Commissioner, Exec. Ass’t.
Ellen Nowak is a Commissioner for the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.
Bob Seitz is Nowak's Executive Assistant at the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: What do you do in a typical day as Commissioner, and how has that changed a little bit in this recent virus crisis?
Commissioner Nowak: We regulate about eleven hundred utilities here in the state. Most of those are water utilities. There are almost six hundred municipal water utilities. Then we have electric and gas investor utilities, municipal electric and gas, and some combined water and sewer.
We meet generally once a week. Occasionally we'll have to skip a meeting if it's busy or we have a scheduling issue. A typical day for me is making sure I am prepared to address the items on our weekly agenda.
I review the materials for our weekly meetings, read the Staff memorandum, the comments submitted by parties, have briefings from Staff, if necessary, and formulate my responses. That's the bread and butter of what we do every day.
It's different now because there are almost no more speaking engagements. Every once in a while, there'll be opportunities in addition to preparing for the weekly meetings for speaking engagements.