Alachua Voter Guide

MORE OF THE SAME — BUT THE BALL WON’T STAY HIDDEN.

The readers of The Gainesville Sun have been served another heaping pile of nonsense by Gainesville city-commission-front-man Rob Brinkman, (“More drilling won’t lower the rising price of gasoline, April 9, 2012).

In this latest Alice in Wonderland tale Brinkman admits that:

1. In 2005 imported foreign oil accounted for more than half of the US oil supply.

2. Today, a few short years later, imported foreign oil accounts for less than half of the US oil supply.

You would think that Brinkman would applaud this change that has reversed a situation in which the US imported 33 percent more foreign oil in 2005 than it does today. Surely Brinkman means to applaud this significant decrease in U.S. reliance on imported foreign oil, right?

Of course not.

Brinkman’s proposed solution is to immediately slap a fee of at least 10 cents on every gallon of gasoline and diesel fuel, and increase that fee by another 10 cents every year presumably forever.

“Rather than subsidizing fossil fuels, as we currently do, a fee should be leveled at the mine, well head or port of entry,” Brinkman proposes.

As illogical as Brinkman’s reasoning appears at first glance, it will come as no surprise to those who have listened to him make citizen comments at Gainesville City Commission meetings where he plays Greek Chorus to wood-burning-incinerator-at-any-cost commissioner heroes like Mayor Craig Lowe and Commissioner Susan Bottcher, and their allies.

This crowd unabashedly appears to believe that perverting the free market system to penalize fossil fuels and favor the wood burning schemes will hide the ball of the wood burning electric generator disaster of their own making. They appear to believe that they can fool the Gainesville public by raising the price of fossil- fuel-generated electricity so high that the excessive wood burning rate hikes will seem less extreme.

Unfortunately, for them, it can’t work.

In this month’s edition of “North Central Florida Business Report” their tree burner ally, Josh Levine, project developer for GREC, let the cat out of the bag:

“Transportation costs, which make up 30 to 40 percent of the biomass fuel costs, will be affected by the price of diesel.” And these diesel fuel influenced costs will be passed directly along to the GRU customer. Huge percentages of the biomass fuel costs will come from the cost of diesel truck transportation. Even more diesel fuel costs will come from huge diesel-powered equipment like feller-bunchers used for harvesting and thinning trees. Even more and diesel powered wood chipping machines will suck down even more imported oil.

If the Lowe-Brinkman-Bottcher dream of driving up the price of diesel fuel takes hold, the majority of the cost GRU customers will pay for wood to be burned in the incinerator will be paid less and less to regional forestors and more and more to foreign fossil fuel merchants.

Will the Lowe-Brinkman-Bottcher sleight of hand, as amateurish as it is, fool enough of the people, enough of the time?

Not if the years-long information lock down ceases to hold.

Many members of the public are now aware that the irregularly negotiated GREC wood burning contract will cost ratepayers at least $103 million per year for 100 megawatts of electricity until 2034 — the year the Deerhaven II coal plant is likely to be decommissioned.

They also know now know that at current market prices the city – if it could figure a way to remove the GREC albatross of the wood-burning-incinerator from around the neck of its citizens — could enter into a 20 year contract for 100 megawatts of electricity produced by clean natural guaranteed cost of less than $72 million per year, as opposed to the possibly ever escalating $103 million per year wood-burning GREC contract.

And they know that that $620 million in savings over 20 years could go a long way to rebuilding the city’s damaged infrastructure, while providing millions of dollars in rebates and business incentives to citizens and entrepreneurs.

The knowledge is there, and will spread.

But d o not underestimate the lengths – and increasingly absurd arguments — to which the Lowe-Brinkman-Bottcher daisy chainers will go to keep the public fooled, and to keep the courts from delving into the Sunshine Law violations that brought our community to this unnecessary fiscal precipice.

In the last couple of weeks different Gainesville citizens, with different political orientations, have expressed concerns about the Gainesville Mayor Craig Lowe’s support for the city’s non-competitive hiring and retention, with benefits, of his former campaign manager.

These citizens have expressed what seem to be five distinct concerns:

First, there are those citizens, some of them former political supporters of Craig Lowe, who expressed concern that the city’s hiring of his former campaign manager soon after his election as mayor damaged citizen trust in city government by creating the appearance of a political payoff. According to some of these citizens, the seeming spoils system championed by Craig Lowe appears to be a renunciation of reforms that the Progressive movement brought forth long ago in order to reduce corruption in municipal government.

