March 29, 2024
Business

Power Broker New Bangor Hydro CEO helping to improve service, efficiency

Ray Robinson appeared uncomfortable in his charcoal-toned suit as he sat down in a small conference room at Bangor Hydro-Electric Co.’s downtown Bangor offices. And nervous.

That seemed strange given that for the previous three months he had a tougher audience than a reporter. He’s had 425 stressed employees trying to interpret his every move and wondering what impact his decisions would have on their lives.

Robinson is an outsider at the utility, brought in by the new parent company to cut costs, reduce staff, and get the business running efficiently and profitably. Besides all that, he agreed to lower customers’ transmission rates while maintaining or bettering service.

It’s a tough job, but he’s done it before for Emera Inc., the Nova Scotia holding company that bought Bangor Hydro for $210 million last October. And this week the Canadian headquarters gave him the permanent title of chief operating officer. He replaces Carroll Lee, who recently retired as president.

Robinson said he plans to stick around for a while, not just reorganize the utility and leave. That, too, sounds a bit unusual for a man who has had 13 different positions at seven companies since 1990.

“My plan is to stay here and make sure that the transformation at Bangor Hydro is sustainable,” Robinson said. “There are a lot of examples I’ve seen where people come in and quickly change things and move on before the transformation sticks. I’m committed to making sure that Bangor Hydro is here for the long haul. It must be, and it will be, and it will be a leader in what it does in delivering energy.”

Right now, Bangor Hydro is close to being a national leader, but in a not-so-positive way. The utility charges among the highest transmission rates in the country, and the rates won’t start going down until July of next year.

Even though that’s a year away, Robinson called the rate cut a step in the right direction. But to get there, Robinson and a team of other Bangor Hydro and Emera managers held meetings outside the downtown headquarters, a couple of miles away at a rented Husson College conference room.

The secrecy surrounding what was happening at those meetings only led to heavy criticism being leveled against the group by employees who had to live day to day without knowing what was going to happen to them.

And customers weighed in, too, saying that significant cuts of staff might lead to poor service.

Robinson is sympathetic, almost apologetic, for what he and the others put the workers through. He wouldn’t say whether he had ever been laid off from a job, but said he’s worked at places that have undergone staff reductions. None of the cuts, though, reached the magnitude of one-quarter of the company’s staff as they did at Bangor Hydro, he said.

“I can’t say I’ve ever been involved in anything this significant or substantial,” Robinson said. “I’ve had to deal with certain amounts of employee or workforce adjustments, but it’s the ones of this order of magnitude that weigh heavily on everybody.

“I’m sure if any of us were to put ourselves into their situation, there’s a great spectrum of emotion going on – from anger to grief to devastation,” Robinson said. “And some of them, probably, I know a couple of the individuals … now they want to move on.”

Robinson is on a campaign of sorts to prove that he and his bosses at Emera aren’t the bad guys. The problems at Bangor Hydro reached a boiling point last year before Emera took over, when former managers asked the Maine Public Utilities Commission to approve a rate increase, which would have been the sixth one in six years.

Even with all the Maine firm’s problems, the acquisition of Bangor Hydro was key for the Canadian company to establish a strong presence in the New England power markets, Robinson said.

Emera gave Robinson an iron-clad edict when it sent him to Bangor – look at every aspect of Bangor Hydro’s operations and then come up with a better, innovative way to manage all of its assets, from the power lines to the customers.

He’s called what he’s done in the last few months a self-imposed audit of the utility, one where the organization was thoroughly evaluated and then restructured to put in place “pretty tough expectations on customer service and cost effectiveness.”

“In most positions that I’ve had, that was an expectation of the role – trying to find different and better ways of doing things,” said Robinson. “It’s a radical shift in mindset as to how you identify what must get done to meet all of the business and customer expectations and how you get the work done as efficiently as possible.”

But will his business philosophy actually work, for both employees and customers? Robinson said it is up to him to make it happen.

“You can say anything you want to say until you’re blue in the face, but until you demonstrate what you’re saying with your actions, people either won’t understand it or they won’t give you the respect,” Robinson said. “All this skepticism out there I would expect. Demonstration and performance is the only way that skepticism will disappear.”

Among Robinson’s plans is to encourage economic development in the area. The only way Bangor Hydro can take an active role in bringing business to a region that has been losing some of its biggest industries is to lower rates and keep them low. Bangor Hydro has agreed to lower rates by a total of 12 percent over a six-year period starting July 1, 2003.

“That speaks volumes to the ability for economic development in the area, certainly for customers of ours,” Robinson said. “With our rates, they can make long-term plans and projections as well.”

Even though Robinson did not display a public persona during the three trying months that just passed, he acknowledged that he actually is more transparent as a person than when he’s working as a chief executive. He drops the suits on weekends, and said he is living his second childhood by doing off-the-wall activities with his wife, Samantha, and three children, Chris, Scott and Lindsay.

When he and the family lived in Canada, Robinson said they’d hike to alpine lakes or build snow caves in mountain passes and live in them for the weekend. They once had a competition to see who could build the best – and loudest – cannon to shoot a potato. He used to sport a ponytail and still sometimes toys around with the idea of growing it back. And he likes heavy metal music, preferably AC/DC and Metallica, but not Ozzy Osbourne.

What he values most is his family. After that, his friends, in particular a rough-and-tumble biker with very long, gray hair flowing from his head and Harley-Davidson leathers strapped to his legs.

The two met when Robinson worked in a small town in British Columbia. Robinson, not much of a biker, said he’d get together with the man every so often just to hang out.

But, he said, he didn’t realize how important his friendship was to the biker with “huge character, huge heart” until it was time for Robinson and his family to leave British Columbia.

Over dinner one night, the biker “got all choked up and was fumbling around with this ring,” Robinson recalled. “It was a ring he got from one of his buddies who is no longer alive.”

The biker gave the ring to Robinson, who wears it on his right hand and rarely takes it off.

“In a way, I’m no longer alive to him, either,” Robinson said. “We had a lot of good times. He’d take a bullet for anybody.”

The ring is a keepsake Robinson wears to remind him about good times, simple times. And trying to keep things simple.

That’s another philosophy Robinson said he hopes to bring to Bangor Hydro.

“Businesses have a way of making things complex” needlessly, Robinson said. “What I’m trying to bring here is something more powerful and very simple. And the power is in the simplicity.”


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