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.
Ingomar is a small unincorporated community in northwestern Rosebud County, Montana, United States, along the route of U.S. Route 12. The town was established in 1908 as a station stop on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, then under construction in Montana. Although the land around Ingomar attracted numerous homesteaders during the decade following the railroad's completion, the region proved to be far too arid and inhospitable for intensive agricultural use, and by the 1920s the town was in decline. The railroad through the area was abandoned in 1980, and only a handful of people remain in Ingomar today. Three of the town's surviving buildings -- the Ingomar Public School, J. A. Bookman General Store, and Wiley, Clark & Greening Bank -- have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.