GUEST COMMENTARY

LYNNE LARKIN

The merry-go-round of ideas dropping from Faheranty will not stop!  We should all be queasy by now.  PhD?  It must be in slippery speaking, since the expertise evidently is all about “spin.”  What do the doctors of spin want us to believe now?

We’ve come a long way since the first days of Glenn Heran’s debut as mouthpiece for Florida Power & Light.  Has it been six years since he, along with Stephen Faherty, began their slide shows and mail campaigns to alarm voters about a problem that was addressed in 2004?  It seems forever, really, that they’ve been promising the impossible and dragging our tax money into their endlessly morphing public relations scam.

1.     Just vote to lease the power plant land, that will solve the problem.

2.     Okay, now vote on this “contract” which doesn’t yet exist “to continue negotiations” or you’ll never get lower rates.

3.     Now that you’ve voted to sell at any cost [!!!!!] we’ve got you.  [See “The Big Lie”}

4.     Keep repeating that the voters have spoken!

5.     Please ignore the elephant in the room – those contracts with FMPA simply will go away [even though we already tried and lost that gambit in 2004].

6.     Everyone else is your enemy, even though we’ve been wrong from the start.

The latest move to buy PR points was the gnashing of teeth over an independent audit of the Florida Municipal Power Agency.  It is disappointing to have to say this again, but where has everyone been for the past ten years?  Especially the media fear mongers, who should be able to pull up all the background they need to address and evaluate the truth.

Truth?  One of Faheranty’s lap dogs, Pilar Turner, had been the FMPA City representative for years.  Did she have no skills at all in either determining what was going on at FMPA or comparing it to other utilities?  Perhaps she was incapable of reading budgets, or the annual audits outlining what FMPA money was doing every single year [Yes, Virginia, there really are yearly outside audits].

Did she miss the fact that, like every other utility in Florida, FMPA and FPL both regularly were hedging power purchases prior to 2010.  And both got burned, FMPA for millions of dollars, FPL for billions.  FPL, regulated by the Public Service Commission, got away with some pretty awful investing.

Both FMPA’s and FPL’s costs rose by a little more than 3 percent to pay for fuel hedging losses from 2003 to 2011. Duke Energy and other major utilities had similar losses.

But now FMPA should be put under PSC’s control in order to avoid what they didn’t prevent before.  Sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it?

Those are only a few of the misguided spins being flung, like cow patties in a country fair contest.  Some of that will fall to earth with a smelly bang if we don’t stop the . . . . spin.