He who controls the water...

Palm Beach County Water vs. our own Reverse Osmosis System

There are some who still profess and blog that we should have stayed with the Palm Beach County water contract. No reasons are given other than, "it was a deal." Yeah, it was a deal all right and the only guy that was shuffling the cards in his favor was PB County. I am sure that even our former Mayor, Jeff Clemens, still believes we should have gone with PB County Water.

We read or hear from those complaining about our high utility bills and state that we should have stayed with this "fine" contract with PB County. A recent statement by a Lake Worthian: "We are financing the reverse osmosis plant through utility rate increases - something that would not have been necessary if we stayed with the perfectly fine contract with Palm Beach County to provide water."

Well, let me ask you this, how would we have financed the $27+ million for County water? There was nothing "fine" about the PB County water deal unless you believe, however, that turning over our Floridan wells worth $14 million was a good thing and then spending $27 million in order to buy water from PB County. Some people like to find fault where there is NONE. Do not allow them to twist the truth. Do not swallow the lies. Watch out for all the spinmeisters in the next few months.

THE FACTS:

If we had stayed with the Palm Beach County Water Contract (LW a buyer of water)
$25,786,000
$1,500,000 payback to South Florida Water management for a total of
$27,286,000

Reverse Osmosis System (LW a supplier of water)
$23,556,000 (this includes the cost of getting out of the PB County Water deal of $1.2 million)
Savings of--
$3,730,000. "This equates to a savings of $1,000 for every resident in Lake Worth," says Commissioner Mulvehill.

When we asked Commissioner Mulvehill to expound more on it, she said, “Bottom line, we saved $3.7 million by building the RO. PLUS – we are getting an extra 500,000 gallons over the PB County contract – this is valued at $1.5 million dollars based on the $6million for 2 million dollar capacity charge that the County was going to charge us for a 30 year contract. PLUS, we get an expandable RO Plant – up to 9MGD and we are doing all of this without any future debt. One more thing, the rate for the RO water is now the SAME as was projected for the increases in the County water which is 11%. We had budgeted 13.5% increase in consumer water charges for building our RO Plant and have decreased this amount to 11%."

The way to quench the deep thirst of a growing populace and to meet the needs of the future, good leadership made up for the sins of a past Commission when Commissioner Suzanne Mulvehill was one of the commissioners who voted for the Reverse Osmosis System and to get out of the PB County water deal.

Infrastructure has to be replaced from time to time; that is just a fact of life. We chose going back and completing our own reverse osmosis plant once we were satisfied (after hearing experts testify) that deep well injection was the proper way to proceed to eliminate the waste by-products left-over from the process. Deep wells go down 3,000 feet into the Earth's surface.

Let me repeat--We ended the bad contract with Palm Beach County that would have turned over our Floridan wells, burning $14 million already invested in our RO and making us dependent upon PB County for our water supply and costs. We all know that costs always go up; they never go down. Now we are in the driver's seat. And we saved over $3 million dollars inspite of the bad decision of the Clemens commission.

This is just another huge example of how Suzanne Mulvehill made a great decision and who is a commissioner watching out for you.