The Sun Editor Castigates Georgetown for Accepting Bloomberg Grant

As predicted here last week, the City Council approved accepting the Bloomberg solar grant with all the attached strings. The editor of the Wilco Sun newspaper has a great editorial in the Sunday, May 19, 2019 edition. Here is the editorial in its entirety.

"Who Votes with the mice?

The Sun editorial published Sunday May 19, 2019

Those of us who buy electricity from the city can thank Coun­cilmen Kevin Pitts and Tommy Gonzalez for thinking of us on Tuesday during the debate on the Bloomberg Grant. The vote to accept the grant and sign the agreement passed 4-2, with Pitts and Gonzalez on the los­ing end. The Georgetown billpayer has now been saddled with another energy experiment. Under this grant we will install solar panels on a dozen or more roofs, feed the electricity into big, neigh­borhood batteries and see what happens.

Although we are already buying twice as much electricity as we use — then sell the surplus at a loss — the council voted to see if we can make things even worse by making even more electricity. Every watt of power from these solar panels will create a surplus watt that we will sell at a loss.

The grant came about when George­town entered the idea in a Bloomberg contest called the Mayor’s Challenge and won a $1 million grant to try it out. It sounded interesting, like a big science fair project.

Not long after, we learned that the city’s all-in move to wind and solar had backfired, and that we would have to pay higher electric bills because of it. Sud­denly, making more electricity no lon­ger made good money sense. The idea is interesting. The financial consequences are not.

Pitts and Gonzalez made practical objections, saying that the additional grant work would come at a time when the electric department is already mired in digging out of the debacle of genera­tion-long wind and solar contracts. Even though the grant pays for most of the experiment, the citizen will have to pay, also. The staff estimated that it would add up to over $200,000.

During the discussion, no one said the experiment would be good for those who pay electric bills. That’s not surprising, since we bill payers are not the beneficia­ries of the experiment. We are the mice who are being experimented upon.

Those in favor of the project argued that there would be no extra work load on the staff since the staff has the free time to take on this extra chore. Although this appears to answer the extra-work objec­tion, it brings up a new question — how is it that the staff has this extra time? Is the department over-staffed? Do we need make-work projects to keep everyone busy?

The grant agreement requires the city to do so much publicity that the commu­nications department will have to devote considerable time to it — all paid for with taxpayer cash.

The grant also requires that all media releases be approved by the Bloomberg people before being given to the citizens of Georgetown. Paragraph 12a of the agreement reads: “The Grantee [George­town] shall provide copies of all Media Releases to the Foundation and obtain the Foundation’s consent prior to publi­cation or distribution in any format of any Media Release.”

This means that the city cannot re­lease, on its own, any information about the project without first getting permis­sion from New York. We anticipate, based on the city’s prior behavior, that if the news is bad the city will cite Paragraph 12a and decline to answer questions from citizens or reporters.

By signing this agreement, the council has, once again, made the citizen’s inter­est subordinate to an outsider’s interest. We see how that has worked with the wind and solar contracts where the cit­izen who pays the money is far, far less important than the people who get the money.

The city is obligated to move the $100,000-a-year manager of the project to the “public budget” in the third year if the project is “successful.” Since the project is to place solar panels on one or two dozen homes, and this shouldn’t take very long, we wonder what a $100,000-a-year person will do every day once the project is running. Check the meters? Sit in the shade and watch the batteries?

In the end there is only one guaranteed good that can come of this — publicity. Our mayor will get many photo ops in front of the batteries and the solar pan­els. He will go to New York and hang with the glamorous elite.

We citizens, on the other hand, will stay home and pay electric bills.

* * *

During the council discussion, the staff and council talked of two kinds of money: hard money, mostly Bloomberg money, and soft money, which is taxpayer money. The terms are exact.

Bloomberg money must be earned. That’s hard. Citizen money comes easier, so it’s called soft."