If you move out of our coverage area, fill out our forwarding address form and return it by email, mail, or by dropping it off at our office.
Capital Credits
After the patronage has been allocated to you, the cooperative uses your money to cover the operating costs and capital investments. This in turn helps keep your rates down by allowing us to not borrow money to operate on and make capital investments.
The capital credits are refunded only upon authorization by the member-elected Board of Directors. According to the bylaws, the board cannot authorize refunding capital credits if it will financially impair the operation of the cooperative.
The refund amount is reduced by the net-present-value of the future expected distributions and then provided to the estate or next of kin. Heirs have the option to retire unpaid capital credits.
Capital credits are the assignment, to Wasco Electric Cooperative members, of each account’s portion of the margins for a year. Since Wasco Electric Cooperative is a non-profit organization, all profit or margins are assigned to you, the member-owners.
An example of this is as follows:
Revenue: $1,000,000 – Expenses: $900,000 = Profit/Margins: $100,000
For the sake of keeping it simple, imagine that you paid $100,000 for energy that year or 10% of the total revenue came from you. At the end of the year, 10% of the margins [$10,000] will be assigned to you.
This allocation comes to you in a letter each year. Many people confuse it with a power bill or credit. It cannot be used as credit on your next bill.