While our congressional representatives debate in Washington, D.C. about a very controversial bill aimed at saving our economic system from a total meltdown, a very similar crisis, albeit on a much smaller scale, is looming right here in Glasgow. That statement is not made to sound overly dark, but October 1 is the day that the largest increase in the cost of TVA electric power in many decades takes effect. So, in an odd sort of fashion, the pursuit of light is setting us up for economic darkness.

Nationally the proliferation of variable rate mortgages is said to be the chief cause of our economic distress. As the interest rate on those mortgages spiraled upward, many have not been able to make the larger payments. The result has been that thousands of families have seen their homes repossessed and that has resulted in the general reduction in value of all of our homes. Thus, banks who secured loans based upon the inflated values of the real estate, have become insolvent because they cannot sell the repossessed homes at anywhere near what they thought they would be worth. But you did not come here for my explanation of the national economic crisis.

The point is that the situation here in Glasgow is eerily similar to our national situation. Instead of variable rate mortgages, all of us are facing variable rate energy bills. In particular, your electric power bill from the EPB, depending on how much electricity you use and where you use it, just went up around twenty percent. For many in Glasgow that increase will be quite painful. For many more, the increase will be the “straw that breaks the camel’s back” relative to their personal finances. More folks than ever will face termination of their electric service due to their inability to pay their bill and that will send ripples throughout our local economy. The EPB certainly does not look forward to increasing the number of electric service terminations, but we don't really have any other tools to use since any amount of electricity not paid for by one customer is ultimately paid for by the rest of the customers. So far, the rest of the customers have been unwilling to subsidize those who cannot pay. Meanwhile, even folks who can tighten their belt enough to deal with this increase will also contribute to the destabilization of Glasgow’s economy simply because this rate increase, should it stay in place for a year, will extract an additional $4 million from our local economy! That means every church, charity, and non-profit agency that depends on contributions from locals to survive will feel the pressure. Four million dollars is so much, when pulled from a community the size of Glasgow in one year, that none of us will be able to avoid feeling the impact.

The national economic crisis generally results from the unmitigated greed of several folks with Wall Street work addresses. Our local energy-derived economic crisis comes from many years of TVA rates which encouraged us all to use energy as if it were a limitless resource. As a result, we have all become addicted to cheap and abundant energy but now the supply is suddenly expensive and very finite. I am not at all sure which of those sins is the more damaging. Nationally, our congress will likely vote to rescue the Wall Street sinners by borrowing more money from China, Germany, and Russia. Locally, your rescue might come from a number of actions, but being saved by Congress is not on the list possibilities. First, you could redouble your efforts to use less electric power (you know how to do this, just turn thermostats down and appliances off). Next, you could offer up effective prayers for rain (TVA can make really low-cost power with their hydroelectric dams, but those need to be attached to reservoirs full of water, and for the last couple of years they have been at record lows due to persistent drought.). Finally, you might get ready to embrace a new electric rate environment wherein you will save money by moving your electric power consumption to off-peak times (this is the savior we have been hoping for over the last several years but TVA is glacially slow at delivering to us).

Of course, no discussion about our economy can take place without also mentioning that localism, making every possible effort to buy your needs from locally owned businesses, is also a great way to blunt the impact of this economic crisis. TVA has just opened up a huge new hole through which lots of money will drain away from our local economy. Meanwhile, you have the power to start sealing that hole by trapping more money in our local economy. Whatever you buy, think about how you can buy it from a local merchant first. It might be a long process of encouraging more local folks to offer the goods and services that we all need, but even the journey of one thousand miles begins with the first step!

In the last few days it seems like the news is more ominous than ever before. Hurricane Ike came to Galveston Texas and continued up through Louisville and beyond. In Ike’s wake are over two million homes without electric power in Texas and Louisiana. Today’s Courier-Journal says that 275,000 homes and businesses are without power in the greater Louisville area. Our supply of oil, gasoline, and natural gas has been destabilized and crippled as well and it only took a few hours for the impact to be felt right here in Glasgow. At the same time, our currency is being threatened by the failure of massive investment banks like Lehman Brothers, and let’s not forget the dramatic effect that TVA’s electric rate increase (which takes effect October 1) will have when it takes another $4 million per year out of our local economy right here in Glasgow.

