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.
Wooster (first syllable with the vowel of wood) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Wayne County. The municipality is located in northeastern Ohio approximately 50 mi (80 km) SSW of Cleveland and 35 mi (56 km) SW of Akron. Wooster is noted as the location of The College of Wooster. Wooster was established in 1808 by John Bever, William Henry, and Joseph Larwill, and named after David Wooster, a general in the American Revolutionary War. The population was 24,811 at the 2000 census, but has since grown to over 26,000. The city is the largest in Wayne County, and the center of the Wooster Micropolitan Statistical Area (as defined by the United States Census Bureau in 2003). Wooster has the main branch and administrative offices of the Wayne County Public Library. Wooster is the birthplace of physics Nobel Prize winner and chancellor of Washington University, Arthur Compton and his brother, physicist and president of MIT, Karl Taylor Compton.