On a summery December morning in 1985, RE Magazine staff writer Bob Gibson found himself stuck in a Tampa, Florida, traffic jam on the very day Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative in nearby Dade City became the first NRECA member to hook up its 100,000th consumer.

Three months later, Lee County Electric in North Fort Myers, Florida, did the same. And less than two years after that, Clay Electric in Keystone Heights, Florida, joined. 

People were moving to coastal Florida at a rate of more than 800 a day back then. Since the 1960s, developers had been carpeting its pine woods, grasslands and marshes with tract homes, first for retirees and then increasingly for younger people following jobs and warm winter weather.  

WREC was adding 7,000 new consumer-members a year. This put a lot of stress on staff and other resources, but the co-op found ways to stay close to the people and communities it served, while keeping the cost of rapid growth from affecting rates.   

The co-op found a sympathetic ear on the rate issue at both the state Public Service Commission and Pasco County. In September 1985, the PSC recommended a $500 “contribution in aid of construction” for every new service. Withlacoochee Electric was the first utility in the state to do this.  

“Everybody has got to pay for the future cost of growth,” County Administrator John Gallagher said. 

At the time, the county’s board of commissioners was considering charging a fee for every new residence or commercial building to pay for road construction and maintenance.  

Another person tuned in to the growth issues in the Tampa area was Hugh McGeehan, a realtor and former county commissioner in neighboring Hernando County. 

“A lot of these people don’t know they are members of a co-op,” referring to his neighbors in Spring Hill, a 24-square-mile golf course-oriented subdivision. 

“Every time you think you’ve made a public relations breakthrough, that you’ve really succeeded in an educational effort,” said Ernie Holzhauer, the co-op’s member services manager, “you’re faced with 7,000 new members, and you’ve got to start all over again.” 

Still, many of these new members were retirees with time to listen to WREC’s messages. 

“The civic and social organizations in these communities are always looking for speakers for their meetings, and we are usually booked months ahead,” he said. “The groups are very receptive, and the presentations give us a chance to talk about the co-op.” 

Robert Strickland, manager of the Bayonet Point district office, started working for Withlacoochee River Electric in 1961, when it was a rural utility with less than 14,000 consumers. 

“Our staff grew professionally as the co-op did,” he told Gibson. “That contributes to keeping the small co-op feeling. I don’t think we ever want to change that way of doing business, to turn into a big power company that only recognizes the customers as numbers.”  

Today, Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative has 270,000 consumers, and expects to join the exclusive 300,000 club sometime before the end of 2028, according to Manager of Member Relations Gary Steele. The co-op hit the 200,000 mark in November 2006. 

“Even as WREC continues to grow at one of the fastest rates in our history, we’ve never lost sight of what matters most: our members,” says current General Manager David Lambert. “We remain committed to preserving that small-town, Main Street feel, where every member is treated like a neighbor, not a number. That’s the heart of our co-op, and it always will be.”