The rural nature of our service area offers many benefits—wide open spaces, starry nights away from the city lights, miles of wildflowers, and a more peaceful way of living are just a few things many folks appreciate about country living. Although quiet and peaceful, country life has its challenges. In 1938 Medina EC was created to provide safe, reliable and affordable electricity to our rural service area when big investor-owned utilities would not. We do this for 17 counties across South Texas and continue to grow rapidly all while continuing to provide dependable and affordable power.

As growth continues, new challenges arise. Cooperatives across the nation are looking at broadband services for their members. Medina EC understands our members want the same reliable and affordable access to internet as our neighbors in the city and more urban areas. That’s why at the beginning of 2021, Medina EC established a Broadband Feasibility team to research the possibility of offering broadband services to our members. Unfortunately, over the course of the year as that team worked with experts to evaluate multiple options, it became clear that the size and rural nature of our service territory, and the existing coverage from established internet providers would make it extremely difficult to provide that service to members.

The board voted at the February 2022 meeting to not enter the broadband industry at this time.

This decision did not come lightly. Our goal to exceed member expectations in everything we do was and continues to be a driving factor in the decisions made by staff and the board of directors.The co-op studied many options including serving broadband to all of our members or limiting service to densely populated areas of our territory. Financial considerations included looking at combinations of federal grant money and debt. Medina EC's research also involved talking to other cooperatives who have gone through this process, looking at a multiple vendors and extensive work sessions to develop various models and scenarios. The results from the research proved that a broadband service would create an unacceptable risk to our members' assets, electric service and rates. Ultimately, the addition of broadband would not positively contribute to the reliable, safe and affordable electricity service we were established to provide.

Medina EC will continue to evaluate and study future programs and services that could benefit our members and the cooperative in the event they will not hinder our primary goal to provide reliable and affordable energy while protecting cooperative assets and maintaining strong financial health.