Utility Board's Presentation to the Lake Worth City Commission

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Once again, the idea of establishing a utility board authority came up on Tuesday's meeting by commissioner John Szerdi.  Back in 2005 when a group was vehement about selling our utility to FPL, it came up then as well.

Around 1971, the people voted on a Utility Board Authority. Members of it were appointed by the  commission. It was non-political.  Later, and as all boards eventually become and all are today, it became political and the people voted to end the Board.  Ron Exline was mayor at the time, around 1990 or so.

Fifteen years later, the city formed the Electric Utility Task Force with Bill Coakley as chair. This Board was simply adopted by resolution but soon became political. The forces that be who wanted to sell our utility made it so.

Bill said, "It was sad then to see so much emphasis being placed on a utility board as some kind of silver bullet that would have given us competitive rates and service. Perhaps we could argue that when the option to sell was not fairly explored something had to be substituted and the desperate search ended up, quite logically, with the utility board idea. It’s nothing new. In fact, it’s a very old and moldy idea that has logical appeal and seldom works the way the public expectations would have it."

Tuesday night the Electric Utility Advisory Board presented its three options regarding our electric utility--1) To Rebuild and Upgrade the Tom Smith Power Plant 2)To Sell the Electric Utility 3)To Extend the current Orlando Utility Commission’s contract. I was pleased to see that it was well researched, informative and on the surface appeared to be non-biased with no politics involved.

The option to sell was made very clear---there were too many costly negatives for it ever to happen and we still, to this day, have no idea what it's worth. Expense of lawyers, consultants, huge existing debt especially with Stanton Coal and the nuclear power at St. Lucie are tremendous obstacles to overcome.  The best options where the other two by default-- number 1--rebuild what we have and put in another tie-line that would cost $10 million or number 2, simply extend our contract with OUC . The Board recommended going out on an RFP now before the contract ends in order to line up a power supplier.

However, as Coakley said back in 2006, and it still very well could apply today because NO ONE knows anything about our electric utility--the black hole--"The sheer manipulation, withholding, skewing and stonewalling of information fed to the public, the commission and the EUTF by city staff  should stand as a warning to the public not to ever trust anything the city tells you."  We hope those days are over.

We're still looking for an internal audit of our utility, something that was supposed to have been done eons ago. How can you make a determination on where you are going without knowing "where you've been?"