Incompetence by Design

Comment Up
By William Coakley
Former Chair, Electric Utility Task Force

I am responding to a post under the blog entitled A Few Thoughts on Sustainability wherein someone commented that our RO plant is a fiasco among other false assertions.

The comment is just more delusional thinking. The County was looking to expand their water empire and had found a willing sucker by colluding with Mark Bates, Finance Director and Robert Baldwin temporary city manager to essentially bankrupt the city with a classic rip. The County water department cleverly gave phony projections and figures to Bates and Baldwin, leaving out key facts and figures which showed the County was attempting to scalp LW taxpayers.

The County Water Contract as you refer to it would have cost LW 30 million before we even had a drop of water and that's assuming no "cost overruns or miscalculations"... famous in LW. It would have provided the County (at our cost) a twenty million dollar tap into the coastal water systems where they could further their aggression and sweep up our water contracts with other towns and cities. In this contract, our water rate was set to automatically escalate for twenty years. And it would literally GIVE the County our 15 million dollar investment already in the ground with three wells, an infrastructure that could provide 15 million gallons a day of RO water, and permits for many more wells which, by the way, were permitted on COUNTY land.

The County had no way of expanding their empire building into the coastal networks without hoodwinking those "Lake Worthians of lesser intelligence, foresight and care for the planet" into believing the biggest lie ever told, ie, that "we would actually save money."

This deal was so rotten from top to bottom that the County had to back off when it became obvious to County Commissioners that the aggressive pursuit by their water department might net an embarrassing law suit that would have revealed how the County had lured the city of LW into a sucker deal. And they wisely decided to avoid the stain on their reputation if they ruthlessly insisted that LW pay regardless of the burden it imposed on the already overburdened LW taxpayer.

Unfortunately, the subsequent handling of the RO system wasn't very stellar either. First, the city paid about 7 million more to Mock Roos than they had to and it may be that we're getting nicked for things that the LWU utility director missed... after all, she was only $20,000,000 off on her estimates on other utility issues.