Did the city take $68 million more from the utility than it made? Did the General Manager warn the Commission about this for years? Can GRU not afford to produce power anymore? Let's take a look:
Bryan this is a simply stellar piece of research and analysis! Thank you for sharing it and if you’re game, an in person presentation to the GRU Utility Authority would be an outstanding way to bring clarity.
Each time I read one of your posts, it makes me more and more proud to have you as my Commissioner, Bryan. We need more folks like you, up there taking the fight to the haters, calling them out on their nonsense, and bringing receipts.
A few points that I'd like to follow up on:
-On the issue of the utility transfer as a whole, I fall somewhere in the middle on this. As Mark Benton and Claudia Rasnick have pointed out repeatedly, in a normal situation, the levels of the transfer would probably be fine. But when you really look at GRU's books and see highly leveraged they are and how much of their yearly expenditures are going toward debt service, not to mention the credit downgrades in recent years, it's pretty clear that we needed to be doing more, and sooner, to address that issue. More significant cuts to the GFT sooner would have, in my opinion, gone a long way toward defusing the current situation that we find ourselves in. As a citizen and a ratepayer and former Utility Advisory Board member, I take as much responsibility for failing to do so as anyone.
-However, as to the current back and forth between the City and GRU regarding whether and how much the City took from the utility over and above its revenues, why not propose to GRU that the we hire an outside accounting firm (at the City's expense even) to mediate and help resolve the issue? If GRU's accounting is so defensible, surely they'd agree to this.
-THANK YOU for calling Ed out on his duplicity. He has changed his story so many times that it's head-spinning, most recently on the value of GRU's natural gas rebates, which he fought stridently for when he was GM, then weaponized when he was fishing for an opportunity to fire Tony Cunningham, then just as quickly accepted them again once his true objective had been met. Ed serves a different master now (i.e., the Governor), but really at the center of all this is his own Trumpian, ego-driven revenge campaign against the City of Gainesville and anyone that he perceives to have wronged him. Craig Carter's truest words to-date: "the Ed Bielarski show."
Bryan this is a simply stellar piece of research and analysis! Thank you for sharing it and if you’re game, an in person presentation to the GRU Utility Authority would be an outstanding way to bring clarity.
Each time I read one of your posts, it makes me more and more proud to have you as my Commissioner, Bryan. We need more folks like you, up there taking the fight to the haters, calling them out on their nonsense, and bringing receipts.
A few points that I'd like to follow up on:
-On the issue of the utility transfer as a whole, I fall somewhere in the middle on this. As Mark Benton and Claudia Rasnick have pointed out repeatedly, in a normal situation, the levels of the transfer would probably be fine. But when you really look at GRU's books and see highly leveraged they are and how much of their yearly expenditures are going toward debt service, not to mention the credit downgrades in recent years, it's pretty clear that we needed to be doing more, and sooner, to address that issue. More significant cuts to the GFT sooner would have, in my opinion, gone a long way toward defusing the current situation that we find ourselves in. As a citizen and a ratepayer and former Utility Advisory Board member, I take as much responsibility for failing to do so as anyone.
-However, as to the current back and forth between the City and GRU regarding whether and how much the City took from the utility over and above its revenues, why not propose to GRU that the we hire an outside accounting firm (at the City's expense even) to mediate and help resolve the issue? If GRU's accounting is so defensible, surely they'd agree to this.
-THANK YOU for calling Ed out on his duplicity. He has changed his story so many times that it's head-spinning, most recently on the value of GRU's natural gas rebates, which he fought stridently for when he was GM, then weaponized when he was fishing for an opportunity to fire Tony Cunningham, then just as quickly accepted them again once his true objective had been met. Ed serves a different master now (i.e., the Governor), but really at the center of all this is his own Trumpian, ego-driven revenge campaign against the City of Gainesville and anyone that he perceives to have wronged him. Craig Carter's truest words to-date: "the Ed Bielarski show."
Thank you for this detailed accounting.