Sioux Valley Energy was awarded the 2024 Leroy Vanderpool Excellence in Safety Award at the Minnesota Rural Electric Trust (MRET) annual meeting held on June 13 at Breezy Point, Minnesota. The cooperative was recognized for its culture which centers around the safety of employees, members, and the public along with Sioux Valley Energy’s work to move that culture to a new level of excellence.
“Sioux Valley Energy strives to continually advance our safety culture and recently held a strategy session to discuss ways to create an environment yet to be realized in our industry. We collectively hold ourselves to high standards and set progressive goals in building an organization that recognizes people first. If you get that correct, great results naturally follow. I view this award as a testimony to the effort every person at Sioux Valley has put forth to build this culture of excellence. Our folks are committed, and they live it every day,” said General Manager and CEO Tim McCarthy.
The MRET Leroy Vanderpool Excellence in Safety Award is presented annually in memory of Leroy Vanderpool who passed away in 2006 of Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Vanderpool spent his career in the field of electric utility safety and was the loss control manager at East Central Energy in Braham, Minnesota.
“The LeRoy Vanderpool Excellence in Safety Award was created in 2006 by the Minnesota Rural Electric Trust Loss Prevention Committee to recognize the safety culture efforts of the MRET membership,” said Dan Maholias, Executive Vice President and MRET Program Administrator at Brown & Brown Insurance Services, which administers the award. “Each year, members are asked to apply by sharing how they are supporting a culture of safety within their cooperative. Sioux Valley Energy’s story epitomized that goal, in that its safety culture story is supported and lived by every department, for every employee, and has been an evolving process over many years.”
Sioux Valley Energy, a Touchstone Energy® Cooperative, is a member-owned electric utility, providing reliable electric service at cost-based rates to nearly 30,000 homes, farms, businesses, and industries in a seven-county area of east-central South Dakota and western Minnesota.
