Public utilities provide electric, gas, water or telephone service to customers in a specified area. Utilities have a duty to provide safe and adequate service on reasonable terms to anyone who lives within the service area on without discriminating between customers. Because most utilities operate in near monopolistic conditions, they can be heavily regulated by local, state, and federal authorities. Generally, the local and state agencies are called Public Service Commissions (PSC) or Public Utility Commissions (PUC). Municipal Utilities and Rural Electric Cooperatives may be unregulated though.
Salton City is a census-designated place (CDP) in Imperial County, California, United States. The population was 978 at the 2000 census. It is part of the 'El Centro, California Metropolitan Statistical Area'. Although maps at first glance show Salton City to be a sizable community, in fact very few of the surveyed streets and roads were ever developed. The town was developed in the 1950s as a resort community on the Salton Sea, a saline, endorheic rift lake located directly on the San Andreas Fault, but as the salinity of the already highly polluted Sea rose, very little development took place and much of what was built — including the city's marina — was abandoned.