No matter how you look at it, no matter what your political leaning, one thing is certain; we can no longer count on our state or federal governments to protect us and care for us. Over the last several years, the government institutions that we counted upon to regulate, and protect us from raging greed, have become best friends with those they were supposed to tame. It is happening in Washington and it is happening in Frankfort. As a result, no one is really looking out for us anymore. It seems that the forces of greed overwhelmed our government's ability to look after us. So, let’s do it ourselves! If we want safety, security, and the comfort that comes from a stable local economy and low crime rates, it is becoming more clear every day that we are going to have to take care of ourselves. There is a philosophy that we need to embrace and pursue and that philosophy has a name . . . localism.

While not simple to define, my definition of localism is the desire to make the place where we live better by reinforcing our local economy. We can do that a lot of different ways, including: identifying, and bending over backwards to patronize, locally owned businesses, encouraging local entrepreneurs and the jobs they can create, identifying holes where money leaks out of our local economy through the purchase of goods and services from non-locally owned businesses, focusing tax dollars on the provision of infrastructure that is needed to support local businesses and a durable local economy, and so forth. All of these ideas, and many more, are at the very center of the EPB’s mission and you will be hearing a lot more in the future about our efforts to support and encourage localism, but here are a few initial ideas.

There is an ocean of information on the web about the concept of localism and why we are actually paying ourselves when we purchase goods from a locally owned business. One such web site, local harvest, has an outstanding narrative about the virtues of buying locally:

Most produce in the US is picked 4 to 7 days before being placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped for an average of 1500 miles before being sold. And this is when taking into account only US grown products! Those distances are substantially longer when we take into consideration produce imported from Mexico, Asia, Canada, South America, and other places.

We can only afford to do this now because of the artificially low energy prices that we currently enjoy, and by externalizing the environmental costs of such a wasteful food system. We do this also to the detriment of small farmers by subsidizing large scale, agribusiness-oriented agriculture with government handouts and artificially cheap energy.

Cheap oil will not last forever though. World oil production has already peaked, according to some estimates, and while demand for energy continues to grow, supply will soon start dwindling, sending the price of energy through the roof. We'll be forced then to reevaluate our food systems and place more emphasis on energy efficient agricultural methods, like smaller-scale organic agriculture, and on local production wherever possible.

Cheap energy and agricultural subsidies facilitate a type of agriculture that is destroying and polluting our soils and water, weakening our communities, and concentrating wealth and power into a few hands. It is also threatening the security of our food systems, as demonstrated by the continued e-Coli, GMO-contamination, and other health scares that are often seen nowadays on the news.

These large-scale, agribusiness-oriented food systems are bound to fail on the long term, sunk by their own unsustainability. But why wait until we're forced by circumstance to abandon our destructive patterns of consumption? We can start now by buying locally grown food whenever possible. By doing so you'll be helping preserve the environment, and you'll be strengthening your community by investing your food dollar close to home. Only 18 cents of every dollar, when buying at a large supermarket, go to the grower. 82 cents go to various unnecessary middlemen. Cut them out of the picture and buy your food directly from your local farmer.

Even though the newspapers and television bring us tidal waves of bad news about our economy and our future, Glasgow is not helpless and totally dependent on the global economy for our daily bread and our ongoing happiness, but we still have a lot of work to do. Our forefathers built us a great foundation for sustainability when they established a locally owned water and sewer system, electric power and broadband network, as well as wonderful parks, roads, sidewalks, and even recent additions like The Plaza Theater and the EPB’s Jama M. Young Technology Center. But even those systems are not perfect. While the EPB is locally owned, the electric power we sell is not produced locally and thus we are subject to rampant cost increases. In addition to our technological assets, we are blessed with fertile land and folks who know how to use it. They have established cattle farms, dairy farms, and abundant crops of all sorts. We have a lot of assets going for us so we don’t have to start from scratch to focus on localism. But we do have to start looking at things differently. We are surrounded by rich farm land that produces large amounts of food, dairy, and beef, but practically none of it is sold and consumed here. We have a lot of work to do to make it possible for our local food economy to flourish and become sustainable.

