Business Lexington Editor in Chief Tom Martin talks with Joe Kelly about his retirement as
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president of Columbia Gas-Kentucky, his views on education and energy and his special approach to advancing human compassion.
The unedited conversation can be heard in its entirety here.
TM: Joe Kelly, by the time this interview is published you will have just said your good-byes at Columbia Gas. What has prompted the decision to retire?
JK: Well, it's been a very hard decision to make because I feel so fortunate to have worked at Columbia Gas for these many years and it's a really fine organization. You know, Columbia Gas is not pipes and meters — it's people, and I've just really been blessed to work with outstanding people at the company. But there are things I have interest in that I have not had time to be as involved in as I would like. I'm no spring chicken, but I'm not dead old, so maybe there's one little chapter out there somewhere yet for me to maybe be involved in. So, just felt like it was time — time to do something else and kind of recharge and decompress, and maybe I can find something else where I can hopefully be of some value.
TM: I would like to look at some ways that you have already served Kentucky and Lexington in some pretty incredible roles (listed on page 19). I wonder if you would share with us what motivated you to take on all these very important, very critical and time-consuming roles.
JK: A couple of things, Tom. One is I have a deep belief that we all have an obligation to leave this place a little better than we found it, and we all should do what we can to make this world a better place. That doesn't mean you have to devote tremendous amounts of time, you don't have to be someone of financial means — give a lot of money. It can be opening a door for somebody whose arms are full of groceries or helping someone who may be physically challenged or elderly. It can be visiting a nursing home — there's just so many ways. I've been really fortunate because Columbia Gas, my employer, and the people that I have worked for have encouraged us to do the kinds of things that add to our communities and our state, and ultimately our country and our world. They don't expect you to do it but if you're interested and willing to do it, they support us. So, that's been very helpful.
Also, I have a really deep feeling and commitment to education. My parents were depression era folks who never had the opportunity to get much formal education. My dad was a farmer, but he was a good farmer. He could make anything grow, and he taught himself to read and he taught himself to do math. He did quite well without the benefit of formal education. They valued education, so the thinking (was) that we would get at least a high school diploma. A lot of times when dad needed us on the farm to help him, it would have been very easy for him to have kept us at home — he did not. He insisted and my mother insisted that you get up and you get on the bus and go to school. So, I guess I was one of those children that we talk about today as "at risk." It would have been very easy for me to have fallen through the cracks and been a dropout. So, I believe so strongly that every child should have the opportunity to maximize their potential, whatever their potential might be, and that we have an obligation to remove the obstacles that keep them from that. You can't guarantee that everyone is going to be academically successful, but you can create an environment where they have the chance, and you can support them and you can nurture and move them toward that opportunity to be successful.
TM: You are in a position to have some unique perspectives on Kentucky's strengths and weaknesses. What makes your short list of our most serious obstacles?
JK: I think a history of low expectations, of not believing that education is as important as it really is. Up until 1990, there had been attempts to try to improve the quality of education for all of our children, but they had been sporadic and probably not properly funded, and then trying to implement those reforms was spotty at best. When the general assembly, with the support of Governor Wilkinson, came together and as a result of the Supreme Court decision that said our system of schools was unconstitutional, they took a major step forward. They not only raised the level of expectations, but they also funded some initiatives that really have helped move us forward, and that process is continuing.
I think we had a good (legislative) session this last session. There was funding made available for things like technology for early childhood programs, more money for higher education particularly. The University of Kentucky, their business plan, which is the result of a mandate they were given by the general assembly, was well received by the general assembly. They didn't ask for a lot of money. They said they would generate revenues that they would direct towards achieving a plan, but they did get some assistance in the second year of the biennium. So I think (our priorities are) continuing to try to educate people, which is kind of an ironic thing — to educate people about the need to continue to invest in quality education; to continue to try to improve teacher education programs; (and) to make sure that we get to children early. The brain research, the science, tells us there are windows of opportunities when children are really ready to learn certain things, and that means we have to get to them early, early, early, and make sure that they're prepared when they get ready to enter school to learn.
Then we have to continue to provide adequate support and programs so that if a child is struggling, whether it be in reading because of physical needs — a child isn't reading well and we find that they have sight problems — we have mechanisms to help address that, so the child has a chance to maximize their potential. This 2020 Visioning Program that Stu Silberman and the Fayette County Board have kicked off is a terrific example of what communities can do and should be doing to make sure that we're not leaving students behind.