Second, there are those citizens, some of them former political supporters of Craig Lowe, who expressed concern that the hiring of a mayoral aide, with special responsibility to the mayor, represented a significant change in policy for a city governed under what political scientists call a “weak mayor” structure in which the mayor is supposed to have no greater policy role than any other city commissioner. According to some of these citizens, Craig Lowe championed of the creation of the job of full time paid “mayoral aide” and in so doing undermined the structure upon which Gainesville’s city government has been built.

Third, there are those citizens, some of them former political supporters of Craig Lowe, who expressed concern that the city’s hiring of his campaign manager for any city job without a competitive hiring process was unfair to highly qualified minority applicants who never had the chance to compete for the job. According to some of these citizens, the non-competitive hiring process championed by Craig Lowe is a reminder of the days when people of color were systematically excluded from competition for city jobs.

Fourth, there are those citizens, some of them former political supporters of Craig Lowe, who expressed concern that he had led them and the public to believe that the new non-competitive mayoral research position would be temporary and without benefits. These include citizens who, upon learning more than 20 months ago about the city’s hiring of his former campaign manager, had given the newly-elected mayor a pass based on his assurance that the job his campaign manager was hired for urgent and critical research claimed to be urgently needed – particularly related to the Cabot-Koppers Superfund remediation program and the city’s solar feed-in tariff program. According to some of these citizens, Craig Lowe, without informing them, or the public, championed his assistant’s abandonment of these research projects in favor of more politically oriented work that would be of greater benefit to the mayor in his announced reelection campaign.

Fifth, there are those citizens, some of them former supporters of Craig Lowe, who expressed concern that, behind the scenes, and out-of-the-Sunshine, he maneuvered to assure that mayoral aide position would not be competitively filled. According to some of these citizens, Craig Lowe, behind the scenes, championed the revision of the city’s policy manual to thwart the expressed will of the city commission that the mayoral aide position be competitively filled.

Craig Lowe in his Gainesville Sun opinion article (“As Gainesville grows up, so do city staff needs,” March 11, 2011) for the most part ignores these citizens’ expressed concerns, and uses most of his allotted words to recite what he appears to believe to be his most important accomplishments as mayor, presumably unachievable without the assistance of his mayoral aide.

He then ends his opinion article with a promise “to make the mayor’s office more responsive to the needs of citizens.”

Taking Craig Lowe at his word, on behalf of many Gainesville citizens who have sought my counsel about how to address their concerns to their mayor, I send this brief open letter asking Craig Lowe to clarify two assertions contained in his opinion article:

Mr. Mayor:

1. Do you claim that the mayors of Tallahassee, Miami Beach and Chapel Hill – as you imply by citing these examples – all have mayoral aides whose job descriptions did not exist before the election of those mayors and all of whose mayoral aide jobs were non-competitively filled with former campaign managers for those mayors?

2. Will you share the names of the multiple other mayors of other cities that you assert each expressed, with bafflement, “Why would they want to hold your city back?” in response to your complaints that Gainesville’s strange citizens have expressed their varied concerns about Gainesville’s non-competitive hiring and retention of your former campaign manager as your taxpayer-funded personal aide?

I ask that you yourself – and not your mayoral aide – answer these questions.

Ray Washington

It has reached my ears that there is some work going on to get together a petition drive that would put Gainesville City elections on the same November schedule as all other elections. This would mean that there would no longer be an annual election, and it means that the terms of the commissioners would have to be altered from 3 year terms to either 2 or 4 year terms.

For years I have opposed this because I thought that conservatives would eventually get smart enough to exploit the criminally low turnout and start voting in enough numbers to take over the city. I no longer have this sort of confidence. Therefore, it is time to roll the dice and change the landscape! apparently, we have nothing to lose. Stay tuned for more details.

I have placed a poll in the sidebar for a little while, so please weigh in!

This is nothing for our city to be proud of. This is what the turnout for this past runoff election looks like.

Please, never tell me that conservatives are “outnumbered” in this town. Only people who CARE are outnumbered!

The day after the January 31 city commission general election, I wrote the following words, a version of which appeared on this blog, and a version of which was published by The Gainesville Sun:

“The city commission conductors’ handpicked At-Large candidate, Lauren Poe, is headed for a runoff with former Florida Public Service Commissioner Nathan Skop in part because of internecine political infighting and in part because of the city commissioner conductors’ disreputable whispering smear campaign against candidate Skop. These attempted smears, in my opinion, will become nastier and more outrageous in the Poe-Skop runoff. The stakes are that high. Biomass-rate-hike-at-any-cost commissioners are desperate to end all discussion of the irregularly negotiated more than $3 billion biomass contract the city commission approved in violation of the Florida Sunshine Law.”

