COMMENTARY
MILT THOMAS
At last Tuesday’s County Commission meeting, the net result of a 45 minute discussion on the Vero Electric sale to FPL was a decision to hire specialized counsel to look into the constitutionality of the permanent agreement between the City of Vero Beach and the FMPA and researching an anti-trust lawsuit suit with Florida’s attorney general against the FMPA.
Now, I agree that Vero Electric rates can be a real problem for businesses, and I live in the county, so I pay more for electricity than neighbors a block away. But I can’t complain about the excellent level of service. After the 2004 hurricanes, my electric was restored much faster than those same neighbors a block away. In fact, whenever we have an outage, it is taken care of on a timely basis.
But this isn’t about me. The real question is who IS it about?
At the County Commission meeting, a budget of $100,000 was approved unanimously with the caveat that this is basically a start, similar to the City’s ‘start’ with its transactional attorneys, which has now risen to a cost of more than $1.5 million without results.
Commissioner Davis suggested that any funds left over from the $75,000 approved for a lobbyist in Tallahassee to move the sale along, could be applied to this effort. He was told that we need to keep that lobbyist on the payroll because they are doing such an excellent job for us, one that the Commission could not discuss at this moment. Okay, we know that all of Representative Mayfield’s bills to remove obstacles to a sale failed to make any progress with the consultant’s help. If they are not ready to speak about the $200,000 that Senator Joe Negron slipped into the budget for an audit of the FMPA, they should not become too excited about that since the FMPA does an annual audit anyway.
So, we are again wondering what is the end game of the County’s effort. Nothing much is being said about the City’s contingent liabilities pulling out of the FMPA, or that there might be alternatives to the FPL proposal that gives them a $200 million asset for essentially nothing. That’s not the County’s problem. Protecting the Vero Electric customers who live in unincorporated Indian River County is their problem. Possibly Vero water and sewer customers, too.
No doubt, past City administrations have put us into a deal we may have little chance of reversing, at least for the time being, but there are several conflicting motives going on here. For all its help trying to pull this deal together including funneling big bucks into the last City election campaign to protect their majority on City Council, FPL has little to show for it. But is their end game bringing lower electric rates to Vero Electric customers?
That may be what Vero Electric customers want, but the big picture for FPL is to convert all those other small, municipal electric companies. That’s their job. They’re in business to make a profit. More customers, more profits. No one can blame them for that.
But if they want us bad enough, why not remove one of the biggest obstacles to a sale, our contingent liabilities within FMPA? They could just assume those liabilities and we could be close to a deal. But they won’t do it. Why? They don’t want to set a precedent for the next deals they make, possibly other FMPA members.
The County, in its efforts to help FPL wrest away Vero Beach’s electric utility, may have more than the best interests of its unincorporated county ratepayers.
Some elected officials see municipalities as a duplication of effort. Getting rid of Vero Electric does eliminate the issue of taxation without representation for those ratepayers in the unincorporated areas of the county. But it also eliminates $6 million of enterprise fund income that the city needs to maintain its level and quality of service. There are also efforts to take over the City’s water and sewer customers, which would eliminate another source of enterprise revenue for the City. Vero Beach City Council majorities of the recent past, who supported the electric sale at any cost, also tried to slash city budgets, hand over police dispatch to the county, sell the Crestlawn Cemetery as well as other city-owned properties. Do you see a pattern here?
By approving consultants and outside attorneys to force Vero Beach out of the electric business, the County Commission may or may not be successful, but in the context of an unarticulated end game, we can surely expect these efforts to continue.
Indian River Guardian 
I also am a county resident who is dependent on the COVB for electric service. Over the last few years I have heard about the ‘reliability” of the electric power, Yet I have never experienced this “reliability.” Power outrages have occurred frequently. Sometimes the power is restored in less than an hour. Other times it takes several hours before electrical service is restored. None of the unexpected outages appear to be caused by weather conditions.
Yes, a huge company like FPL must reach out for more customers – or stagnate. However, having watched too many old westerns where the boss of a town is out to push the ranchers and the farmers out so he has the water rights as well as ownership of the land needed by the railroad….I find it hard to believe we must give up whatever it is we have and genuflect before these corporations and competing governmental agencies (in this case, County), for water and sewer ownership. What would John Wayne do? I wish I knew.
Please clarify, did the gray haired gentlemen that spoke at the May 6th city council meeting regarding the sale of the Vero Beach electric utility suggest that deregulation of power supply generation be implemented. I would think this line of thought would be contrary to FPL. One could lose his secret decoder ring.
If is proven that a permanent agreement between Vero Beach and the FMPA is unconstitutional wouldn’t it also hold true that a permanent agreement between Vero Beach and FPL could also be ruled unconstitutional in the future ?