Some electricity customers along the McKenzie River east of Springfield will be receiving bills from a new utility company this month.
As of May 1, the Eugene Water & Electric Board transferred about 2,500 customers in McKenzie Valley to Lane Electric Cooperative.
The affected area runs from the intersection of Thurston Road and McKenzie Highway up to Vida.
The area has historically been served by the two utilities, and switching to one utility in the area could help decrease outage frequency and increase service, according to Lane Electric Cooperative’s general manager.
"Our plan over the coming years is to tie those systems together so there’s more redundant feeds in the event that there’s a tree through a line or some other cause of an outage," said Scott Coe.
Another possible benefit, according to Coe, is that Lane Electric has staff and equipment who are embedded in the area most of the time. That will likely lower response times for service calls.
“We don’t have the lag time of dispatching someone from headquarters, the hour to hour-and-a-half drive out there, then assessing what the problem is and returning or getting other people to bring out the gear that’s needed to restore the power,” he said.
A news release from EWEB said the transfer allows it to focus on the needs of the urban customers that make up the strong majority of its service area, which now mainly includes the city of Eugene and some adjacent unincorporated areas. EWEB’s news release also mentioned that Lane Electric is better set up to handle the needs of rural customers.
