I am curious:

Certainly it's more efficient for the citizen to report outages directly to Duke. But does not the county/cities, who pay the bill for that lighting, have an interest in knowing how often such outages occur and how fast they're repaired, which interest is not served by referring citizens directly to Duke?

(If you have the impression that I'm not really fond of Duke Energy as a company*, you have much to go on...)

(* Their street-level repair people, generally, are fantastic, just so I'm clear)