The accuracy of my prediction is no cause for celebration. That sitting Gaineville City Commissioners — with the help of Gainesville Sun collaborationists whose days of employment at Hallifax Media Group may be numbered — behaved in the runoff just as their past behavior indicated they would behave, was disheartening to experience, despite its inevitability.

Whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s runoff election — and the outcome is far from clear — the long, sad unraveling of the GRU-GREC biomass disaster will continue apace.

The details of the biomass unraveling — partly political and partly legal — may vary a bit, depending upon the outcome of tomorrow’s election, but, ultimately, the inevitable GRU-GREC disaster, in one form or another, will play out, and the injury and scarring of this community we have chosen as our home will be a long time healing.

Nathan Skop is running for the At Large 1 seat of the Gainesville City Commission with a commitment to protect our community from the more than $3 billion biomass contract disaster of the commission’s own making.

If Nathan Skop is elected in the February 28, 2012 city runoff election, my understanding is that as a first order of business he would require GRU General Manager Robert Hunzinger to provide information about what construction has been completed at the GREC biomass site, and at what cost. In addition, it is my understanding that he would require GRU General Manager Robert Hunzinger to provide information about whether the infrastructure that has been put in place by GREC could be used, or could be adapted to, a less expensive form of electric power generation. It is my understanding that with the above information in hand he would seek the cooperation of other commissioners for a renegotiation of the GRU-GREC contract under terms that would favor the ratepayers of this community.

Commissioners can at long last stand up for ratepayers, or not. But make no mistake – if Nathan Skops’ efforts are rebuffed by GRU-GREC-biomass-plant-at-any-cost-to-ratepayers commissioners who remain committed to forcing the financially irresponsible GRU-GREC biomass disaster of the commission’s own making down ratepayer throats, there is a “death penalty” option.

Based on information that has come to light since previously secret portions of the GRU-GREC biomass contract were made public on April 6, 2011, the contract may be found by a court to be void on several bases:

1. GRU General Manager Robert Hunzinger, contrary to May 12, 2008 city commission instructions that he himself negotiate the GRU-GREC Contract, instead appointed an ad hoc committee, headed by GRU Assistant General Managers Ed Regan and John Stanton, whose meetings were required to have been noticed and opened to the public but were not;

2. Hunzinger, Regan, Stanton and others “daisy-chained” information between the Mayor and individual commissioners by GRU officials before the commission’s May 7, 2009 vote; and

3. The city commission on May 7, 2009 approved a contract differs substantially from the contract the commission authorized in a public meeting on May 12, 2008. Changed terms of the contract were not publicly noticed or discussed before the commission approved them.

These and other Sunshine Law violation, if established in court, provide bases on which a judge would be required to rule that the GRU-GREC contract is void and without legal effect.

The significance of all this is that if a court now determines the GRU-GREC contract is void, there is no contract to break. Should GREC file suit against GRU and/or the City of Gainesville to attempt to recover damages, no damages may be awarded to the extent GREC was on notice that its contract with GRU was in violation of the Sunshine Law but chose to proceed with construction at its own risk.

If politics is indeed the art of the possible, in the District 1 campaign we did what was possible.

In two months of last minute campaigning vs. six and eight months of campaigning by two opponents in a district with a difficult demographic divide we needed more time to unite — what was possible for us was to bring into better focus the looming GRU-GREC biomass electric rate hike disaster.

After two and a half years of trying to pretend this bad decision never happened, biomass-at-any-cost-to-ratepayers city commissioners — in an effort to keep biomass rationalists off the city commission — went public and on the record leaving  a paper trail of attempted obfuscations and specious justifications that, in the fullness of time, will show  who is responsible and who should be held accountable.

This was what was reasonably possible to achieve in the District 1 race, and we achieved it.

Now that the general election has resolved itself in the manner in which it has been resolved, the insular Gainesville City Commission majority is conducting a runaway train headed for a crash of historic proportion — assuming the GRU-GREC biomass contract is not reformed or cancelled, which they seem hell bent on preventing.

These would-be conductors in the election just passed began what appeared to be the first stages of an orchestrated campaign to smear candidates who would speak truth to power.

For me, that incipient smear campaign is yesterday’s news, and largely irrelevant. The District 1 race yesterday was decided in favor of the conductors’ handpicked candidate Yvonne Hinson-Rawls.  The result, in my opinion, was not substantially affected by the inept City Commissioner Susan Bottcher led smear campaign against me. The result — a second place finish, a 78-vote swing from a runoff — was, in my opinion, the legacy of  a District 1 demographic divide that there was insufficient time  for us to bridge.