TM: You've been very intimately involved in the exposure of students to an experience that can be very profound. In citing you for its Diversity Award, UK noted that you sponsored through Columbia Gas scholarships for students to study the Holocaust, and in a way that must be unforgettable. In fact you actually "walk the walk," leading hundreds of students on the "March of Remembrance and Hope" in Poland each year; meeting survivors and touring such places as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek. Why is this important to you?
JK: The study of the Holocaust — it's not just about the Holocaust, but it's about the genocidal events that have occurred throughout history and continue to occur today regrettably. Coming out of World War II and the Holocaust, we all say and have said and continue to say, "Never again." And yet those events continue to happen. Because the records kept by the Nazis, because physical structures and the camps that were so well constructed and so methodically operated, some of those are still in place. Because of the depths of the records that are available, because there are still survivors that were there who experienced this horrible, horrible thing, it just makes sense that the Holocaust is the centerpiece for making students aware how these things start and how they evolve and how they can end in horrible tragedy as the Holocaust did. If you go back and you study World War II and you study the Holocaust, you find that really the process of the Holocaust began in the early twenties, when Hitler was beginning to come to power, to be someone that people were listening to. The rhetoric he was espousing at that time had embedded within it these kind of key components of anti-Semitism and discrimination. The students do a semester of academic preparation before they travel to Poland, and they go with students from all across North America and we link up with students from Europe, Eastern Europe, and we've had students from China, Korea, and Japan to participate in the program as well. By the time they get there, they have a good sound academic foundation — about not just the Holocaust, but about Rwanda, about the Armenian situation that occurred, about the killing fields of Cambodia — so they have a good academic understanding. But to go there to spend a week with survivors who were there, people who lost, many of them lost their entire families, to see how hard it is for these survivors to go back there, to be there, the memories that that trip brings back for them. And the students see that the survivors, although it's painful, they do it because they want the students to understand. Again, it's about how can we intervene earlier to make sure these kinds of things don't evolve. It begins with denying someone access to a water fountain, by saying you can't sit on that park bench, by saying you can't play soccer with the other kids. It begins by exclusion and through the process, at least with the Holocaust, ultimately (led to) trying to dehumanize the Jewish population in Europe, in particular in Poland but all across Europe
So, our hope is that we raise the level of understanding about how these things happen, that we recognize that they've happened in other places and in our country. The issue of slavery, of course, is a blight on our history, and the fact that people were brought here in bondage, thousands died in the trip here, and of course tens of thousands died in slavery, so it's not something that hasn't touched America as well. So it's all about trying to have the students be able to identify and recognize how these things can begin and that they become advocates for equality and diversity. And it doesn't mean you have to agree with everybody. It doesn't mean you have to abandon your values at all, but to simply say we are all human beings and we all deserve the same protections relative to human rights.
TM: It almost seems as though the perpetrator winds up becoming the victim of his own dehumanization, by somehow overcoming or losing human empathy, the basis of the golden rule, "do unto others." What happens that allows these things to occur between people?
JK: That's a great question, and I don't know that I have the answer. There's something about all of us, I suppose, as human beings that no matter what our situation personally might be, that there is a tendency — thank goodness most people are able to put that tendency aside and ignore it — but there is a tendency, at least on the part of some people I think, to feel that for their own self esteem, they have to feel better than somebody, that they somehow or other are superior in some way, which is a very unfortunate thing. There are issues of jealousy. People who in Europe, I think, and Germany, and Poland, who were the perpetrators were jealous of those who, through their own hard work and their own tenacity, were able to be successful relatively speaking, to self-sustain and to accrue some wealth. And there wasn't anything magical about it — they worked hard. But others somehow or other were jealous of that and felt that they were acquiring their standard of living or their wealth at the expense of others, which was generally not the case.
So, I don't know, Tom. It's a difficult question. The thing that just causes you to grab your head and shake your head is that the people who were the prime instigators of the Holocaust, for example, were some of the most educated, cultured people in Europe. Commandant of the camp at Auschwitz would put in a day's work exterminating thousands of people every day and then go home to his wife and his family and put on Bach or Wagner and have a bottle of good wine and you know, it's bizarre. It's absolutely bizarre, and somehow or other, they had disassociated themselves from this large segment of humanity.
There is nothing about it that's not horrible, but to think of six million plus Jews — and another six million innocent victims who were non-Jewish that we certainly do not forget about — but of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, 1.2 million of those were children. In Kentucky, we have something in the neighborhood of 625,000, give or take, children in our public schools, so you'd have to kill every child in Kentucky twice. I mean, the numbers are so big, it's hard to get your arms around, and what this experience in Poland with the survivors does is it puts a face on this tragedy. So, I think, the students who participate in the program — these are mostly upper-level college students — come away with a much deeper understanding of the human impact of these things and are far more likely to intervene earlier when they see some of these initial kinds of things taking place, the denying of someone of their basic rights. To say, wait a minute, this isn't right, we have no reason to be doing this. That's what we hope to gain.
