COMMENTARY

“While City leaders are doing what they can to lower rates, the County Commission and the Indian River Shores Town Council are rattling their sabers and thumping their chests. All this posturing will come to nothing, and will only serve to distract the City it its efforts to lower rates.”

MARK SCHUMANN

Any serious book written to chronicle Vero Beach’s electric sale saga would be incomplete without at least one chapter explaining the ways the barrier island weekly sparked the fires of discontent and then fueled them by regularly exaggerating and distorting the truth.

The island weekly’s reporting has regularly over-simplified and overstated the rate differential between Vero Beach and Florida Power & Light and has sought to create the impression the City’s electric system is a model of inefficiency. Further, the paper first ignored and then slanted the truth about the City’s contractual obligations to the Florida Municipal Power Agency.

Just this past week, the island weekly reported as shocking news a statement Mayor Richard Winger made before the Indian River Taxpayer’s Association. Winger explained that any so-called partial sale of Vero Electric (one in which the customers outside the city limits might be sold to Florida Power & Light) would have to be approved by the Orlando Utilities Commission and the FMPA.

That the 20,000 out-of-city customers of Vero Electric are part of a larger 34,000-customer system, and are not as wandering isotopes free to spin off in any direction they choose, is a self-evident fact that should not come as news to anyone. Because the City’s 34,000-customer base backs its contracts with the FMPA and the OUC, any unilateral selloff of some 20,000 customers would be an obvious and clear breach of contract. This is not news!

Those making the case for a partial sale, including Vice Mayor Jay Kramer, have all along cautioned that such a deal would require the City to terminate or re-negotiate its agreement with the OUC. Kramer has also said any significant downsizing of Vero Electric’s customers base would also need to be approved by the FMPA, and more importantly by its bond counsel and bond trustees.

Pro-sale fundamentalists, the ones who continue to push for the sale despite mounting evidence it cannot be accomplished, want the City to join the Indian River County Commission and the Town of Indian River Shores in what will surely be a protracted and expensive legal fight with the FMPA.

Though all bets are off when it comes to the County Commission, one has to believe the five intelligent gentlemen serving on the Indian River Shores Town Council are far too experienced and prudent to waste their taxpayers’ money on a lawsuit that will almost surely fail. If it hasn’t already, it will also soon dawn on the Shores Town Council that any partial sale hinges on FMPA approval. Waging war with the agency while seeking concessions makes sense.

Meanwhile, the clanging symbols of the pro-sale crowd are making so much noise they apparently cannot hear themselves think. That, or they stopped thinking way back when they pushed for the signing of a sales contract without any clear path toward a closing.

All discontent, they say, is caused by comparison. Certainly, continuing to compare Vero Electric’s rates to FPL, which happens to be the state’s lowest cost power provider, is little more than an exercise in Chinese water torture. More relevant is a comparison of the City’s electric rates to the statewide average.

Though this news has yet to be reported by the island weekly or by the Press Journal, the City Council last week, in the second rate reduction of the year, cut electric rates 4.2 percent. The Council also approved an optimization study clearing the way for a broad assessment of the ways the City can cut rates, including decommissioning the power plant and re-negotiating its wholesale power agreement with the OUC. Those moves would mean significant rate relief for all 34,000 customers of the City’s electric system and would bring Vero Electric’s rates below the statewide average.

While City leaders are doing what they can to lower rates, the County Commission and the Indian River Shores Town Council are rattling their sabers and thumping their chests. All this posturing will come to nothing, and will only serve to distract the City it its efforts to lower rates.

The question the members of the Indian River County Commission and the Indian River Shores Town Council need to ask themselves now is whether they want to be a part of the problem or a part of the solution.