John,

Communities across the country faced storms last week, but most of the brutal power outages were in my state of Michigan. Hundreds of thousands of Michigan families have gone without heat or electricity for days, and most of them are customers of DTE Energy, which serves my district.

One of the most expensive and unreliable utility corporations in the country, DTE is an investor-owned and profit-driven monopoly, only accountable to their shareholders.

While continually raising rates on customers who cannot afford to pay, DTE raked in $1.1 billion last year. Instead of investing in families or in critical infrastructure upgrades to prevent future power outages, DTE spends its profits on CEOs, shareholders, and buying off elected officials.

Over and over again, they’ve failed us, leaving hundreds of thousands of families without power for days on end -- all due to greed.

Enough is enough. We need public power in Michigan and across the country. Utilities should be basic human rights and our neighbors should not be treated as commodities for profit.

Please sign if you agree: We deserve reliable, affordable public power. It’s time for publicly owned utilities that are dedicated to human needs, not profits.

DTE has offered to give a paltry $35 credit on people’s utility bills if they were without power for at least four days. This is not nearly enough.

We reached out to residents directly ensuring that they knew where the closest warming center was located. We heard that people’s food and medications have spoiled, and people have been suffering in freezing temperatures without heat.

The people most affected live in Black, brown, and poor communities, where DTE has spent the least on needed grid updates and where people already disproportionately suffer from DTE’s dirty fossil fuel power plants.

DTE continues to neglect communities and needs to make residents whole by paying for loss and damages for outages, lowering rates, and actually investing in needed infrastructure.

Instead we’ve experienced ongoing failures. Last year, DTE Energy disconnected life-sustaining service for hundreds of thousands of households that could not afford to pay skyrocketing rates, while selling residential customers’ debt to a predatory debt collection firm.

Like many for-profit utilities around the country, DTE also funds dark money misinformation campaigns and lobbies state decision-makers.

This pattern is happening in states around the country. Utilities keep poisoning our communities by burning fossil fuels, blocking renewable energy, hijacking our state governments, and prioritizing profits over people.

Please sign if you agree: We need public utilities that are accountable to the people, not shareholders.

I promise to keep fighting on this. I’ve joined grassroots groups to protest DTE Energy’s rate hikes and hold them accountable, and I’ve been leading efforts in Congress to guarantee our right to affordable and reliable utility services.

Always serving you,

Rashida