Rochelle Municipal Utilities recently announced its receipt of three awards from the American Public Power Association.
The city of Rochelle-owned electric utility received the Reliable Public Power Provider (RP3) designation, the Excellence in Reliability Award and the Safety Award.
The RP3 designation recognizes utilities that demonstrate proficiency in four areas: reliability, safety, workforce development and system improvement. Utilities earning this designation meet rigorous criteria and are among the top-performing public power providers in the nation. Currently, 251 of the nation’s more than 2,000 public power utilities hold an RP3 designation.
RMU Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver thanked staff for their work on applying for the awards and said the RP3 designation is a point of pride for RMU.
“The RP3 is a very prestigious award amongst public power providers,” Toliver said. “We got the gold designation, which is a three-year designation. This was the first time RMU applied for it since 2017. It was revamped in 2022 to make the criteria more robust. It’s harder to get now, and we still were able to get it on our first application since 2017. It’s a very rewarding feeling knowing that we’re doing the right things as a utility to get these awards. It’s a difficult award to earn.”
RMU employs a crew of 10 linemen. Its service territory includes 141 overhead miles and 68 underground miles for a total of 209 miles of line. It serves 100 square miles of territory including greater Rochelle and the communities of Creston and Hillcrest.
Utilities ranging from 1,000-300,000 customers applied for the RP3 award. RMU has approximately 7,500 customers.
“When you have other utilities that have 10 times the amount of staff we have, it’s a pretty big achievement for us,” Toliver said. “There’s only five of us in the office here every day to put this stuff together. We’re a pretty small crew and we were able to pull this off. Doing more with less means a lot to me. It shows we have a very dedicated staff here that wants to see us succeed and for this utility to be as reliable and efficient as possible.”
Toliver called reliability and safety “paramount” to the RMU electric department’s work. The utility prides itself on local people providing local service and ensuring reliability and limiting outage times, he said.
In 2025, RMU saw 31 outage events across its entire system. The utility saw an Average Service Availability Index of 99.9828% last year, which means the percentage of time power was available. RMU’s average customer was out of power for about 90 minutes total in 2025. RMU saw about .32 outages per customer last year.
A priority that comes before fast outage repairs for RMU is safety, Toliver said.
“The linemen have to make sure that they’re in the clear before they start making repairs, especially when their hands are the ones touching these bare wires,” Toliver said. “Safety is of utmost importance. If that means delaying an outage because we have to make sure the line is clear or we need to hang grounds or whatever the case may be, that’s what we’re going to do. Our people come before any metric.”
The Excellence in Reliability Award honors utilities that achieve high levels of system reliability, as measured by industry data and performance metrics. The Safety Award recognizes RMU’s culture of safety and its commitment to protecting employees and the public.
Toliver said RMU received the diamond rating on the safety award, the highest level possible, for the third consecutive year. The reliability award was received for the fifth straight year.
“That’s huge to me,” Toliver said. “All of our outages are recorded by time and customers affected and sent to the APPA and the government. We’ve consistently gotten excellence in reliability and that compares us against all of the other utilities and we’re within the top 25 percent of utilities for reliability. That makes me feel good. Receiving those awards over multiple years shows we’re making the right plays when it comes to investing in our utility.”