Fifty years on the job: Manager Jim Phinney started with MPPD in 1959

There were still a few 32-volt wind-powered electrical systems and a lot of windmill-powered stock wells when Jim Phinney went to work for McCook Public Power District on June 7, 1959, but most of the owners were happy to give up wind power when electrical lines were extended to their farmsteads.

Fifty years later, some of the descendants of those same farmers are looking at wind again, with a chance to actually sell power back to MPPD under Nebraska's new net metering law.

Phinney, manager for the last 20 years, recently sent out 16 information packages to customers interested in doing just that, and one of them, near Maywood, was ready to talk to a lender to finance his wind operation.

Phinney was sacking groceries at Sheldon's Market on West Third in McCook at 50 cents an hour one Saturday, when he saw the MPPD manager, George Meyers, across the street.

"Mr. Meyers, are you hiring out there?" the recent McCook High School graduate asked.

The interview was short and sweet.

"Son, do you have a pair of walking boots?"

Yes, Phinney said, he did.

"Do you have a lunch pail?"

Sure did, he answered.

"Then be there Monday morning."

Walking into the warehouse that Monday, Phinney found he had arrived unannounced.

Superintendent HarleyTirrill came over to see who he was.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I've come to go to work," he said.

Apparently satisfied, Tirrill put the newcomer to work unloading a truck. "I asked enough questions that I was able to get the truck unloaded," Jim recalls, and he soon found himself headed to a substation north of town. Yes, he explained, his mom was Mildred Phinney, who lived on the east side of town.

Sent out on a job, Jim was put to work digging holes for power poles.

"They told me if I dug eight holes in a day, they'd keep me."

By 4:30 p.m., he realized he wasn't going to make it.

He must have done well enough to keep his job, however.

"The next day I did nine."

Digging holes in those pre-automation days, with a "banjo and spoon and 5-foot shovel" was hard work.

"There's a real art to it," he said. Sometimes when the ground was extra dry, they would pour drinking water down the hole and come back later.

Employee No. 7 on the operational department at MPPD, Phinney found himself making 75 cents an hour. "Then they let me go on outage calls," and he was making $1.25 an hour. He made $1,500 that first summer, and his boss let him work around his college schedule. "When I got two weeks off, I always got in as many hours as I could."

But Jim had no misconceptions about the work. "One June we had a bad storm ... they came and got me out of church on a Wednesday night and I think I worked until Monday night."

He learned to climb poles and did some line work, he said, but then came an opening for an inside job.

"They needed a material man real bad," Phinney said. "I didn't really want it," but that's where he wound up.

From there he went on to purchasing, then engineering, operations and directing crews.

Phinney really didn't want to apply for the job in 1989 when manager Doug Mollet left, content to let attorney Stan Goodwin manage MPPD while the search was on for a permanent leader.

Just before the deadline, "Nine employees came into my room. 'Jim, are you going to apply for the managers's job? If you don't, we will do it for you.'"

Phinney said he threw together a resume and "slipped it under the door," only to find that he had the job.

Phinney and the board were put to the test five years after he became manager, when the April 11, 1994 ice storm did $6.5 million in damage to MPPD's facilities.

Early on, Jim learned that MPPD and other descendants of the Rural Electrification Association all used the same specifications for building power lines.

"That's real nice in an ice storm," he said.

Because of the standardization, all 162 outside men who came to Southwest Nebraska to rebuild the lines knew exactly how it was to be done.

One crew even brought in its own mechanic, who set up shop at MPPD, repairing any trucks that needed it, regardless of which utility owned them.

The work went extremely smoothly, he said, with only one crew waiting half a day for material to arrive to make certain repairs.

"All of the businesses around McCook were just great," he said. "It's just fantastic how everyone works together."

Not only that, "we've got some of the best customers in the world," Phinney said. "People have a good work ethic and pay their bills."

The district was very successful in keeping the repairs going, obtaining a $6.5 million line of credit to pay the $180,000 to $200,000 a day in labor the repairs cost at their peak.

"You want to really see cooperation and a real desire to help our customers, just wait until you see one of those ice storms."

MPPD dodged a bullet in 2006, and found itself helping other utilities to the east when that ice storm took out miles of power lines around Holdrege and Kearney.

MPPD's lines actually accumulated more ice in 2006 than 1994, but the expected winds never arrived here in 2006 like they did farther east.

MPPD has grown about a hundred-fold by some measurements since Phinney started in 1959, he said. The utility served about a dozen stock wells in 1959, compared to 1,200 today. Only eight irrigation wells were served by MPPD then, compared to 800 today.

Starting with 1,900 customers all together, MPPD now has 4,724 customers in 77 townships covering about 2,800 square miles, served by 2,520 miles of line.

Phinney, 68 in March, has four children and two step sons, and he and his wife, Patty, have 10 grandchildren, one great grandchild and another due in November.

With no contract or plans to retire, he credits the board of directors for much of the utility's success, and said he's always tried to show respect and be honest with its members.

He gives most of the credit to  "great group of employees" for making MPPD a very successful rural electric district.

"It's funny how things progress, but everything just clicked," he said.