Last week, Erin Keys was sworn in as Columbia’s Utilities director. KBIA’s Jana Rose Schleis sat down with her at city hall to discuss her priorities for the department, which include boosting staffing levels and completing capital projects for each utility service.
Keys also shared how she’ll approach a variety of challenges, from severe storms to the growing need for power.
This conversation has been edited for length.
Schleis: You've been with the city for decades and were interim director, but you officially began the role shortly after a tornado destroyed the recycling facility. What would your message be to folks in the city who are looking for recycling alternatives while the city's program is paused?
Keys: That's been really interesting to me, how many people have said that they want to continue recycling, and I've heard stories of people taking their recycling to St Louis. I would just encourage that they (make sure) they're taking it to a facility that can handle it.
Schleis: Going forward, how might the city be able to adjust the recycling program and processes to be more effective?
Keys: We started that by asking people to keep glass out of the recycling.
There is a market for glass when it's clean and it's not contaminated with other stuff. So glass needs its own container, basically. Because when you put it in with plastic or cardboard, then it ends up contaminating those.
As we start back up, we'll need to work on a good communication plan so that we can reiterate the things that are important about our recycling program to bring the best value to our customers.
Schleis: Increasingly severe weather and storms are also a threat to the electric utility infrastructure. How will you approach that challenge as director?
Keys: That’s one thing that we’ve been working on is deferred maintenance. There was some deferred maintenance on our transmission poles. We were in the process of replacing, and are in the process of replacing our existing transmission poles. When that storm hit, unfortunately, it found the poles we had not yet replaced and so that caused a significant outage.
So that’s the plan right now is to continue to do those replacements of our poles so that we are ready for storms.
Schleis: Columbia is growing relatively rapidly, and with that growth, there's a need for increased utility service and infrastructure. How is the city accounting for and keeping up with that growth?
Keys: We will need to look at our power generation as we go in the future.
Especially as people go towards electrifying things, electric vehicles, that sort of thing — we're going to need to look at how we accommodate that with our existing system, and that will be a challenge going forward on electric for sure.
Schleis: There's anticipated demand spiking because of the electrification of life that you mentioned, and also large customers, AI data centers get the most attention. Do you foresee any of that for the Columbia area?
Keys: I know there's been companies that are interested in how this area could accommodate an AI center. I'm not sure how serious those inquiries are.
But we've also got industry that's growing. There's some industries up on Route B that want to electrify, which means they would go away from using gas to using electric and so that would be a significant increase. We've got the university that's got their own developments going on that may impact either us or Boone Electric or Ameren. We're not sure you know where that's going to go.
Those are definitely some things that we're going to need to accommodate.
Schleis: Many investor owned utilities in Missouri have been or are now going through the rate making process — the regulatory process that allows them to increase prices. As a municipal utility, what can the city do to maintain service at affordable prices?
Keys: I think that's what we've tried hard to do.
As we move forward, we will hopefully continue to propose moderate, small rate increases so it's not a big shock.
I think this (city) council is very aware that we need to do those regular rate increases, but I think we've also been good at evaluating our budget each year and determining, well, maybe we don't need one this year. Maybe we can put it off a year.
