Essay About Municipal Power Company And City Of Allen Park

Allen Park Power Ltd.
Allen Park Power
Allen Park Power Ltd. (APPL) is a municipal power company in the city of Allen Park (approximately
750,000 people) and is currently wholly owned by the city. It provides electrical generation,
distribution and sales to the citizens and industry within city boundaries and also to some surrounding
rural counties. The City treasury is the sole recipient of dividend payouts.
The company started as a city department in the early 1900’s and has maintained responsibility for
electrical services in Allen Park since that time. In 1997 the city council decided to restructure the
department into a separate corporation in order to take advantage of impending changes in the
regulatory environment. The restructuring was designed to allow the company to enter the market in
non-regulated, but related, industries and to market services in other Canadian and international
locations. By the end of 2008 the company had developed separate business units to operate projects
in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
A Board of Directors governs APPL. The Board Nominations Committee selects potential new
members of the board. There is a requirement that two of the twelve directors be City Council
members. The company operates somewhere in between the public sector and the private sector.
When the company was created City Council directed APPL to operate like a private sector company.
As a result, the APPL started to adapt its policies and procedures, including its supply chain
procedures, with this in mind. However, since the citizens ultimately own the company, and are
represented by the two councillors on the board, the company receives a great deal of public scrutiny
especially over issues of pricing, purchasing, cost control, service, social responsibility and
environmental impact. The news media seem to be very critical of practices such as sole sourcing and
the use of negotiated partnerships rather than competitive bidding.
APPL has traditionally been a vertically integrated company, handling all aspects of the power
business from power generation, though transmission