TM: Energy. Of course this has been your bread and butter for years, and you're intimately familiar with the energy situation, the industry. What are the tensions between our consumption of energy, our resources of energy and the impact on our environment?
JK: Well, it's been a difficult two or three years. It actually goes back to the winter of 2002 when we had a very cold winter and supplies were tight and prices escalated. Columbia Gas of Kentucky is a distribution company and the way the process works is that we acquire the commodity, the natural gas, and the vast majority of it comes from the Gulf of Mexico. ... We purchase that gas and we transport it through interstate pipelines, compressing it and cleaning it up if you will, getting the moisture out of it. And then we take delivery of it from the interstate pipeline and we deliver it then from the pipeline through our pipelines and our systems to the end-user, our customers. We have approximately 143,000 customers in Kentucky. The commodity — we do not mark the price up. We are not allowed to mark the price up for the gas itself. We get paid for transporting the gas from the interstate pipeline to the end user, so from our perspective, the high gas prices that we have seen for the last year or so particularly have been very, very difficult for our customers. And they have been difficult for us, because as the prices have gone up dramatically, people obviously try to use less. They're driven to conservation because they struggle to pay their bill, so the less people use, the less we transport, which means we suffer a lack of revenue as well.
TM: And you receive the phone calls.
JK: Yes, and we get the phone calls. I will say because of the good job that the Kentucky Public Service Commission has done over the last several years, and working with the natural gas local distribution companies like Columbia of Kentucky, and the fact that we, some years ago, broke out the commodity and the delivery charge on our bills, people do have a pretty good understanding of how that process works. They've been very patient and very gracious through some very difficult times. But having said that, what happens is that we, of course, generate less revenue, which creates financial pressures for us. Our customers suffer because their bills are sometimes breathtaking relative to what they've been used to paying when gas was two dollars or three dollars per thousand cubic feet. When it goes to ten dollars or even higher, that's just really difficult for them to deal with. We had a much warmer-than-normal winter last year, which helped ease some of the upward pressure on natural gas. But now we've had this stretch of really, really hot weather, so the power industry which uses natural gas to meet the demands for air conditioning and other needs that people use electricity for is diverting gas from storage into generation. So now we're seeing a pressure put on supply again from the hot weather that we're having.
The good news is that our storage situation is in good shape. We're actually ahead of where we would normally be relative to filling our storage. There are two things that we are concerned about. One is the price; we try to buy the gas as cheaply as we can because the commodity piece is about 75 percent of a customer's bill. But just as important or maybe even more important than price is reliability. Are the people we're going to buy that gas from going to be able to get it to us, deliver it so that if we have a cold winter that when the customer turns the thermostat up, something happens: the gas is there and the furnace comes on.
TM: Going all the way back to the beginning (of our conversation), you mentioned that there are things that you yet want to do in your life.
JK: Well, I don't have anything specific in mind. I want to take a little bit of time and again, gather myself and decompress a little bit. But the things that you and I have been talking about are things that are very important to me, and if there's an opportunity for me to continue to be involved in those things — education, human rights initiatives, trying to ensure that all of our children have an opportunity at a quality education — those are things that I would like to continue to be involved in if I can. The things that Commerce Lexington is doing relative to working with the surrounding counties in this regional initiative and recognizing the strengths of our communities with UK and Transylvania, and the resources we have here with the World Equestrian Games — I can't get used to the new name, so forgive me — coming here in 2010. There's just so many exciting things going on, and I care about all of those things and would like to be involved in some way that I might be of help. But I don't have anything specific yet in mind.
TM: Just on the light side — how does Joe Kelly decompress? What do you do for fun?
JK: Well, we have an old cattle farm. We've got about fifty head of mostly Angus but some other cross breeds as well, and having grown up on a small family farm, I really enjoy being out on the farm and working with, as we all jokingly refer to them as, the girls and the little guys, the calves. I enjoy old vehicles — not classics as such, not show vehicles, but I've got a couple of old vehicles. An old pick up truck, an old '55 Chrysler that we enjoy getting out on Sunday afternoons and riding and enjoying those things. But there hasn't been as much time to do those sorts of things because of the nature of our work, and I'm looking forward to having a little more flexibility to do those things.
TM: We appreciate the time you've taken here and we're going to watch with interest what you do in the future, Joe Kelly.
JK: Thank you Tom. I appreciate you visiting with me.
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