It was a different story in the At-Large city commission race that was not decided yesterday. In that race, largely because of political machinations, the city commission conductors’ handpicked At-Large candidate, Lauren Poe, is headed for a runoff with former Florida Public Service Commissioner Nathan Skop. In that race the city commissioner conductors’ disreputable smear campaign against candidate Skop appears likely to become nastier and more outrageous.

It is what it is.  But what goes around comes around, in politics as in life. The worm will turn.

Today we had yet another shameful apathy festival. Some of us were naive enough to think that the Republican primary would increase turnout, but it was not to be. In fact, the 2010 mayoral runoff had 6 more voters than this race. And that one was a stand-alone race.

At-large 1 will go to a run-off. Democrat machine candidate Lauren Poe got 4,402 votes for 36%. Nathan Skop got 2,944 votes for 24%. Considering that there are over 70,000 registered voters in Gainesville, this is not something to be proud of. Six other candidates divided up the remaining 4,826 votes.

District 1 will not be going to a runoff because Democrat machine candidate Yvonne Hinson-Rawls got 1,126 votes for 54%.

If you people out there don’t care, there will be no reason for you to get a hearing at city hall when your ox is getting gored.

Since I am a Republican, I have been pounded by what can only be called hate mail. “Newt is evil!” “Mitt is another Obama!” “Santorum is not a real conservative!” It is truly a sad state of affairs. I have gotten very little from local candidates, although I did get one from James Ingle, which I actually liked. It was kinda wordy, but that’s how I roll, so I felt some affinity.

So, here it is and the only sign waver I have seen was the ever-present Von Fraser, our intrepid tax collector who always runs unopposed, so he campaigns for his fellow Democrats. Where is everyone?

I have not seen many signs, and I’ve only seen one TV ad. I wonder if anyone even knows there is an election tomorrow?

For sure, the Republicans do. Therefore, I am anticipating that Democrats and Independents will be even more likely to sleep through this one than usual. That is why i suspect that the Republicans will swamp the field. Yes, there will be a runoff, but I would not be surprised if it were between Nathan Skop and Darlene Pifalo. Darlene is probably the best known Republican, so she will pick up a good share of the Republican tidal wave. Skop is barely known among Republicans, but he will probably get more crossover from angry Green voters who are against the biomass plant. Donna Lutz is the Mitt Romney of the Republicans, except without all the money. She’s fairly new to the party and still sounds like a Democrat.

Tomorrow  night, I will be staying home and watching the returns on the Supervisor of Elections website. After the locals are done, I will probably go to the Google election coverage map that is so cool!

My wife has brought to my attention the following assertions by City Commissioner Susan Bottcher.  Bottcher apears to have become the current city commission majority’s group-think purveyor of misinformation and attack in a desperate attempt to influence the outcome of Tuesday’s City Commission election.  If hand-picked new commissioners can be elected, past commission actions related to the irregularly negotiated more than $3 billion GRU-GREC contract may be kept from public consciousness. Bottcher has written the following version of the “FACTS” as devoutly wished by her and those who wish to re-write GRU-GREC history and thereby continue to mislead the public.

COMMISSIONER BOTTCHER’S INCREASINGLY DESPERATE PERSONAL ATTACKS AND ATTEMPTS TO MISLEAD THE VOTERS:

“Skop and Washington apparently learned nothing in law school about contracts, the Sunshine Laws or how bond ratings work. Both these candidates are promising that, if elected, they will force the city to break the contract with the owners of GREC (biomass plant).

“FACT: The contract was not done in secret. It has been a long standing policy that negotiations with a private contractor or business are conducted between city staff and the contractor. Once terms are set the contract goes to the full commission in a public forum for ratification. This is how it was done for GREC. This is in no way a violation of the Sunshine Laws since elected officials are not involved in the negotiation process. At the May 2009 commission meeting Commissioner Braddy made the motion to ratify the GREC contract, there was no public comment against it, and it passed unanimously.

“FACT: There was never a so-called buy-out clause in the GREC contract. The idea was discussed and after careful consideration between both parties it was decided that it was in the city’s and contractor’s best interests not to insert such a clause. Claiming such a clause existed and then was surreptitiously removed is patently false.

“FACT: Breaking the contract would ruin the proud AA bond rating this city enjoys. Not only would it cost the city hundreds of thousands if not many millions of dollars to break the GREC contract, it would have a long term devastating impact on the city’s ability to borrow money for future infrastructure projects (roads, new GPD building, RTS transfer station, etc). Anyone who advocates for now going back and breaking the contract is advocating for bankrupting the City of Gainesville.

