Manager’s Message — April 2020

Dear Members:

Lineworker Appreciation Day is April 13. Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative’s lineworkers are responsible for keeping power flowing day and night, regardless of national 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’ mentality of helping others often extends beyond their commitment to their work at the co-op.

Lineworkers are often familiar figures in the community. They can be found coaching youth sports teams, volunteering for local charities and serving on local advisory boards.

Monday, April 13, is Lineworker Appreciation Day. Given the dedication of PSREC’s lineworkers, both on and off the job, I encourage you to take a moment and acknowledge the many contributions they make to our local community.

Communications

Have you visited PSREC and PST’s Facebook pages lately? If you are curious and want the most up-to-date information about your cooperative and its subsidiary, please find
us on Facebook under Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative and Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications. Please also take a moment to review us on Google, Yelp and Facebook.

We post systemwide power outage notifications and other useful information, such as updates and tips. If you are not on Facebook, no worries! Check out www.psrec.coop and www.pst.coop to stay informed. You can also receive outage information via text message.

To sign up for text notifications, login to the SmartHub app from your mobile device, or from www.psrec.coop and set your notification preferences.

With the SmartHub app, available for Apple and Android devices, you can pay your bill, view your energy-use history, report outages, view outage information and contact us from the convenience of your smartphone, tablet or other devices.

Telecommunications

Service is now available in new regions! We are able to connect fiber optic to customers in Sierraville, Sattley, Calpine, Chandler Road and some of its side roads, as well as the main part of Quincy south of Highway 70. Speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second are available to residential and business customers.

In addition, our electric and telecommunications businesses are working together to expand our electric system data control, meaning our telecommunications business is able to sell the surplus capacity on this system to our member-owners.

We have received grants in some parts of our region as well, allowing for further fiber-optic expansion. If you are looking for service, or are 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 that our services were about to arrive, they wouldn’t have signed up for a long- term contract.

Areas we are working on connecting later in the year include Plumas-Eureka Estates, Johnsville, Lake Davis, Grizzly Road and Wingfield Road.

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

We continue to expand broadband coverage throughout the region, so if you haven’t already, get on our interest list or sign up for service by calling us at 800- 221-3474 or visiting www.pst.coop.

COVID-19

We would like to encourage our membership to try to conduct as much business as possible with us via email and phone until we know more about the impact of the virus.

Please check our website to see if our office is open for face-to-face transactions. As we go to print with this issue of Ruralite, it is difficult to predict what the impact of the virus will be in early April, so please review the website and our Facebook page for the latest information.

If you have any questions, or would like more information, please call me at (800) 555-2207 ext. 6076, or email me at bmarshall@psrec.coop.

Sincerely,

Bob Marshall
General Manager