Wyandotte makes its own electricity — and has since the 1890s

When the lights flicker in most of Downriver, people curse DTE. In Wyandotte they call City Hall, because the power company is the city. Wyandotte Municipal Services runs the electric, water, and cable systems for the whole town — about 12,000 electric customers who get their bill from a municipal department rather than a private utility.

This isn’t some recent experiment. Wyandotte residents voted in 1892 to build a community-owned electric utility. The alternative back then was a private outfit downtown they didn’t much trust. So the city borrowed money, put up its own power plant, and started by lighting the streets. The water system goes back even further, to an 1889 bond for fire protection and clean drinking water. Cable came generations later. Three utilities, all owned by the people who use them, in a city of roughly 25,000.

Living with a city-run power company changes small things. The crew restoring power after a storm works for the same government that plows your street, so outages tend to get sorted out fast. A small system with a few thousand poles can move quicker than a regional grid. An elected commission sets the rates in public meetings, not a far-off rate case in Lansing. And the money that would leave town as a shareholder’s profit instead circles back into the system.

Wyandotte is one of about 40 Michigan towns — Holland, Lansing, Marquette, a scattering of others — that never sold their utilities off. Most are smaller, older, industrial places. They wired themselves up before the big private companies got around to them, and then just kept the keys. So the smokestacks along the Detroit River aren’t the only old infrastructure here. The power running the streetlights traces back to a vote taken before Henry Ford built his first car.