Hawkeye joins Heartland to expand offerings

CRESCO, Iowa—Heartland Security Services—a cooperative of rural electric companies that provide traditional, agricultural and medical security services—on Feb. 22 announced that another rural electric cooperative, or REC, had bought into the company, increasing each entity's footprint and list of available services.

Hawkeye REC now owns one share of Heartland and joins a list of

. Hawkeye will bring its FirstCall medical alarm monitoring and service business to the table and increase Heartland's presence in Western and Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa.

“We're a traditional security company. We offer everything from medical alarms to large commercial access control, CCTV, fire—everything to do with security. In 1999, nine rural electric cooperatives partnered to create Heartland Security and offer new services to their customers and their geographical areas. Rural electric cooperatives that formed over 75 years ago so rural consumers could get electricity out to their farms, homes and businesses,” said Heartland GM Guy Adams. “That's Hawkeye's core business, but they saw an interest from their customers to offer more services, so they bought into ownership of Heartland … So we're gaining the medical monitoring from them and offering their customers other services they don't have, like home security, business security, card access cameras, agricultural systems—we do a lot of different things.”

Hawkeye CEO Brian Krambeer agreed the partnership was a good fit.

“Heartland Security is a way for Hawkeye REC to bring another valuable service to our area at a fair price. There is a real need to provide a low cost security solution for our customers. Being an owner of Heartland Security allows Hawkeye REC to be focused on providing high quality and reasonably priced energy services to our members while expanding the types of monitoring services we have provided in the past, throughout our community,” Krambeer said in a release “I feel that Heartland Security offers the same high standard quality service that we have always strived to provide Hawkeye REC customers for over 75 years.”

Heartland Security now has more than 6,000 customers. Heartland installs GE Security Pro alarms and security services and uses third party central stations to monitor. It was named the GE Security Pro Dealer of the Year for 2009 for the Western United States.