Manager’s Message — April 2021

Dear Members:

April is Lineworker Appreciation Month. Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative (PSREC) lineworkers are responsible for keeping power flowing day and night, regardless of holidays, vacations, birthdays, weddings, or other important family milestones.

Beyond the years of specialized training and apprenticeships, it takes internal fortitude and a mission-oriented outlook to be a good lineworker.

In PSREC service territory and across the country, electric co-op lineworkers’ mindset of helping others often extends beyond their commitment to their work and into their communities.

Given the dedication of PSREC’s lineworkers both on and off the job, I encourage you to take a moment to acknowledge the many contributions they make to our local community.

Telecommunications

Service is now available in new areas. We are able to connect fiber optic to customers in parts of Plumas Pines, Portola, Johnsville, Keddie, Chandler Road, and some of its side roads, as well as areas of Sunnyside Road, Amesbury Drive, and Jura Drive. Speeds of up to 1 gigabyte a second are available to residential and business customers.

We have received an additional grant to expand broadband to the Scott Road area, and are awaiting final decisions on our other grant applications for Old Truckee Road, Greenhorn, Spring Garden, La Porte Road, and other remote areas of Mohawk Valley and Long Valley.

If you are looking for service or wondering if you should make a long-term commitment with another provider, please check with us first. We hear again and again that if people knew our services were about to arrive, they wouldn’t have signed a different provider’s long-term contract.

PST’s fiber-optic services offer speeds up to 1 gigabyte per second, our coax service offers speeds up to 25 megabytes a second (Mbps) and our wireless broadband service offers download speeds of up to 20 Mbps. With these speeds, you can stream videos on multiple devices at the same time without slowing down. You could even replace your TV provider with streaming services.

We continue to expand broadband coverage throughout the region. If you haven’t already, get on our interest list or sign up for service by calling us at (530) 832-4261 or visiting Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications.

Fire Prevention

As the weather improves, we will begin our rights-of-way work, including clearing poles, trimming trees, and removing trees that threaten our rights-of-way and our communities. Your help is greatly appreciated with this crucial ongoing project. Our members have helped identify trees that have turned color or are clearly damaged. This is a big help—sometimes trees die and turn color after we’ve inspected them for the year.

Another way to help is cooperating with us when we need to remove trees. We don’t cut trees unnecessarily because it is a big expense to the cooperative. If a tree is a hazard tree, we are legally required to remove it. When members cooperate with us on tree removal, it reduces our costs—which helps keep rates down—and keeps us all safe.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please call me at (530) 832-4261 ext. 6076, or email me.

Sincerely,

Bob Marshall
General Manager