LED Chief Will Hang It Up After 40 years

Lyndonville Electric Department manager Ken Mason, the face of the village-owned utility for nearly 40 years, has announced he will step down effective June 1, 2016.

Hired as a superintendent on May 24, 1976, Mason took over as manager in August 1978. Since that time, Mason said he has seen the utility grow from about 3,500 meters (customers) to about 5,500 meters today, and from a five megawatt load to a current draw of approximately 12.5 MW.

Born in Hanover, N.H., Mason's father was in the military, which meant he traveled all over the world as a kid. The family finally settled in Massachusetts, and after serving in the Air Force and attending college, he found his way to Lyndonville to take the job at LED.

When he retires next June, Mason will be 69 years old and figures it's just time.

"I have two grandchildren that I want to spoil and I want to spend a little more time bothering my wife," said Mason. "She wants to start going on vacation, and when you manage a utility like this, you kind of act like the mother hen. You want to be around because whatever happens is going to end up on your desk."

Despite adding over 2,000 meters since he arrived, and having a budget in excess of $10 million, Mason points with pride to the fact that in 40 years LED has added only one employee to the payroll, which now stands at 17.

"The biggest thing I've done since I've been here," said Mason, "is getting the VELCO 115 kilovolt substation which we energized Dec. 16, 2010."

"Prior to that we were on what they call a radial feed line out of St. Johnsbury," Mason explained. "So when that line went down, our whole system went flat until it was repaired. Now with the substation, all four of our substations are fed independently out of it. We used to have a minimum of five or six outages a year just because of our feed, let alone what we had on our system. That 115 kV line has only gone down once in 25 years. So our reliability is just so much greater."

"Ever since he's been here, that's been his goal and he achieved that," said Clay Bailey, LED financial manager. "Outside of the utility he's a great representative of Lyndonville Electric. He's represented us at VELCO and before the public service board. Whatever topic arises, maybe it has something to do with hydro or maybe it has something to do with rate setting, he can go in there and put the point across. That's been his greatest strength."

"Ken is very good at the job he does and he has the interests of the ratepayers at heart," added village municipal administrator Justin Smith. "I've known him personally since I was about 10 years old. He coached me in little league and his son and I went to school together. It was definitely interesting working alongside someone I used to know as coach Mason or Mr. Mason."

"I think with Ken he's going to tell you how he feels," said Smith. "He's definitely going to give you his opinion on what he thinks is the best way to handle a situation. And I think his decisions are most often motivated by trying to keep rates in a place where the people in this area can afford them."

Of all the ice storms, snow storms, floods and other weather events to pass through the Kingdom in his 40 years, Mason said it was the storm of July 16, 2013, that caused the most havoc for LED.

"That was the worst storm we had," said Mason. "It was a straight-line wind thunderstorm that started out in Sheffield and came right through our system. We had people out for three or four days and it cost us a little over $100,000 to restore service."

Mason said that getting out and working with the operations staff in tough situations is one of the things he'll miss the most about the job.

"When we have outages, everyone in this utility works the outage," Mason said. "I may be the manager, but I know how to run a chainsaw real well and I don't ask my line crews to do anything that I wouldn't do with them. If I ask them to work long hours, I'm going to work long hours myself."

"Treat everyone equally," said Mason, "always tell the truth." These are the two principles he has relied on to guide him through nearly 40 years running the department.

"The thing I will miss the least is dealing with state and federal regulators," Mason volunteered. "I think the longer you go the worse it gets. For a small utility like this, the demand on us administratively to provide paperwork and documentation ... that's the thing I will not miss at all."