Wilco Sun Concerned About Secrecy in Georgetown Government

The publisher of the Williamson County Sun published a blistering editorial yesterday, December 5, 2018 castigating the City Council for conducting business associated with the wind and solar energy contracts in secrecy.

Last week we got a nasty surprise — going green has turned out to be a lot more expensive than we thought. On Tuesday the council had to approve a budget amendment to account for a $6.9 million loss that has accumulated since July when the solar farm went live. The money came from our reserve fund, which has now dropped from $8.8 million to $1.9 million in a matter of weeks. At this rate, our reserves will soon be exhausted if they’re not already. Once our savings are gone, it’s belt-tightening time for the city, and we who pay tax and electric bills. 

However, some will let their belts out a notch. The city’s wind and solar companies have contracts to sell us, at a fixed and profitable price, all the electricity they make for 20 to 25 years. Since we can’t use all that electricity until the town grows bigger, we sell the surplus on the open market where we compete with electricity from plants run on low-cost natural gas.

 We buy high and sell low. We appear to be stuck with the losing end of a trade, at least for the time being. There is talk in city circles about renegotiating the contracts. But what leverage could we have? Maybe our city folk have a card up their sleeve no one knows about.

 This unfortunate business seems to me to be the newest example of what happens when we run our city affairs on the basis of secrecy and limited public discussion. The details of the contracts are secret. They were discussed in private and in secrecy during the non-public special sessions of the city council. Who knows the details? Some of the staff. All of the city council folk. 

As citizens, we know only one hard number: the contracts go for 20 and 25 years. We know, or think we know, one general fact: Georgetown is committed to buy all the electricity the solar and wind companies produce at some fixed price. In the public discussions we heard almost nothing about the chance that the deal could go south. We do know that we’ve gotten our money’s worth in the publicity department.

 At this point, virtually all the discussion about going green has been upside talk. This is possible only because no one on the outside knows what is in the contracts. As a result, the upside talk has been the only talk. 

You wonder — if the green energy issue had gone through a big brouhaha fight, could we have ended up with a better way to do it? Perhaps it is time for us to reconsider how open we want our city government to be. Should city council closed sessions be less closed? Should our utility contracts be secret as they are now? Much of what we do in the city is done on a public bid basis. The final prices are known. Should we consider treating more of our city business with a similar openness? It’s worth talking about.

The outrage over the financial losses by the Georgetown owned electric company focus only on the losses experienced in 2018, however, there has been a pattern of losses over the last three years.

FY-16 loss was $6M
FY-17 loss was $9.6M
FY-18 loss was $11.6M

All these losses were experienced either purchasing electricity necessary to meet the demand in Georgetown on the spot market, or from trading financial derivatives in the ERCOT market.

As the The Sun Publisher Clark Thurmond said in his editorial, its time to have public discussions about the content of these energy contracts.