a news release.

The new facility will include a "Centralized Operations" room for directing emergency operations. It will also have offices, training and meeting spaces and will allow room for expansion. It will bring together departments of the company that do similar work but are geographically separated now.

Cooperative Building Solutions of St. Louis will serve as general contractor on the project. Casper said the firm specializes in building electric cooperatives and has done others in Missouri.

It will be built on 40 acres where Citizens' Perryville service center is now on Highway 51.

Weather permitting, Citizens will break ground in July and work will be completed within 14 to 16 months.

Perryville Mayor Debbie Gahan said she's delighted to have Citizens relocating to her city.

"It's helping us in the development in the area we want to develop and we're thrilled to have one of our community partners see the value in moving to Perryville," she said.

Citizens relocation project is comparable to the Bank of Missouri, which chose Perryville as the location for its operations center built in 2010, she said.

The number of construction jobs created from the Citizens project isn't yet known, Casper said. At this time, the company will be only relocating its current employees, not adding any new ones. It has about 80 employees.

Its Ste. Genevieve headquarters provides customer service and administrative offices. Customer service is also offered at a location in Perryville, and Citizens has separate service centers in Ste. Genevieve, Perryville and Altenburg, Mo.

Once the new headquarters is open, Citizens will reduce its facility locations from five to three, closing its existing Perryville customer service office and its Altenburg service center.

The utility will build a service center in Ste. Genevieve to serve its northern service territory and a service center in Fruitland to serve its southern territory areas. Both locations will be near Interstate 55, Casper said.

Specific cost estimates are not yet available, Casper said, because they are still gathering bids from subcontractors. However, the annual expense of implementing the new facilities plan will be less than 2 percent of Citizens' annual budget, a news release stated.

The project will not increase utility rates. If rates are raised in the future, it will be because the cost of the electricity Citizens purchases increases, officials said in a fact sheet about the new facility.

According to its 2011 annual report, Citizens had operating expenses last year of $108 million.

The company's largest annual expense is the purchase of power, which consumes 80 percent of its budget. In 2011, that amounted to $89,545,556.

Citizens sells more kilowatt-hours of electricity than any other electric cooperative in the state. It serves a number of large industrial customers, including cement manufacturer Holcim in Ste. Genevieve, TG Missouri in Perryville and Procter & Gamble and Nordenia in Fruitland.

In 2011, Citizens supplied more than 1.6 billion kilowatt-hours to nearly 27,000 members.

mmiller@semisourian.com

388-3646

Pertinent address:

1500 Rand Avenue, Perryville, MO