The new Mt. Pleasant Substation will soon be online, Greeneville Light & Power Systems General Manager Bill Carroll announced at Monday's GL&PS Board of Directors meeting.

"We are going to energize that station this week," Carroll said.

He said the substation will need to "heat up" for a couple of days after being energized. It will be load-bearing by early next week.

"We just missed [the end-of-year target start-up date] by a couple of days," Carroll noted

He said that part of the delay was because contractors were out of town helping deal with various natural disasters in other areas of the country.

Carroll also presented bids for tree-trimming for the upcoming year.

Two companies, Seelbach and Wolf Tree, offered bids for sections of road by substation. The lowest bid for each won.

Five went to Seelbach and two of the seven went to Wolf Tree.

The total estimated cost is $1,891,749.87, with an average per mile low bid of $3,266.86.

The recent storm winds on Dec. 20 caused many in Greene County to be without power, Carroll said.

At least 2,000 GL&PS customers were without power at the same time, and several utility poles were broken as a result of the wind.

Carroll said six poles were damaged, but the crews worked "from 6:30 that morning till 11 that night" to restore power.

Carroll said that, after power was restored, they used new technology to make sure all meters had power.

Carroll said they can now send an electrical signal or "ping" to a meter to see if there is power. They discovered 18 more meters that were still dead

"It was people that weren't home or barns or things like that. We would never have gotten a call, so we went out and fixed those, too," Carroll said.

Controller Paige Mengel gave the monthly financial report for November.

Total operating revenue for the month of November was about $7.8 million.

The GL&PS spent $6.1 purchasing power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, bringing the gross margin to about $1.7 million.

After operating and maintenance expenditures, the net margin for the month of November is $298,228.

Mengel said this was better than expected and an improvement from last year during the same month.

Capital expenditures were $327,000, bringing the year-to-date capital expenditures to $2.5 million. This is over a half-million dollars more than last year, which Mengel attributes to the new substation work being completed.

Carroll presented an updated figure of United Way donations. The new total of $16,807.60 was approved for GL&PS to match donations.

Board member Sam Miller suggested that the board vote to give Carroll a three percent raise.

The board voted unanimously to approve the raise, which will be effective in January.