Letter to the Editor – January 11, 2020

This morning I perused the Gainesville City Commission agenda (something I haven’t been interested in doing in quite a while) and was astonished to see the new GRU plan to buy power from FP&L. 

Thinly disguised as a green initiative, the City is finally showing (but not admitting) defeat and completely reversing course from the long-continued defensive diatribe about how much better and more efficient GRU is than all the others. This will be very difficult for them to pull off without sounding like a bunch of lying horse’s butts.

At least it will be much easier to see the mark-up from wholesale to retail! Of course, they’ll always have some smoke and mirrors as to why you can’t look at it that way. 

The reality is that much of GRU’s revenue has been squandered on GRUCOM, broadband studies, City Commission mandates, unnecessary positions, fund raising, high salaries, charity donations, a selected few Feed-in Tariffs, annual events, excess General Fund Transfers, travel, and the granddaddy of them all: biomass shenanigans and new millionaires in Boston. We got all of this instead of sound finances, capital upkeep, and planned reinvestment. 

It’s sad, really. The “fuel” created by passing such wasteful spending on to the public through rate increases has finally run aground. The all-knowing commissioners’ last laps will be to act as greedy middlemen refusing to let go of the golden goose, at least until the majority of the public wakes up and realizes they’ve been ridden hard, put away wet, and left bankrupt at the end of the road.

Sincerely, A long-suffering citizen