At tonight's city commission meeting, there are ten items that were postponed from the January 17th meeting related to the Utility that will be voted and approved.
The Lake Worth Utility has always been the black hole. There has never been a city manager who understood what expense was justified and what was not that came out of the Utility. They all have relied on the utility director and professional staff to advise them correctly. For awhile there, we were running through utility directors at the same pace as city managers.
The Utility is very important to our city. Without it, we would not be able to operate our city as we draw $10 million from it to keep our city afloat. We all instinctively feel that something is amiss particularly when our rates are among the highest in the State. How do we really know if we need that Derrick-Digger as an example? Is the price in line? Could we have bought used?
There is a whistle-blowers' law suit against the City right now regarding the Utility. Some have said that one of the whistle-blowers, an Engineer, could have conducted the Arch Flash Study in-house and saved us a bunch of money.
Read William Coakley's article on that Arch Flash Study, How forty thousand dollars of your money got wasted.
Ask yourself two simple questions:
ReplyDelete1) With a EE as an Asst. Utility Director, why is an outside source required for this study, especially since the two men conducting the study (Farmer & Fisher) were the same two individuals who stated the 26.4 kV conversion would be the cheapest route. We all know how that worked out for the city.
2) Why, again with an Asst. Utility Director, was it deemed necessary to pay Mattey an additional $72K for three months work?
I would suggest that both of these questions could be answered with the lack of competency of the Asst. Utility Director. Clay should be the next person to exit stage left.
The truly sad part is that, had Andres been permitted to conduct the study as he wanted, LW would not be looking at the multi-million dollar lawsuit that is presently pending from this same person.
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