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.
Pine Bush is a hamlet located in the Town of Crawford, in Orange County, New York, U.S. , roughly coterminous with the 12566 ZIP code and 744 telephone exchange in the 845 area code (both of which spill over into adjacent regions of the Town of Shawangunk in Ulster County . The population was 1,539 at the 2000 census. Pine Bush is part of the Poughkeepsie–Newburgh–Middletown, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area as well as the larger New York–Newark–Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area.