Richland EC Members Honk Horns to Vote at Annual Meeting

Richland Electric Cooperative (REC), a 100 percent CFC borrower, held its first-ever drive-in annual meeting to ensure social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During REC’s 84th Annual Membership Meeting held at the cooperative’s service center parking lot in Richland Center, Wisconsin, REC General Manager and CEO Shannon Clark and Board President Calvin Sebranek climbed into bucket trucks and were lifted into the air so members sitting in their vehicles could view them, listen to their remarks through the vehicle radios and honk their horns to vote.

Engaging Members During the Pandemic

“We need to engage our members more than ever during times like these, and we thought a drive-in annual meeting would help that mission better than any other type of meeting,” Shannon Clark said. “A virtual meeting would not have worked for us because all of our members do not have broadband while others wouldn’t use it for meetings like this.”

REC leadership needed to act fast in order to follow the Wisconsin “Safer at Home” executive order, meet their bylaw and state requirements to host an annual meeting by the end of April and determine if a virtual meeting was even permissible. Once REC staff validated a drive-in meeting was possible, they shared their plans with the board, which approved them in early April.

First Electric Cooperative Drive-in Annual Meeting

“We were the first electric cooperative to do anything like this, so we had to create our own blueprint on how to get it done,” explained REC Director of Outreach Services Trevor Clark. “Due to the ‘Safer at Home’ order, communications were vitally important as we could not meet face-to-face. We held numerous conference calls to make sure the logistics of holding the event at our service center were possible.”

Pulling off the successful event required teamwork across REC. The finance team managed the drive-through registration where members showed their member number through their vehicle window. The operations team supervised traffic and parking. Trevor Clark worked with media and the local radio station to ensure the broadcast worked as expected.

On the morning of Saturday, April 25, members arrived several hours before the meeting started, forming a line of vehicles to register. 

Concern to Reach Quorum

“We were worried about whether enough members would show up for us to reach quorum, but once the local media began picking up our event we knew it was going to be bigger than we envisioned,” Trevor Clark remarked. “The meeting far exceeded our expectations with 132 registered members attending, which is a little more than our average annual meeting attendance and amazing given the circumstances.”

Shannon Clark and Sebranek delivered their broadcast remarks from bucket trucks while members listened over their own vehicle radios. Sebranek managed the business portion of the meeting by asking members to honk their horn to propose a motion, honk to signal if they had a question and honk to vote for or against the motion.

“The annual meeting’s business portion wasn’t managed any differently than our previous meetings, other than the honking,” Shannon Clark said. “It was amazing for our members to show up, sit in their cars, listen to us and participate.”