…and “sovereign municipality” is an oxymoron

COMMENTARY

“One way to build community in Indian River County would be for the Indian River Shores Town Council and the Indian River County Commission to cease their predatory actions against Vero Beach. After dispensing with their high-priced lawyers, the members of the County Commission and the Shores Town Council could then roll up their sleeves and work with Vero Beach officials in their efforts to lower electric rates.”

MARK SCHUMANN

Scripps’ Stuart-based columnist, Rich Campbell, after attending Wednesday’s mediation session between Vero Beach, Indian River Shores and Indian River County, opined about “community,” and the lack of it in Indian River County.

Campbell, who occasionally wanders up from Stuart to cover Indian River County news, centered his column around a comment made by mediator Carol Alvarez, who at one point Wednesday said, “We’ve been saying ‘town,’ ‘city,’ ‘county.’ These are constructs.  But this is one community.”

In one sense, Alvarez is correct. The residents of Vero Beach, Indian River Shores and the unincorporated areas of the county surrounding the City of Vero Beach are all part of a larger community. But it is also true that the partnerships, connections, alliances and inter-dependent relationships that make for a healthy community can be strained, even broken.  Like ‘town,’ ‘city,’ and ‘county,” community is also a construct, to use Alvarez’s word. Community can, through enough careless abuse, be deconstructed.

Campbell, like his Scripps colleagues, has never grasped the larger issues underlying the power sale saga.  If Campbell really understood the lay of the land in Indian River County, he would never have written that Vero Beach is “proving to be more territorial than the others (Indian River Shores and Indian River County).”

Campbell seems unaware of the ways the County has tried to break up Vero Beach’s water and sewer utility in an effort to force the City to sell its profitable, well-run enterprise. The Stuart-based pundit seems clueless to the ambitions of those who would like to see the City of Vero Beach disincorporated.

Defending Indian River Shores for dragging its neighbors into court, Campbell wrote that Shores leaders are “fed up with high utility rates and frustrated by the lack of progress in the city’s proposed sale of its electric utility to Florida Power & Light.”

Before deconstructing that sentence, let’s remind ourselves that Campbell’s publisher, Bob Brunjes, is married to a key FPL vice president.

What constitutes “high” utility rates?  Vero Beach’s rates are within the statewide average. They just don’t happen to be “FPL-like.”  Many utilities across the Florida, including investor-owned utilities regulated by the Florida Public Service Commission, are charging rates higher than Vero Electric, and certainly higher than FPL. These rate disparities across the state do not give the customers of utilities with higher rates, such as the customers of Duke Energy, legal grounds to sue to become customers of FPL. The Florida Supreme Court has ruled, “An individual has no organic, economic or political right to be served by a particular utility merely because he deems it advantageous to himself.”

Campbell repeated Shores attorney Bruce May’s assertion that the Town is “an independent and sovereign municipality.” “Sovereign municipality” is an oxymoron. Municipal governments, such as the Town of Indian River Shores, the City of Vero Beach and Indian River County are not sovereign, they are creatures of the state, and are limited in their power by state law. One such law is the 1974 “Grid Law,” which gives the PSC, not cities and counties, exclusive authority to determine service territories. This authority is vested with the PSC, in order to insure a reliable and efficient statewide power grid.

The County Commission’s assertion that it should have the right to force Vero Beach to abandon its out-of-city customers and to remove its utility infrastructure from the unincorporated areas of the county is a novel, even bizarre idea opposed by every other utility in Florida, including FPL. If and when the Shores lawsuit makes it to trial, expect Florida’s electric utilities — big and small, public and private — to file briefs in defense of Vero Beach.

Campbell was critical of Vero Beach officials for refusing to accept a proposal from the Shores that would have delayed its lawsuit for six months, so long as the City would concede the merits of the Shores’ case. What else could Vero Beach officials have done but refuse such an unreasonable proposal?

In accusing Vero Beach leaders of “intransigence to keep the town (the Shores) in the city’s electric utility ‘fold’,” Campbell revealed that he is clueless, utterly clueless about the legal, economic and practical consideration which render the breaking up of Vero Electric all but impossible.

Perhaps the most puzzling point Campbell made was his assertion that Vero Electric is owned by its ratepayers. He should call his boss’s wife, Amy Brunjes, FPL’s External Affairs Manager, and ask her if FPL is owned by its ratepayers.  The answer, of course, is that FPL is owned by its stockholders. The “stockholders” of Vero Electric are the taxpayers of the CIty of Vero Beach.

Like Campbell, Vero Beach City Councilwoman Pilar Turner does not understand this basic, fundamental fact. “I believe the (electric utility) system is owned by the ratepayer,” Turner told Campbell.

One way to build community in Indian River County would be for the Indian River Shores Town Council and the Indian River County Commission to cease their predatory actions against Vero Beach. After dispensing with their high-priced lawyers, the members of the County Commission and the Shores Town Council could then roll up there sleeves and work with Vero Beach officials in their efforts to lower rates.