“FACT: No one commissioner can force the city to do anything. There are seven voting commissioners and any changes require a majority of at least four. Even if any anti-GREC candidates is elected, the remaining commissioners have all voiced support for GREC. Even Commissioner Chase was quoted at two commission meetings last fall saying he is “committed to making GREC successful” and is “not interested in getting out of the contract.’”

RESPONSE TO COMMISSIONER BOTTCHER’S LATE ATTEMPT TO KEEP THE GRU-GREC CONTRACT SKELETON’S HIDDEN FROM THE PUBLIC:

FACT: Terms of the GRU-GREC biomass contract were secretly communicated to members of the Gainesville City Commission but not to the public. Gainesville City Commissioners and those who negotiated the GRU-GREC contract conspired to keep those ultimately responsible for paying for the cost of the GRU-GREC biomass project — GRU’s rate payers — from knowing how much the project was going to cost. Individual city commissioners also knew that the GRU-GREC biomass contract contained a provision under which details of the contract would be kept secret from the public until at least 2043. Aside from the breach of trust with the community that is inherent in these backroom dealings, what these commissioners did was to violate the Florid Government in the Sunshine Law. It has been admitted by the Mayor on the public record that he knew that the other commissioners knew key details of the project when they voted on it. The Mayor’s knowledge of what other commissioners knew is evidence of information Daisy Chaining, which is prohibited by the Florida Government in the Sunshine Law. As a result of these actions taken by commissioners in violation of the Sunshine Law, the GRU-GREC contract is void as a matter of law.

FACT: The negotiation of the GRU-GREC contract with the private contractor GREC’s predecessor in interest, Nacogdoches Power LLC, was authorized by the city commission in May 2008 to be carried out by new GRU General Manager Robert Hunzinger as a one man negotiation. A one person negotiation, under the Florida Open Meetings Law, allows negotiations to take place in secret without the need for public notice and public attendance.  Mr Hunzinger, contrary to his explicit instructions, organized a negotiating “team” headed by two co-lead-negotiators Ed Regan and John Stanton. This team-based negotiation required notice to the public and required negotiating team meetings to take place in the Sunshine.  As a result of actions taken by the negotiating team in violation of the Sunshine Law, the GRU-GREC contract is void as a matter of law.

FACT: At the May 7 2009 city commission meeting members of the Gainesville City Commission (but not Commissioner Ed Braddy, who was no longer on the city commission) — without notice to the public of the secret terms of the GRU-GREC contract, and without notice to the public that the the contract did not contain the back out clause that Commissioner Braddy and every other then commissioner by a public vote on May 12, 2008 in a public meeting required to be included in any contract executed by GRU General Manager Hunzinger — unanimously approved the GRU-GREC contract. As a result of these actions taken in violation of the Sunshine Law, the GRU-GREC contract is void as a matter of law.

FACT: A back-out or buy-out clause was specifically included in a version of the GRU-GREC contract the developer GREC had agreed to in September 2008. The clause existed and was removed, without the public being informed. Subsequently the city commission, without notice to the public, voted to ratify a version of the contract signed by General Manager Hunzinger. As a result of these actions taken in violation of the Sunshine Law, the GRU-GREC contract is void as a matter of law.

FACT: The action of the city commission in violating the Sunshine Law and then attempting to proceed with a void contract may threaten GRU’s and the city’s AA bond ratings. But while the city commission’s actions in entering into a contract void as a matter of law may threaten GRU’s and the city’s AA bond ratings, the “breaking” of a bad contract
through the legal process historically has not harmed GRU’s or the city’s bond ratings. The city on at least three occasions since the construction of the DeerHaven Generating Station has “broken” bad contracts when the public interest has required it, and neither the city’s nor GRU’s bond ratings have suffered as a result.

FACT: One or more commissioners’ bringing to light deficient negotiating and actions taken by the city not in the public interest can and has changed bad decisions made by the majority of the city commission. In December 2011 there were five commissioners, including Bottcher, who supported a scheme for the installing red light cameras at four intersections in the city under a contract that would have harmed citizens without substantial benefit to the community and a cost of more than $12 million to the citizens. Two city commissioners, with the assistance of members of the public, were able to demonstrate the folly of the Bottcher’s majority reasoning. As a result Bottcher’s support for the red light camera contract was abandoned, and the red light camera contract rejected by a 7-0
commission vote. Commissioners who have all voiced support for a contract can and do change their minds when held to account by other commissioners and the public.

The $64,000 question is:

How much more sheer nonsense and personal attack against independent-minded candidates will Bottcher spew forth in her continued attempts to influence the outcome of Tuesday’s election?