MARK SCHUMANN

It may seem to many as if the negotiations to sell Vero Electric are coming off the tracks, but cooler heads focused on finding solutions could still devise a strategy for completing the sale.  When City Manager Jim O’Connor and FPL officials meet this week, presumably their discussion will be about how to hold the deal together, and hopefully in a way that is fair to the residents and taxpayers of Vero Beach and to all 34,000 customers of Vero Electric.

Never mind that voters were asked last spring to approve a contract that was incomplete and which was founded on no small measure of wishful thinking.  We are where we are, and the only responsible course now is to find a way to accomplish what voters have said are their priorities – achieving lower electric rates and moving the city beyond its ownership of and dependence upon its electric utility.

If the fundamental objectives are to lower rates and to ultimately sell the electric system, then zeroing in on those priorities will require tuning out all the pro-sale and anti-sale chatter and propaganda.

A further unnecessary and quite possibly unhelpful distractions is the dust storm State Representative Debbie Mayfield is kicking up in Tallahassee with a number of utility-related bills she had introduced. Though the effort to sell Vero Electric need not become a train wreck, Mayfield’s proposed legislation deserve to wind up in the junkyard of bad ideas.  Not only are her bills potentially injurious to her constituents within the City of Vero Beach, her frontal assault on the municipal power industry will almost surely fall flat in the face of opposition across the state.

In filing House Bill 861, Mayfield might as well have drawn a target on the front door of the Florida Municipal Power Agency’s offices in Orlando.  Not only is Mayfield going after the FMPA, she has taken direct aim on each and every one of the member cities now participating in the joint action agency.

It is hard to imagine that Florida Power & Light officials are be pleased with Mayfield’s almost militaristic approach to diplomacy. Most likely, they are not.  Mayfield may have been encouraged by local utility activist Glenn Heran and his patrons on the Indian River County Commission to launch a direct legislative attack on the very agency from which Vero Beach will need continued support and cooperating to conclude the sale. Ultimately, though, Mayfield is responsible for putting her name on the proposed legislation.

Now that it is known what the FMPA and the Orlando Utilities Commission would need in compensation to take on Vero Beach’s FMPA Stanton I and Stantion II power entitlements before Jan. 1, 2018, negotiators for the city and FPL can finally sit down and figure out what their options may be.

This is not the time for the sale’s opponents to gloat, or for advocates of the sale to despair.  Rather, now is the time for those committed to achieving lower rates and completing the sale to show both flexibility and resolve.