Thirty-one years after he started with Manitowoc Public Utilities, Key Accounts & Meter Services Manager Dan Salm is retiring.
Salm started his career in utilities in Madison before coming back home to Manitowoc in 1990, starting as a Customer Relations Manager. He worked his way up the ladder and has seen many changes at the municipally owned utility company, the biggest being technology.
“When I first started in the industry, meters were simple. They were just rotating disks that we read each month and created a bill off of them,” Slam explained. “Today, the advanced meters we are using, it’s such high technology that it can alert us to outages, it can give us readings every hour or every 15 minutes so we can use that data for energy management for the customer or we can use it for managing our systems.”
Another aspect of that is payment methods. Salm told Seehafer News that when he started in the industry, roughly 40% of customers paid their bills in person. Last year that dropped to 0% due to the pandemic.
“Electronic payments, electronic billing presentments…they can log on to our website and look at their bills, or even pay their bills online,” Salm said. “Going from postcards to the data that we have today is such a big change.”
Dan’s last day is Friday, June 4th, and Senior Manager of Business Services, Cindy Carter said they have named the successor for Dan.
“He is a local guy, his name is Eric Duenkel,” Cindy told us. “He has been with the Utilities for about 10 years. He started in the water system and has worked his way up. Dan has been such a wealth of knowledge for him…but I think we will still have Dan’s number on speed dial.”
Dan said that he has lots of plans after he is done at MPU. He said he has planned a trip to go see his son in South Carolina, several small projects, and he will continue to work on the small farm he owns.