The municipal utility: the city as its own power and water company

1904 – today

Owned by the city, held by a company: The New International Encyclopædia's Mishawaka article, written within a few years of the charter, states the fact flatly: "The city owns and operates the water-works and electric light plant." The legal form behind that sentence is De Kever's: the municipal water and electric plants were owned by the Mishawaka Public Utilities Company — the company Mayor Mix, Martin Beiger and other civic leaders formed — and leased to the city, the company assuming the city's debt and issuing the bonds the city was barred from issuing itself. The utility was therefore the city's own instrument twice over: it ran the water and the lights, and its credit built the city hall and staffed the regular police and fire departments. No arrangement in Mishawaka's government has carried more of the city on its back.

What the utility is not: The electric fame of the era belonged to another owner. The Twin Branch dam, built 1901–1903 east of the city, and the coal-fired Twin Branch steam plant that followed it in 1925 were the St. Joseph & Elkhart Power Company's, then the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company's — private utilities whose power made Mishawaka "the Power City" of the 1920s but which were never the city's own. Their course belongs to the Businesses & Banks record, and the distinction is kept here because the whole point of the municipal utility is that it was the city's: the government entry owns its governance, not Twin Branch's turbines.

The modern utility: Mishawaka Utilities remains a department of the city — water, wastewater and electric service run as municipal enterprises, its rates set by ordinance of the Common Council, as in the council's wastewater-rates proceedings under Proposed Ordinance No. 2025-26 in the fall of 2025. Its business office sat at 126 North Church Street until 1 September 2022, when it moved into the new City Hall — the utility that had once financed the government's house ending, a century on, as a tenant in it. The course of the 1904 lease itself — when it ended, and when the plants passed from the company's ownership to the city's outright — is not in the sources read for this section, and it is named in the gaps entry.

Sources:

1. The New International Encyclopædia, "Mishawaka" (c. 1905) — "The city owns and operates the water-works and electric light plant."
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Public Utilities Company's formation, its assumption of the city's debt and bond issues, and the plants owned by the utility and leased to the city.
3. City of Mishawaka news release, 1 September 2022 — the Mishawaka Utilities Business Office relocated from 126 N. Church Street to the new City Hall.
4. Office of the City Clerk, notice of 23 September 2025 (mishawaka.in.gov) — the Budget and Finance Committee's informational meeting on Proposed Ordinance No. 2025-26, amending wastewater rates and charges.
5. The Story of Mishawaka section fragment of this build — the Twin Branch dam built 1901–1903 by the St. Joseph & Elkhart Power Company, passing to the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company in 1907.