In an interview with APPA, Katie Abraham, executive director of the Michigan Municipal Electric Association, detailed how the services that MMEA offers to its member utilities has evolved to the benefit of those member utilities.
MMEA represents all 40 of Michigan's public power utilities.
“When I started at MMEA about seven years ago now, the association was hyper focused on legislative issues for the membership and they were very, very successful in that area and advocating on behalf of our members in Lansing, which is the capital here in Michigan, is still a huge part of what we do and the primary role of MMEA -- that legislative advocacy is critical,” she said in an episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“However, I noticed that there was a gap of unmet needs” related to services, she said. “And interestingly, although maybe not surprisingly for many, our current services, a lot of them actually grew out of lessons learned during COVID and most of them revolved around making MMEA this main conduit, if you will, of the information sharing between the members and connecting members to members in that sharing of information.”
So, for example, MMEA hosts a monthly membership exchange call, “and these are informal virtual calls where members ask each other questions and our members, we've learned, learn best really from each other and from lessons learned,” she noted.
“And so this platform offers an opportunity to share that information and as you can imagine, when it was started during COVID, members were asking each other questions about a pandemic, and how do you handle all these new situations?”
It was so popular “that now it's evolved into questions about anything really in the energy industry -- about AMI and billing, vegetative management, EVs, GIS. I mean you name it and it comes up. And I also use the opportunity to give a short update as to what's happening at the capitol and at MMEA and these calls have just proven to be tremendously helpful as that conduit…of information sharing between members,” she said.
“Now, similarly, we offer monthly membership surveys, and members will email us their questions in advance and they are questions that they want to ask of their peers on any topic at all and we put them into a survey, we email that out on a monthly basis to the membership for the responses and then what I think is really neat is that we catalog those responses" on MMEA Member’s Hub, which is housed on the MMEA website and is for Members only.
So it is not just one moment in time – “you have a question, you answer, it's done, the information dies. We actually have a library now on our website and we have categories and we label things so that members can go back and use that for reference later or whenever that issue arises for them, so that has proven to be really helpful,” Abraham went on to say.
“Like most APPA member associations, I believe, we also have a large fall conference every year. And again since COVID, that format has changed. It used to be multiple days. We had one day that was designated to breakout sessions with our associate members, but after COVID, our members said no, we kind of want a shorter conference.”
MMEA now has “one day that's focused on the plenary speakers and instead of those breakout sessions, we actually now have monthly webinars with our associate members on hot topics.”
And they have “become very popular and it also is helping us reach a broader audience. We were always struggling with getting the right people in the room for those breakout sessions, but given our member size, they kept saying, Katie, I can't afford -- not so much monetarily, right? -- but I can't afford to have my office empty of staff in case something happens so I can only bring so many people to the conference,” Abraham said.
“Well, we don't have that issue anymore, right? So now we have these monthly webinars, they can join in a room, the right person who focuses on that issue for the utility, can listen to that webinar, ask questions and we post those as well on our website and I will say here because I’ve mentioned our associates many times now -- we have over 130 now at MMEA that are part of us and we work with them and we share their information to the membership and again that sharing of information -- so that our members when they need certain services, they know where to go, so we're very appreciative of our associate members in Michigan.”
Looking at services, “I would of course be remiss not to mention mutual aid. It's a big service of MMEA, especially lately. If anyone's been following the news, Michigan’s been hit by some nasty storms within the last couple months,” she said in the May 2025 interview.
“We were hit at the end of March with some severe ice storms, ice accumulation that we haven't seen, maybe ever.”
And in May, “we had some tornadoes hit down in Michigan, very high winds. And so mutual aid, the response, the coordination has just been outstanding and something that should make us all really proud in Michigan and, of course, the APPA membership as well, we had to call in AMP for this latest storm and so just really appreciative of that coordination, but that's also a huge benefit, right? -- of being part of an association.”
She also mentioned “our newest push, one of our newest services, is on safety and we're really making gains ensuring that our members are getting the necessary safety training.
And we say it all the time -- safety is so important. It's the most important thing we do is making sure that our workers go home the way they came to work.”
But some of MMEA’s members are very small, “they have limited staff. They can only do so much in a day, and, unfortunately, it's easy to push this one…to the back burner. It’s, Hey, well, oh yeah, we’ll get to that training tomorrow, oh, we'll get to it next week, and so we're really trying to prevent that from happening and so we have a new partnership with an associate member and a local community college that has actually led to the construction of a new indoor pole yard for training purposes. It's going to be focused on the public power utilities in Michigan, so we're excited about that,” she said. MMEA has been working with Jackson Community College.
“We have now offered two top notch OSHA 10 training courses that are getting rave reviews. So we're going to do more of that and…we've just launched an online safety training course and it's a catalog of courses that's coming together through this local community college and they are specifically geared towards all municipal utility departments. So not just electric, but also water and wastewater, which is really kind of a one-of-a-kind opportunity, at least in Michigan.”
MMEA is “very excited about that and hoping that some of those members who just need to brush up on the safety -- they do some of the online safety courses and these are things like bloodborne pathogens, for example, you don't have to be in person to do that,” Abraham said.
“We're focused on that and hoping that as they dip their toe into that online safety training that they'll say, hey, you know, let's bring a trainer in and do some of these bigger topics and really start to tackle this.”
Abraham also discussed, among other things, a report that was issued by MMEA that details the positive impact of public power utilities in the state.
