COMMENTARY

BEA GARDNER

Things mentally strong people avoid:

They avoid giving up after failure.  Every failure is a chance to improve. Even the greatest entrepreneurs are willing to admit that their early efforts invariably brought many failures. Mentally strong people are willing to fail again and again, if necessary, as long as the learning experience from every “failure” can bring them closer to their ultimate goals. source Amy Morin

I read this and I thought, a new City Council made of mentally strong people surely will learn from the mistakes of the past council, especially the troika. The troika brought to the city a lot of mistakes when they set out to sell the Electric Utility to FPL.

The first mistake they made was the fact that they did not go out for bid and the troika voted many times during the process to close the deal with FPL by giving them exclusivity on the purchase. Once the word got out that the City of Vero Beach was going to explore the possibility of selling off the Electric Utility asset there were, as I recall, others out there besides FPL that showed an interest in buying the City’s Electric Utility….but, with three solid votes to cut out everyone else, FPL became the only customer. Again, as I said, that was the first mistake.

Another error in the process of selling the utility was to sign a sales agreement before the details of the agreement could be worked out.  Actually this might be the biggest mistake of the entire process…locking the city into a sales agreement before the details were ironed out.

Referendum/mistake number one….fool the people into thinking they were voting on a lease of the land to FPL when in fact, there never was a lease drawn up. So, the first referendum was a trick to make the people believe that if they would not agree to lease the land to FPL that FPL would back out of the deal. So….the referendum took place and the voters voted on a lease that never existed.

Referendum number two…asking the public if they would like to sell the electric utility to FPL. .And, the  voters again overwhelmingly voted to sell to FPL but…there was no sales agreement made at the time of the referendum. In fact, just as the first referendum was voted on with no lease, the second referendum was voted on with no sales agreement in other words, another blank piece of paper. So, what really did the voters vote on?

I believe the voters, on both occasions, voted to have lower rates on their utility bills, period. They hung on to the belief that if they kept inching along with this phantom sale to FPL, exclusive of all others, they would eventually get a cheaper bill. And, though this has not and is likely not to happen in the near future, we are still hoping to get cheaper bills. Instead of cheaper bills, the troika raised rates about five times during this process and thus, the City of Vero Beach Electric customers are paying through the nose…..much more so than when the process started.

Lots of mistakes were being made by the troika of Tracy Carroll, Pilar Turner and Craig Fletcher.  They did all of this…..two referendums dealing with blank pieces of paper, many votes to give exclusivity to FPL while keeping others from bidding, raising rates to pay for the high priced attorneys and signing a sales agreement letting the folks think it was a done deal when in fact, it was NOT a done deal. These were just a few of the mistakes being made with regards to the sale of Vero Beach Electric Utility.

What do you say when you are told they signed a sales agreement with FPL and then you find out it is not a done deal? Well, this is the biggest mistake that was made because all along, the City of Vero Beach needed to clear the path for a sale by extricating themselves from existing contracts that were going to be hard to get out of, most notably with FMPA (Florida Municipal Power Agency) Sort of like selling a house with liens on it and we all know that the leans need to be satisfied before a sale could ever take place when selling your house.

Now, getting back to things that mentally strong people should avoid…Mentally strong people will avoid making the same mistake over and over again. As I said earlier, every failure is a chance to improve and the learning experience from every “failure” can bring them closer to their ultimate goals.

With the troika broken up because Tracy Carroll was not re-elected and the apparent “un-done deal” that is now on the table, maybe we can have a re-do or a re-think on this whole sale thing.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, a lot of Cities are wishing and hoping to get themselves into the utility game in order to enhance their bottom line and to avoid the big monopolies like FPL. And, just remember, the City of Daytona Beach is trying to buy back their utility from FPL. Just saying.

Sometimes what we call failure is really just that necessary struggle called learning.

Editor’s Note:  Bea Gardner is the creator of Bea-isms at beagardner.com.