COMMENTARY

MARK SCHUMANN

Over the past few years, representatives of Florida Power & Light have consistently assured the City Council and the public there was every reasonable prospect of  clearing a path forward for the sale of Vero Electric.  All along during this several-year journey, the majority of the public has placed their faith in FPL and in the city’s transactional attorneys, who have worked in concert to devise and pursue a strategy that has clearly failed.

This confidence placed in FPL strategists and in the transactional attorneys springs either from wishful thinking or from a supreme measure of trust. Either way, the fact remains the transactional attorneys and FPL have led the people of Vero Beach down a long, rough and expensive detour that has now arrived at an abrupt dead end.

Taking FPL spokespersons at their word, even some skeptics had begun to believe claims that  resolution to the remaining issues was at hand.  Unfortunately, it is now clear the agreement between the City and FPL signed last February was not a deal.  It was an illusion.

For three years, the City and FPL have worked, not to resolve the City’s contractual obligations to the FMPA, but to chart a course around them.  What some now describe as new roadblocks thrown up by the FMPA are, in truth, positions the agency took several years ago when Vero Beach first proposed the sale.

According to the FMPA, if Vero Beach is to sell its electric system in a way that does not jeopardize the agency’s members and its creditors, the City must find a municipality willing to assume Vero Beach’s obligations under the FMPA contracts.  Further, the City must secure its contingent obligations under those contracts.

Unable after three years of negotiations to structure a deal that met the FMPA’s long-standing and unchanging requirements, the transactional attorneys and FPL drafted a purchase and sale agreement that was nothing more than a Hail Mary pass.  Signing that four-year agreement in the absence of a firm deal was foolhardy.

The strategy was clear.  Convince voters to endorse the supposed deal, and then bring the FMPA to its knees in a three-prong attack that included a public relations campaign, threats of litigation and proposed legislation intended to break up the FMPA.  Bills were introduced in the Legislature last year to punish the FMPA, but the proposed legislation was never even heard in committee.  This year new bills were filed, and the County hired a lobbyist at a cost of $100,000 or so to help secure passage.  The reports from Tallahassee are that this political effort will again fail.

Utility activist, Glenn Heran, who is assisting the County’s lobbyists and who has run at least two local campaigns largely funded by FPL, recently went before the City Council attempting to extract pledges to take the fight to the FMPA.  Knowing the likely demise of State Rep Mayfield’s utility legislation, Heran has in mind a long, expensive court battle with the FMPA.  Suing the FMPA would be pure folly.

In the face of these legislative assaults and threats of litigation, the FMPA has stood firm in its long-held positions, which its leaders insist are not intended to punish Vero Beach, but to honor contracts that protect the agency’s members and creditors.  Not surprisingly, several FMPA municipalities whose cooperation the City needs to exit the FMPA before last 2016 have said, “Forget it.  We will not cave to political blackmail.”

Rather than making progress in resolving their differences, in the past few years the FMPA and FPL have moved further apart.  Letters exchanged recently between FPL President Eric Silagy and FMPA General Manager Nicholas Guarriello make this sad fact clear.

FPL spokespersons recently said the negotiations are at a crossroad, and they are correct.  The City has scheduled a meeting with representatives of the FMPA April 2 to determine if a path can be found for the City to sell its electric system in a way that will not violate its obligations to the FMPA.

Perhaps the City, led by Mayor Richard Winger, who has not been a party to the recent attack strategy, can succeed where FPL could not.  Further, it will soon be clear if recent political moves in Tallahassee will be supported by the Legislature.  If neither of these efforts are successful, then it will be time to recognize that there never has been a deal to get FPL rates, and that achieving such a deal is not possible at this time.

City leaders and utility activists can wring their hands, engage in name-calling and placing blame, or they can recognize that the plan to achieve FPL rates is a mirage. The responsible approach will be to rise above the temptation to fix blame on those who have questioned the wisdom of the sale, and to instead get to work finding ways to lower rates now.