Utilities and staff are focal point of Public Power Week

Public Power Week is fast approaching and Heartland is busy getting ready to tell the public power story during the annual celebration in October.

Our recent end-user customer survey reiterated what most of us already know – we need to do a better job promoting the value of public power and the advantages it offers. The majority of survey respondents didn’t realize they were served by a public power utility and we want to help improve awareness.

One way we plan to do that is by featuring customer utilities in local newspaper articles.

We have reached out to all our customers asking a few questions about your utility. If you haven’t already, please reply with as much information as you can by September 8^th.

We will write the articles and submit them to the papers. Our goal is to show the residents of our customer communities how valuable their local utilities are and how lucky they are to be served by great public power folks like you!

We will also be promoting public power through advertisements in those same newspapers. They will feature pictures of local utility employees and elected officials. This will help put faces with the names behind public power.

Heartland will also once again be recognizing an outstanding employee from one of our customer utilities with the Distinguished Service Award.

If you know of someone at your utility who often goes above and beyond the call of duty, you can nominate him or her for the award. Nominees should exhibit excellent performance in electric utility operations as well as outstanding contributions to the municipality, community and other organizations.

Past winners include Gary Horton of Akron, Iowa and Mathias Phelps of Lake Crystal, Minnesota.

All entries must be received by September 15 and nominees from previous years will also be considered.

We look forward to celebrating Public Power Week, celebrated the first full week in October, to remind customers about the distinct advantages public power offers. To learn more about how you can celebrate and help spread the public power story, visit the Public Power Week page at publicpower.org.