The localism movement can flourish if we look at today’s headlines, not with fear, but with the resolve to create solutions that will allow Glasgow to thrive in the new world we have created. As we see news reports of the devastation of Galveston (and even Louisville) we should see ourselves as similarly vulnerable. We should assume that fuel supply will be interrupted more often and that it will become ever more expensive. In such a world we need to develop more ways to fuel and feed ourselves from our local resources and farms instead of just taking what TVA has at whatever the cost and waiting at the tailgate of a truck just coming in from afar with our food. We should learn how to use our local talent and infrastructure to entertain ourselves locally without having to drive to Bowling Green, Louisville or Nashville to take in a show. We can also assume that many national banking and investment houses will fail, but we can invest locally and expect the return on our investment in both dollars and in a better life for ourselves instead of distant bank executives. Instead of giving foreign companies our tax dollars to entice them to come to Glasgow, we need to use our tax dollars to pay for the things that make it easier for local farmers to sell their products locally and create a durable and more enjoyable place for us all to live. With a sustainable local economy, those outside businesses and industries will be attracted to Glasgow because it is a great place for their employees to enjoy their lives instead of just because we are willing to pay them for coming. In the long run, sustainable development will flourish more with those incentives than it has using our old formula.

The world is giving us every reason to embrace localism right here in Glasgow. The time has come and the movement is alive. Stay tuned to this blog for more and more information about how we can make Glasgow better without constantly asking for more and more.

Last night the evening news ran a story about the possible demise of the airline industry. Fuel prices and weak economic conditions, they said, might cause two hundred cities to lose access to commercial airlines. The cost of the remaining air travel options might be so expensive that regular air travel by families for vacations and quick visits to distant cities might put such travel out of reach for all but the wealthy. As a former frequent flyer, this story left me feeling pretty sad.

After the news went off we went downtown to the courthouse square to take in a concert by our Glasgow Community Band. Walking down South Green Street toward the square, I couldn’t help but notice the infrastructure; the technology that makes Glasgow a community. There are the streets, sidewalks, utilities, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and many other technological wonders that we purchase for ourselves. These are the infrastructure items that we all count on and accumulate in a passive manner. That is to say, we pay for them with our taxes and utility bills, but are not generally personally involved in.

Those are nice, but the really wonderful elements of our infrastructure are the ones people provide from their inherent pride, generosity, talent, and commitment to improving the community without any direct benefit to themselves. Those include well maintained and renovated homes, lawns, and landscaping. Of course, the biggest item that was on display last night was the Community Band. That is Glasgow infrastructure as well, and it exists only because a handful of locals care enough about the rest of us to commit the time and energy necessary to allow their individual efforts to combine with those of others to produce beautiful music. Fire engines and utility lines are nice and useful, but anyone with enough money can buy them and all communities have them. Our Community Band is not something other towns have. It is special. It comes from that underlying current of civility and community that cannot be established with tax dollars. It is a special bit of technology that we are all so lucky to have.

Last night hundreds of locals sat on our own lawn, under a crystal blue sky, in front of the City Hall that we bought and paid for, and were entertained by a group of our fellow citizens simply because they could. Children giggled and waved blades of grass in unison with Bill Brogan as he waved his conductor’s baton. Friends and neighbors shared all of this with each other during an evening so perfect that you were expecting to wake up and find that you were dreaming. We all enjoyed the kind of evening that so many folks load themselves up into airplanes and travel great distances, at even greater expense, in the hope of experiencing. Many of the attendees did that just by walking down the street. We discovered vacation level happiness on a Tuesday night right here in Glasgow.

On the way back home I started thinking again about the evening news and the demise of the airline industry and the fact that more folks are going to need to find their entertainment at home. I pondered this as we walked back up South Green Street. I pondered the demise of cheap air travel and I finally said . . . who cares.

One thing is certain, the Glasgow EPB is a small operation. We consist of fifty folks with no interest in any customer outside the good old 42141 zip code. We serve homes and businesses that cover a total population of only about 16,000 folks. In the great big world of electric and cable utilities, we are laughably small. But that does not mean we don’t have a mighty big impact on the economy of Glasgow and the lives of those 16,000 folks. We have. We do, and, in the coming years, we will.

