Money taken from reserves
COMMENTARY
MARK SCHUMANN
To listen to County Attorney Dylan Reingold and the Indian River County Commission’s outside counsel, Floyd Self, the County has a slam-dunk, water-tight argument for forcing Vero Beach to abandon its 22,000 out-of-city customers when the franchise agreement between the City and the County expires in 2017. At great expense to Indian River County taxpayers, and to the customers of Vero Electric, the County Commission took its argument to the Florida Public Service Commission. Yesterday, PSC staff issued a report soundly dismissing the County’s claims.
If the PSC follows its staff’s recommendation when it meets Feb. 3, the Indian River County Commission will be back at square one in its efforts to help Florida Power & Light expand its customer base in Indian River County. Going forward, how the County Commission may choose to waste still more taxpayer money could well depend on the next hair-brained scheme to be cooked up by local utility activists who seem to have the ear, if not the confidence, of at least a few Commissioners.
Across the Indian River Lagoon, the Town of Indian River Shores is beginning to seem more and more like a fantasy land. Through November, town leaders have already spent some $275,000 on attorneys and another $50,000 on a public relations firm, all in an effort to force Vero Beach to surrender its Shores electric customers and to remove its utility infrastructure when the franchise agreement between the Town and the City expires in 2016.
The Shores’ high-priced attorney, Bruce May of Holland and Knight, released a statement today clearly seeking to assure Shores residents of the soundness of the case he has filed on the Town’s behalf in circuit court. What May has been careful not to say is that the case will likely work its way to the Florida Supreme Court and will almost surely cost millions to litigate.
The Shores has already spend $324,000, and has yet to set foot in a courtroom. In the current fiscal year budget, the Shores moved $191,769 from reserves to pay for its lawsuit against Vero Beach, leaving the Town $257,563 in unassigned reserves. Assuming the Town Council pushes ahead with it lawsuit, it won’t take two law firms and a high-priced pubic relations firm to blow through a quarter of a million dollars.
May wrote today, “One of the key legal issues in our pending lawsuit is that, under Florida’s constitutional law, the City does not have the requisite extra-territorial powers to encroach and serve within the Town’s corporate limits without the Town’s consent.”
If the case ever does go to court, it will be interesting to see if Vero Beach’s attorneys seek to read into the record statements May made to the PSC last April in representing the Lee County Electric Cooperative. In his April 14 filing May wrote, “The District’s (Babcock Ranch Community Independent Special District) Notice and Petition constitutes an unauthorized and unprecedented effort to unilaterally seize LCEC’s exclusive service area established by territorial agreements approved by the Commission as far back as 1965.”
May continued, “This ill-conceived effort is based on a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the special act that created the District—a mistaken interpretation that (i) conveniently fails to mention that nothing in the special act authorizes the District to operate as an electric utility, or provide electric distribution services that would infringe upon LCEC’s exclusive service area, and (ii) ignores the plain language in the special act that subordinates the District’s asserted powers to the Commission’s exclusive jurisdiction over, and pre-existing approval of, longstanding territorial agreements. (Emphasis added)
Now that he is on the other side of the fence, May is arguing the town’s “sovereign” rights are superior to the state-mandated authority of the PSC to approve service territory agreements and to maintain a reliable and efficient statewide power grid.
Shores Mayor Brian Barefoot also released a statement today, one that will almost surely be re-printed by the Press Journal as a “guest column.” The Press Journal, after all, has been more than generous in giving Barefoot all the paper and ink he wants to carry on his public relations campaign.
Barefoot wrote, “Our lawsuit is in abatement until March 2, during which time the City has agreed to review opportunities to effectuate the sale of its electric system to FPL and to potentially lower its rates. Meanwhile, our Town will explore its options for providing reasonably-priced electricity to our citizens. Should we not reach a solution to our dispute with the City by March 2, we are prepared to move forward with litigation.”
“Prepared to move forward with litigation,” equates to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in legal fees to be spent on what is anything but a sure bet. In fact, the more the Shores spends waging a public relations war, the less certain they seem to be of their case, a case which will be decided, not in the court of public opinion, but in a court of law. The Shores Town Council must have money to burn.
Indian River Guardian 