Kansas Municipal Utilities outlines statewide training, mutual aid and workforce plans

Greg Dumars, project manager for Kansas Municipal Utilities (KMU), told the Transparency and Ethics Committee that KMU supports municipally owned electric, natural gas, water and wastewater systems across Kansas and is focusing on workforce training, mutual aid and reliability tools.

KMU, founded in 1928 and headquartered in McPherson, now lists 213 members and 16 association employees, Dumars said. The association operates a 35-acre training site with a roughly 20,000-square-foot building that includes an 8,000-square-foot shop, an auditorium that can hold up to 300 people and outdoor hands-on training fields for electric, gas and water systems. “We have over 200 members. We are now at 213,” Dumars said. He added, “We have a training staff of 6 that is on the road … they traveled over 200,000 miles” in the last year to deliver safety and technical training.

Why it matters: municipal utilities provide local control of critical services, supply local employment and can offer faster outage responses because utility workers live in the communities they serve. Dumars told the committee that local ownership helps keep payroll and purchases in the community and that municipal utilities still measure…