Fifty-five of the remaining 310 workers at Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. have been notified via e-mail and a memo posted on a bulletin board that they could be out of a job early next year.

The memo informed the 55 workers who make up the utility’s project services division that management this week began soliciting bids for outside contractors to do some or all of the division’s work.

According to the utility’s spokeswoman, the workers were forewarned months ago that they would receive word when bids were going out for other businesses to handle utility construction, pole placement and other projects.

“They had a foreshadowing of that from our business strategy meetings,” said LuAnn Williams, Bangor Hydro communications officer.

It’s been a roller coaster of a year for the 55 employees, who in May were under the impression they dodged the job-cutting ax that fell on 112 co-workers in the utility’s attempt to slash $6.4 million from its budget and reduce transmission rates to its 110,000 customers.

Bangor Hydro’s chief operating officer, Ray Robinson, insists that changes – including staff and budget cuts – at the utility are necessary to streamline operations. At a meeting last week with Bangor Daily News editors, he was adamant that customer service would not be a victim of the cuts.

“There is no resource constraint,” he said. “We’ll do what we need to do. We won’t have anyone idle.”

Robinson’s words, however, do not sweeten the bitterness the 55 employees feel about the utility, according to one of the workers, who asked not to be identified.

In May, the 55 employees, which include 40 to 45 linemen, were moved from the utility’s core line division and their base of operation became a trailer behind Bangor Hydro’s Main Street garage. At first they were going to become part of a separate company called Bangor Line and fall under the organizational umbrella of the utility’s parent company, Emera Inc. of Nova Scotia. That plan fell through, and Bangor Hydro then called the spun-off operation its new project services division.

Project services handles construction projects, vegetation cutting and other services such as emergency power restoration on an “as-needed” basis, Williams said. The work is sporadic and seasonal. The utility has a separate crew of 45 linemen who regularly service the transmission lines.

Last fall, the 55 workers were notified at a company-wide meeting that the utility at some point might solicit bids from outside companies to see if they could handle the project services work at a lower rate than what it costs Bangor Hydro in salaries and benefits. At the meeting, the workers were promised that they would be told by Dec. 31 whether Bangor Hydro would follow through with the bid process.

This week, the internal memo went out as the confidential request for bids was sent out to interested outside companies, including prospective businesses in the Maritimes.

“I guess we now know that we’ll be out of a job next year,” said one project services worker Thursday who asked not to be identified.

But Williams said Friday that just because the bid-solicitation process is under way doesn’t necessarily mean the 55 workers all will be losing their jobs early next year.

Williams said the utility is evaluating a number of options – from all of the construction-related work being handled by outside companies to keeping the project services division intact.

And if one or more outside companies are selected to partner with Bangor Hydro, Williams said she is hopeful the business would “include the people who work here in the new strategy.”

“The best thing would be if they needed people to fill the slots,” she said.

Customer service

Since the fall business strategy meeting, Bangor Hydro has relied on the services of an outside company to help its own employees, including those from project services, restore power after an ice- and snowstorm in mid-November.

No contract exists between Bangor Hydro and On Target Utilities Services, but the Portland-based firm has been called on and responded each time bad weather has hit. On Target is a subsidiary of Energy East, the holding company that purchased Central Maine Power Co. in 2000.

“It’s basically an understanding,” said Paul Nadeau, an On Target accounts manager. “If a big storm is coming in, we get called. They’re well on top of it, in terms of notifying us and other companies.”

Robinson, in his meeting with the NEWS last week, said outside partnerships such as the one with On Target are vital to providing good customer service.

The utility is under specific orders from the Maine Public Utilities Commission to improve customer service while at the same time reducing transmission rates. Bangor Hydro has committed to cutting rates by a total of 12 percent over a six-year period starting July 1, 2003. It also has agreed to meet seven performance standards or face PUC-imposed fines of up to $840,000. The first date when fines – if any are warranted – could be levied is July 1, 2004, based on performances in 2003.

As Bangor Hydro prepares to satisfy all of the standards in the coming year it already is consistently meeting five of the seven, according to documents the utility filed with the PUC. The utility reported that its billing error rates are down, customer complaints about the utility to the PUC are low, customers’ telephone calls are being answered in a timely fashion, crews are responding quickly to service calls, and demands for electricity are being met.

The targets the utility is having trouble meeting are the length of time customers are without power and the number of outages being experienced. Robinson said strategies are in the works to bring those benchmarks in line with the PUC’s expectations, and that includes repairing the worst transmission lines that account for most of the problems.

“Forty-five percent of customer interruptions took place on 10 percent of the circuits,” said Robinson, who noted that percentage is the equivalent of 15 transmission lines in the utility’s 5,275-square-mile territory.

Besides repairing the company’s infrastructure, Robinson said he and the other managers are trying to get employees in sync with a new operational structure intended to make Bangor Hydro “the best electricity delivery company in the Northeast.”

At the fall business strategy meeting where the 55 project services employees were notified that they could lose their jobs, the utility’s 310-person staff was handed a 50-page handbook on the company’s objectives. The manual was something that was much anticipated by the staff after a long summer of not knowing exactly how the company would manage with 112 fewer people and $6.4 million – or 20 percent of its budget – cut.

One attendee called the fall meeting a “pep rally” that lacked pep. Robinson offered that another employee who was skeptical about the company’s new business strategies approached him after a mid-November storm and said, “now I see how that works.”

Robinson said organizational changes at Bangor Hydro are not finished yet. Among the company’s objectives are creating a plan to improve employee communication, review all aspects of its compensation system and develop a long-term safety plan.

Not in the works, though, is a request for a rate increase.

“We have to define what is absolutely critical to get done and it will get done,” said Robinson about the utility’s objectives. “But we will not be going before the regulators in the next six years to ask for a rate increase.”