At Maryland public power utility Easton Utilities, “safety is the foundation of everything we do,” said John Horner, President and CEO of the utility, in a recent interview with APPA.
“Without working safely, none of the other important key performance areas or key performance indicators that we have for reliability and customer service and cost management really matter if we're hurting ourselves or hurting someone in the public, so we do have a very deliberate and intentional focus on safety,” he said during an interview with APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
Easton Utilities in April noted that it earned APPA’s Safety Award of Excellence for Safe Operating Practices in 2024 and received national recognition for achieving exceptional electric reliability in 2024.
Easton Utilities stood up a safety and training department, Horner noted. The utility has worked together with partners in the community, such as surrounding utilities and the local community colleges, “among others, to provide hands on training for our team. We hold regular stand downs and have also implemented an annual safety rodeo, so that not only our field employees, but all of our employees get a chance to understand what it takes to be safe and to work safe in what is a dangerous business,” he said.
“We also have mandatory training for all of our employees and that training is specific to the role that they have here at Easton Utilities and we do some positive recognition programs as well, such as a safety champion. That's something that we award on a monthly basis and it is through peer recognition and nomination that those safety champions are awarded.”
The utility tries to “live to a leadership motto that is you have our permission to take your time to do the job safely,” Horner noted.
“We don't want any of our employees to feel whether it's self-imposed or through some other means that there's pressure to take shortcuts and to avoid doing the job safely in order to get it done faster. All of the customers do eventually get restored. All of the work does eventually get done. What's most important is that once the work is completed that everyone gets to go home in the same or better condition as they did when they came to work.”
Easton Utilities also has corporate scorecard goals associated with safety “and our top two goals are related to training and also safe driving.”
Broadband Project
Horner played a key role in securing substantial grant funding of approximately $30 million needed for the Connect Talbot project to extend broadband to all unserved residents in Talbot County, Maryland.
In the interview, he was asked to describe the process for securing that funding and provide additional details on the project.
“I really need to start by saying that as a rural municipal utility, our community struggles at times to have the same access and availability to what urban communities see as just the normal utility infrastructure and it relates to the fact that the rural communities are not as dense and therefore there just isn't as much of a customer base to attract utilities to invest in those areas,” he said.
“And so in the mid 80s, Easton Utilities decided to put together an Internet and cable TV business for the community because our customers didn't have access to it from any of the larger players in the marketplace.”
And when “you fast forward to the time period just before the pandemic, there were a lot of customers in Talbot County in even more rural areas that didn't have any access to broadband and as a result, they didn't have the same availability to do school work at home, to connect with medical providers at home, to work from home. And it also harmed their real estate values, when they would go to sell or resell their homes,” he noted.
“And so we started to look into how those rural, unserved areas could get access to broadband in the same way that urban and suburban communities and even our town of Easton had access and it really turned out to be a financial pro forma issue. Without having a large enough group of customers per linear mile, it didn't make financial sense to invest in putting all of that fiber in the ground or in the air to serve them, and so we needed to find other sources of funding.”
The USDA at the time had a program called Reconnect, “and it was a pretty rigorous program to apply for and we pulled together a team of partners here at Talbot County, the town of Easton, Easton Utilities, and some help from the state of Maryland and their Office of Rural Broadband at the time,” Horner noted.
“We did go through an application process and fortunately in 2019, we were awarded what I'll call the first chunk of grant funding needed to get to the unserved areas of Talbot County. This is not something that was a stretch for Easton utilities.”
Horner said that as a municipal electric utility “we're familiar with installing poles and underground conduit and cables and wires, and so being in the Internet and broadband business was a pretty easy extension for us to consider doing. It certainly aligned with the municipal utility and public power mission of serving customers and we also wanted to make sure that in doing this project that our existing Internet cable TV customers were not going to have to subsidize the extension of this broadband utility into the county.”
In 2019, “we received a $13 million grant from the USDA and that really was an enormous kickstart for us to eventually then receive funding from the FCC and five different grant funding programs through the state of Maryland to be able to get out to about a little over 4,000 unserved properties in Talbot County,” he said.
“It's a team effort. It really took a partnership with the federal government and our state government, a partnership with Talbot County and certainly support from the town of Easton…and as far as how we communicated it, I'd have to give a lot of credit to our marketing and communications team,” Horner said.
“As we started moving forward, we put together a name for the project. The name of the project is Connect Talbot and built a website and also did a lot of direct mailers because as you can imagine those without Internet and access to Internet accessing an Internet website from home doesn't necessarily make sense, but we did have a website available.”
That website “had an interactive map, and that interactive map enabled customers to go in and plug in their address to see if service would be available to them and if so, when it was forecasted to be available. And that website has regularly been updated and we also have had an e-mail address and a phone line that customers could call to get themselves in the direct mailer communications for the project so that they could remain in the loop on the progress of the schedule. So really a significant undertaking.”
All of those grants together “and all of those partnerships have led to about a $40 to $50 million project within Talbot County and we hope to have everything wrapped up and completed and be the first county within the state to have ubiquitous broadband available to everyone, hopefully by the end of next year.”
