CEO’s Message – January 2026
It’s hard to believe that Union Rural Electric (URE) is preparing to celebrate 90 years as an electric cooperative. That’s nearly a century of neighbors serving neighbors. It all started with the simple idea of regular people, like you and me, working together to bring power to rural Union County.
In the 1930s, cities were electrified, but rural America persisted without the convenience of electric power. Private power companies figured it was simply too expensive to electrify the rural countryside, focusing instead on population centers in and around cities. Thankfully, our founders, mostly farmers, in partnership with the Farm Bureau, hatched a plan to form something called an electric cooperative. With the help of the newly formed Rural Electrification Administration, the electric cooperative movement started in rural areas across the country.
On May 20, 1936, URE officially incorporated. Those early days required determination and hard work. In February 1937, the first URE utility pole was set in place. By that March, 21 poles had been set by hand. When URE’s first line was energized in August 1937, 61 very excited members received power for the first time. That power changed their lives.
In the past 90 years, we’ve grown from 61 excited members to nearly 12,000, most of whom have grown up accustomed to the convenience of electricity. In 1999, when certain portions of our community needed natural gas service, we responded by creating a natural gas division that continues to grow rapidly, accelerated by Marysville’s expansion over the past 2 and a half decades.
As a not-for-profit cooperative, we make investments locally, directly into the economy and the community. We sponsor youth sports programs, 4-H, farmers’ markets, and local festivals. We serve everyone from family farms to advanced manufacturers, from small businesses to schools. We make decisions based on what’s best for our communities in and around Union County, not distant shareholders. That’s part of what I like to call the Cooperative Advantage.
Another aspect of the Cooperative Advantage is being a member, rather than a customer, of the business. As a member of URE, you earn cash back when we earn a profit. That’s quite different from for-profit utilities that only share profits with their investors. URE, in turn, is also a member of other cooperative-based businesses that treat us the same way, allowing us to pass those benefits directly to you, our members. Some examples of cooperative-based businesses we work with include our lender, our insurance company, and our data processing company, among others, who all see URE as a member, not simply a customer.
As we begin to celebrate 90 years of service in 2026, I am grateful to the URE founders who had the vision and motivation to build a better life for their rural community. All the members who have been part of URE’s cooperative business model over the past 90 years have benefited from this cooperative effort. I’m proud of our heritage, but I’m even more proud to play a small role in leveraging the Cooperative Advantage — which will continue to benefit our members and our community in the future. We are, quite literally, YOUR electric cooperative.