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.
Eaton is a Statutory Town in Weld County, Colorado, United States. The population was 2,690 at the 2000 census. The town is named after Benjamin Harrison Eaton, a pioneer of irrigation who played a leading role in transforming the arid prairie of the Great Plains east of Colorado's Front Range into a thriving agricultural region with water brought from the nearby Rocky Mountains in the late 1800s. Much of the farming country around Eaton, Colorado continues to depend on the irrigation systems engineered by Eaton and others to this day. Eaton later served as Governor of Colorado from 1885 to 1887.