This year marks our twentieth anniversary in the cable television business. During those twenty years we have always made sure that the people of Glasgow pay the lowest rates for cable television service in the United States. Even though we just announced a modest rate increase of $1.50 per month which will become effective on July 1, we still blow away the competition. The Census Bureau just released this study relating to cable television popularity and the rates people pay for cable in our country. As you can see if you click on the link, the average cost of cable in 2006 was $41.17 per month. Since this is now 2008 it is very likely that figure is now about $45 per month. In Glasgow, even after our rate increase, you will be paying only $25.75 ($29.75 outside the City limits)per month for the expanded basic package. That differential between our rates and those we would otherwise be paying if we didn’t have our own little locally owned system has existed throughout the twenty year history of our cable efforts. As a result, we have saved the folks around here over $40 million since we got started in 1988! It is certainly worth pondering what Glasgow would look like today if an additional $40 million had left the local economy over the last twenty years. It is not an image I want to dwell on very long.

But saving the community money is not the be-all and end-all reason of our existence. We can do a lot more to make Glasgow a better place to live and we are doing a lot of that right now. You see, the EPB team today, just like the folks who worked so hard fifty years ago to bring the EPB into existence, believes strongly that small is beautiful and that a few determined folks at the helm of some pretty powerful technology can constantly improve the life of local folks. To a large extent our team is guided by the principles so eloquently espoused by the great Kentucky writer, Wendell Berry (who writes and farms in the community of Port Royal, just a couple of hours up the road from us). Just a few days ago he was on KET making an observation about our present fuel crisis and how it might finally bring about a change in the way we live our lives in that we might all be traveling a whole lot less. He said, “It is clear that we are going to have to enjoy the places where we are, and, since that is the case, we need to do a lot more work making the places where we are, enjoyable.” The EPB is executing plans to make Glasgow more enjoyable.

With respect to electric power, we are well on our way to building a second delivery point so that electricity will continue to be reliable and available for Glasgow’s future. Our planned solution is elegant in that it will provide twice as much capacity as we have today should Glasgow continue to rampantly grow, yet it will also offer a much more efficient solution if our growth is stagnant or if we actually shrink. So, whatever direction our energy usage takes, we are planning an enjoyable and efficient solution.

We think that another way to make Glasgow more enjoyable in a world of $4 and $5 gasoline will be an enhanced internet and LAN system capable of affording more folks a way to work from home and leave the car or SUV parked in the garage. As this is written we are anxiously awaiting new fiber connections being installed along the TVA transmission line to Bowling Green and new cable modem management hardware and software to drastically improve the data throughput of our broadband network right here in Glasgow.

Finally, it is obvious from the Census Bureau report that increased access to cable television programming is another thing that folks find enjoyable, and we have some great things coming in that department as well. The $1.50 per month increase is going to allow us to bring some new and exciting products for your enjoyment! Very soon PBS Kids Sprout will come to our digital tier of programming and along with it will come 24 hour a day access to great preschooler programming like “Sesame Street” and “Bob the Builder” and some new characters being developed for the channel by the Muppet folks at Jim Henson Company. “The Pajanimals” will be part of the network’s “Good Night Show” block, and, as a relatively new grandparent, I can testify that Glasgow will be more enjoyable at my house when there is new programming to convince certain grand-daughters to go to sleep before I do! In addition to Sprout we will also be adding Golf Channel HD, VS HD, and it is quite likely that we will also be adding (drum roll please). . . The Disney Channel sometime in June. That’s right. After refusing to pay the exorbitant rates employed by the Disney folks for many, many years, we are finally about to cave in to the power of Hannah Montana. She got us in a headlock and we finally are about to say uncle. So, for those of you who spell additional enjoyment M-I-C-K-E-Y, Glasgow is about to get more enjoyable for you too.

There are other great things coming to your cable service as well. For example, our digital channel 103 (Discovery Home) is about to become Planet Green. This will be a channel which is calling itself the first 24-hour channel dedicated to eco-friendly living. The folks at Discovery are making a big bet here that “eco-tainment” will appeal to viewers. I think it will. Then later this year we hope to roll out our newest cable television service, VOD (Video On Demand) which will give all of our digital customers a nearly unlimited menu of movies and other programming that they can watch whenever they feel like it.

All told, the EPB is working hard to make your life in Glasgow more enjoyable and to ease your pain from beginning the process of withdrawing from a life spent traveling to another location in search of enjoyment. We think Glasgow can be plenty enjoyable! Stick with us and let us show you how.