After spending four days without power—once again—I realized this is no longer just an inconvenience. It's a failure of an essential public service. Michigan residents deserve reliable electricity, accountability for repeated outages, and the opportunity for communities to explore municipally owned electric utilities like the successful model in Wyandotte. If you're tired of paying higher bills while enduring longer outages, please join me in asking our state leaders to make meaningful changes.

To the Members of the Michigan State Senate and the Michigan House of Representatives:

We, the undersigned citizens of Michigan, respectfully petition the State of Michigan to take immediate action to address the ongoing failures of DTE Energy to provide reliable electric service to the residents and businesses it serves.

For years, Michigan families have endured repeated power outages lasting days at a time. During these outages, residents lose hundreds of dollars in groceries and medications, miss work, struggle to care for children and elderly family members, and face dangerous conditions during extreme heat, severe storms, and winter weather. Despite these ongoing reliability issues, DTE customers continue to face repeated rate increases with little evidence of meaningful improvement in service.

Electricity is not a luxury—it is an essential service. Michigan residents deserve an electric grid that is dependable, modern, and capable of withstanding the weather conditions common in our state.

We respectfully request that the Michigan Legislature:

1. Conduct a full, independent investigation into DTE Energy's reliability, infrastructure investments, maintenance practices, executive compensation, and the use of revenue generated from customer rate increases.

2. Suspend future electric rate increases until DTE demonstrates measurable, independently verified improvements in system reliability and outage response.

3. Require automatic financial credits for customers experiencing outages lasting more than 24 hours, with increased compensation for outages extending beyond 48 and 72 hours.

4. Require complete public transparency regarding how customer rate increases are invested in infrastructure improvements and reliability projects.

5. Strengthen penalties for utilities that repeatedly fail to meet state reliability standards and establish enforceable performance benchmarks.

6. Establish stronger oversight by the Michigan Public Service Commission to ensure utilities are held accountable for repeated service failures.

7. Commission a statewide study on municipally owned electric utilities and create a legal pathway for communities to establish or transition to municipal electric service when investor-owned utilities consistently fail to provide reliable service.

The City of Wyandotte has demonstrated that a municipally owned electric utility can provide dependable service to its residents, even during widespread outages affecting neighboring communities. Michigan should evaluate whether similar models could better serve other communities that have experienced repeated service failures.

Residents deserve the opportunity to pursue a municipally owned electric utility when existing providers fail to meet reasonable expectations for reliability and customer service. Communities should not be indefinitely bound to an electric provider that repeatedly leaves residents without power for days while continuing to seek higher rates.

We believe every Michigan resident deserves safe, reliable, affordable electricity and accountability from the companies entrusted with providing this essential service.

By signing this petition, we respectfully urge the Michigan Legislature to enact meaningful reforms that place the interests of Michigan residents above utility profits and ensure that every community has access to reliable electric service—including the opportunity to pursue municipally owned electric utilities where appropriate.

We respectfully ask the Michigan Legislature to act now.

Signed,

The Undersigned Citizens of Michigan