Jensen passes torch at MMU to Gibbs

From left, Paul Jensen, retiring general manager of Marshall Municipal Utilities, with his guest at the Thursday, Feb. 8, meeting of the Marshall Rotary Club, Kyle Gibbs, who will replace him as general manager of the utility. Jensen also introduced Gibbs to the Marshall-Saline Development Corporation board of directors Tuesday, Feb. 13. Gibbs will assume the MMU seat on the board. [Click to enlarge]

The Board of Public Works meeting Tuesday, Feb. 13, was Paul Jensen's last as general manager of the utility after 17 years at the helm.

Add that to a decade managing utilities in Macon, and, Jensen has a broad view of the municipal utility business and how it has changed.

In that time, technology has changed quite a bit, the energy business has become increasingly chaotic, but managing an operation has in many ways stayed the same, according to Jensen.

His management approach has been to provide direction and serve as a liaison to the community and the city government.

"You get good people and let them do their jobs," he said. "I'm proud of the people here."

The best illustration, he said, is when there's a power outage.

"You know what my job is when there's an outage," he said. "Get out of the way and let Jeff (Bergstrom, the electric distribution superintendent) do his job. My job is to communicate with the media, industry and the public."

Outages have become relatively rare in Marshall under Jensen's watch. The utility was recognized in 2006 as a Reliable Public Power Provider (RP3) recognition by the American Public Power Association.

One of the most recent milestones of Jensen's tenure was the transition from buying energy wholesale to purchasing it on the open market.

To survive in the post-deregulation world, MMU joined with other small and medium-sized utilities to form the Missouri Public Energy Pool (MoPEP). The consortium is in the process of purchasing and contracting for generating capacity, but it will take about five years before plants being built now will be able to supply enough electricity to fulfill demand.

In the meantime, MoPEP and MMU are tossed about on the stormy waters of the open energy market, with prices that fluctuate by the minute sometimes, adding increasing uncertainty to the task of managing the utility's budget.

While energy markets have been deregulated, environmental regulations have increased, requiring utilities to toe increasingly difficult lines and generate increasing numbers of reports to state and federal agencies.

"There just wasn't much of it 27 years ago," Jensen said of government oversight. "Now we have to generate more and more reports."

While the business has gotten crazier, technological advances have helped make operations better in many ways, Jensen said.

MMU has seen a number of significant changes and improvements in its infrastructure and tools available since Jensen took the reins.

The $12 million sewer treatment plant was about to be built when he joined the staff, so that was his first big project.

The irrigation system that uses sewer plant effluent to water the Indian Foothills Golf Course was another, more recent, project. Electricity transmission lines surrounding and feeding Marshall have been replaced and improved, too, over recent years.

Since then he has overseen the addition of a natural gas pipeline that serves MMU and Mid-Missouri Energy, the ethanol production plant in Malta Bend.

But one of the most significant projects Jensen has overseen may be one the public may not notice, and that's the development of the fiber-optic communication system.

Ten years ago MMU built the system to improve internal communication, giving operators up-to-the-second information about the various systems' performance, helping them quickly identify and address problems.

"You used to have to monitor things by eye," he said. "Things could be broken and you wouldn't know it until there was sewage running down the street."

MMU is currently in the process of extending the fiber optic system to homes, giving customers another option for broadband Internet access.

Now that he's retired, Jensen is going to offer his wealth of experience to other utilities. He has created a consulting business, Utility Management Solutions.

"I'm hopeful I'll be able to help other utilities," he said. "The biggest challenge is the fact that there's always a tremendous need for the services I can provide" but utilities don't always know that they need them.

Contact Eric Crump at

marshallfaith@socket.net