Letter to the editor
(Note: The following has been presented by Holly Springs Utility Department Receiver Michael Watson to the Mayor and Board of Aldermen and is published here as a Letter to the Editor at his request.)
To the Editor:
To the ratepayers of the Holly Springs Utility Department:
On August 10, 2026, the Chancery Court appointed me to serve as Receiver of the Holly Springs Utility Department. I do not take the responsibility lightly, and I want to speak to you plainly about what it means.
It means I am directly accountable to you whether you live inside or outside the City. I am directly accountable for the safety of the public and the employees. It means we can move more quickly to resolve problems. It means there are no excuses and none will be given. It does not mean things will be perfect tomorrow; they won’t.
The service HSUD provides is not what it should be. You know that better than I. My job is to change what happens now. This system has real problems that took decades to create: aging equipment, rights-of-way that need clearing, a failed metering system that disrupted billing, and a challenging financial state. None of that gets fixed in ninety days, and I am not going to promise you that it will. I will promise that measurable progress will continue on the problems you identified.
There is real progress to build on, and credit belongs to many people: To the Mississippi Public Service Commission – the Commissioners and, just as importantly, the staff who did the unglamorous work of the investigation and the docket: you kept this in front of the public when it would have been easier to let it fade. Commissioner Chris Brown in particular has been relentless on behalf of the ratepayers of his District. I have not agreed with the Commission on every point, and I expect we will disagree again, but nobody should mistake that for a lack of respect. The Commission’s pressure is a significant part of why this utility is in a better position today than it was two years ago, and I intend to keep the Commission fully and truthfully informed.
To Mayor Charles Terry – you inherited this problem rather than created it, and you have consistently chosen the harder, more honest path over the easier one. Winter Storm Fern was the clearest test of that. The ice knocked out power to nearly every meter on this system, and the damage here was on par with that sustained by the Northeast Mississippi and Tallahatchie Valley Electric Power Associations. Because preparations were made ahead of the storm by putting mutual aid agreements in place and getting contract crews committed early, outside help mobilized immediately, and the workforce on the system topped 120 people. That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen without leadership willing to spend money and political capital before the ice ever arrived.
To the Board of Mayor and Aldermen – the recent rate change took real courage. Nobody gets applause for voting to raise rates. The rate vote, the restoration of collection practices, and the updating of deposit and line-extension policies put this system on a firm financial foundation. Those decisions make real progress possible.
To the employees of HSUD – you have been asked to keep the lights on with too few people, too little equipment, and more criticism than any of you deserve. I watch you work storms, nights, and weekends. The shortcomings of this system do not reflect your effort. A meaningful part of my job is ensuring you have the tools, training, staffing, and equipment you need to do the work safely and effectively.
I will continue the work already in motion: right-of-way clearing and vegetation management, replacing failed and unreadable meters, correcting the instrument-rated metering that has left revenue unbilled, upgrading substation and sectionalizing equipment, completing the engineering model and the map of every pole and meter on the system, making a public outage map part of the website, fixing the phone and outage-reporting problem that so many of you have complained about, and hiring a permanent General Manager to lead this utility for the long term.
I will report regularly to the Court, to the Commission, and to you, the ratepayers. I am not asking you to trust me on the strength of a letter; trust is earned through results. I encourage everyone reading this to hold me to account.
A public utility exists for one reason: to serve the people who pay for it. Every measure, report, metric, or filing is only useful insofar as it tells us whether we are doing that. In the end, the only measure that matters is whether customers are satisfied with the service they receive. That is the goal.
Respectfully, Michael F. Watson