WCEC Invites All Members to the Annual Meeting of Members
At Wharton County Electric Cooperative, you are more than a customer - you are a member and an owner.
A cooperative is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits and benefits. WCEC was formed in 1938 by a group of local citizens to bring electricity to rural areas of Wharton County. Today, we serve over 4,000 members in four counties.
WCEC has a rotating board with nine directors representing our members in the nine districts that make up our service territory. Directors serve three-year terms and are elected by the membership at the Annual Meeting of Members each year.
This year, members will vote for representatives from Districts 1, 4, and 7. All members vote to elect each candidate regardless of their home district. Candidate details can be found here.
Please make your voice heard and attend the Annual Meeting of Members on Wednesday, May 28, 2025.
Greetings to everyone! Once again, it is time for our Annual Meeting of Members. The drive-through meeting will be at the El Campo Middle School.
This past year has been challenging for the co-op with Hurricane Beryl. Beryl was costly to WCEC and our members.
I want to thank our neighboring co-ops, Texas Electric Cooperatives, and all of the contractors who helped restore power after the storm. Things could have been so much worse. Thank you again to TEC for the truckloads of supplies brought to us daily, for going above and beyond with food for our crews, and for helping to prepare and hand out meals. Thank you to the directors, employees, and the community for also keeping the crews fed.
Wharton County Electric Cooperative has always prioritized providing our members with reliable and economical electricity while maintaining superior service. WCEC focuses on strategic planning with the board and employees to seek new ways to provide better service and plans for the future.
Looking to the future, the grid in Texas is changing. Here in our service territory, you can see an increase in solar and wind energy. New technology and different ways to produce electricity for the future are unfolding.
I am pleased to say that due to the dedicated professionalism and knowledge of your WCEC Home Team, the cooperative is financially sound and doing well. I feel that we have met any challenges with success and have been able to adapt to changing times.
I appreciate the opportunity the members have given me to serve as a director for these past years. We can thank the employees and previous directors for their foresight on the deregulation issue, which has resulted in our ability to keep the members’ cost for electricity at a substantially lower level than customers of other providers. Our challenge is to continue these efforts to provide economical and reliable power. It will be an increasingly tricky path with more government regulations than we have previously. I hope to continue working with them and for our members in meeting these challenges.
Last but not least, I would personally like to thank my fellow board members and the employees of WCEC for a successful year and their dedication to moving the co-op into the future.
We look forward to seeing everyone at the Annual Meeting of Members.
“The Mission of Wharton County Electric Cooperative, Inc. is to provide economical and reliable electric energy service to our members and to provide products, services, and leadership that will have a positive influence on the economy of the area that we serve.”
The WCEC Mission Statement is the capstone on which we base all other policies at WCEC. The current Mission Statement was adopted over twenty years ago by the Board of Directors as part of a strategic planning session. At each subsequent strategic planning session, the Board reviewed the Mission Statement and felt it was still relevant and accurate. Like WCEC itself, it has stood the test of time.
Every day at WCEC, we juggle providing reliable electric service while keeping rates as economical as possible for our neighbors, friends, and family. While acknowledging that anything made by man can fail, we could build an electric system with poles and conductors that withstand the harshest of conditions that mother nature could ever throw at it and redundancies to reduce outages to near zero, or we could put our entire system underground. However, the cost to do so would be so prohibitive that no one could afford their monthly power bills.
On the other hand, we could forgo routine maintenance and upgrades and have very low power bills, but our outage times would be astronomical, our system could not grow, and the members would come at us with pitchforks.
WCEC has a dedicated team of directors and long-term employees who answer to you, the members. They work day in and day out to strive to give the members of the Cooperative the best bang for the buck because, as locals, we have to face you in the produce aisle at H-E-B.
As always, thank you for allowing me to be part of the WCEC organization; if you need me, call me.