Alachua Voter Guide

The Gainesville Sun in its elections portal, which went on line today, has performed a service similar to the service attempted by the Alachua Voter Guide.

Thoughtful voters researching the issues and the candidates’ stands on the issues will use both of these resources prior to casting their votes.

The City Commission District 1 race was highlighted today in the print version of The Sun, featuring candidate responses to identical questions about issues considered important by The Sun.

As to the fiscally-irresponsible, irregularly-negotiated, out-of-the-Sunshine $3 billion to $4 billion GRU-GREC biomass deal the question posed to each District 1 candidate was:

“What are your thoughts on the city’s 30-year contract to purchase biomass power?”

I hope my answer expressed the urgency I feel — and the urgency that many members of this community feel — about the need for the city commission to immediately act to reverse the corrupting influence of this bad contract with which a previous commission (and the majority of the current commissioners were part of that) so inexplicably (and largely secretly) saddled this community.

I wrote: “This bad contract has become the defining issue of this election. I was part of the legal team representing public-spirited Gainesville area citizens whose efforts on April 6 resulted in previously secret portions of the GRU-GREC contract being unblackened. I became a candidate after weeks of trying to convince the two candidates for my district’s commission seat to oppose the coming GRU-GREC electric rate hike. They both declined to do so. The most important duty of any candidate elected to the City Commission will be to readdress the GRU-GREC deal in light of current circumstances, this time fully in the sunshine.”

This city is facing many urgent and important problems of great complexity which also will need to be addressed, but which cannot be adequately addressed until the city commission stops hiding the ball from the public and courageously addresses the GRU-GREC biomass deal in the light of day, without regard for protecting anyone except the citizens of this community whose economic interests have been sacrificed for reasons that are not yet clear.

As to the positions of the other two District 1 candidates, those positions are telling.

Candidate Grundy, in a response he purports to have written himself, states: “This is an issue that has been voted on unanimously by the City Commission and is already under construction, so as a candidate there is not much any candidate can do about the contract. Should the issue go through a legal challenge and is overturned by the court, then obviously the city will change direction. The biomass plant is already under construction, and I will continue to ask more questions and gather more information and be open to all points of view; however, I do not see much that can be done right now.”

Of course a candidate can’t do much until elected — but a candidate can speak out against the biomass electric rate hike and pledge to do all he or she can do stop it. This is something Mr. Grundy, who is the handpicked successor of the pro-biomass-rate-hike commissioner whose seat Mr. Grundy wishes to occupy, has refused to do.

Candidate Hinson-Rawls, in a response she purports to have written herself, states: : “Biomass will help bring jobs to Gainesville. I will fight to make sure costs to residents are minimized. However, the city must continue to diversify our energy options to lower utilities costs for residents both now and in the future. Gainesville has an opportunity to become a leader in alternative energy. I also believe there must be a systematic approach to educating residents about how to maximize efficient use of their energy to bring costs down now and in the future.”

These are virtually the same words written and spoken by four GRU-GREC-biomass-deal-at-any-cost-to-the-pubic commissioners — Mayor Lowe and Commissioners Bottcher, Mastrodicasa and Hawkins — have written and spoken previously. These four commissioners — all of whom are paid public salaries and all of whom have written checks with this fungible money to Candidate Hinson-Rawls in an effort to ensure the election of another GRU-GREC-biomass-deal-at-any-cost-to-the-public commissioner — have been unable to defend these specious claims, and how have left their hand-picked candidate twisting in the wind, also unable to justify these claims.

1. “Biomass” will not bring any more jobs to Gainesville than any other electrical generating plant, and probably will bring less. The out-of-state private limited liability company GREC has awarded a (secret from the public) operating contract for the plant to a Kansas-based company without any requirement that the company hire the expected 40 plant operation employees locally. (If the city commission had ordered GRU to build its own plant it could have also ordered GRU to hire locally). Worse, the most recent best case scenario figures promulgated by GRU executives (who themselves earn six-figure ratepayer-funded salaries and are behind the unnecessary construction of a new $52 million Taj Mahal GRU administrative building complete with a health spa from which the public is excluded) posits that the annual cost of the so-called GRU-GREC biomass electric power contract at best will be $103 million (more than twice the cost of electricity purchased on the open market and well over twice the cost of electricity that could be produced by GRU from a ratepayer-owned combined cycle natural gas generating facility). GRU’s executives and their GRU-GREC-biomass-deal-at-any-cost-the-public-be-damned defenders on the city commission who have made Candidate Hinson-Rawls “jobs” argument, base that claim on a specious best-case-scenario specially-commissioned FSU study (whose premises have been shown to be erroneous). But even that faulty study demonstrates that $31 million in economic benefit that allegedly would flow from the GRU-GREC biomass plant would not flow to Gainesville, as Ms. Hinson-Rawls claims (or as is claimed on her behalf, but would flow to the broad GREC “catchment area” of northeast Florida and south Georgia. Ms. Hinson-Rawls’ backers (including GRU-GREC contractors whose secret contracts have been kept from the public and who have made large contributions to her campaign) know, if Ms. Hinson-Rawls does not, that 99 percent of the forest land from which most of the trees and parts of trees that would be burned up in the GRU-GREC incinerator is located outside of Alachua County, and that the largest trees-and-parts-of-trees supply contract (which contract has been kept secret from the public) has been awarded to the multi-national Rayonier Real Estate Investment Trust which has identified 200,000 acres of forest land, most of it in the so-called GREC biomass incinerator catchment area (but not in Alachua County), which forest land Rayonier has publicly stated it intends to strip of trees and turn into real estate developments (again, none of which will be in Alachua County). Finally, to add public insult to public injury, even if the FSU study touted by Candidate Hinson-Rawls’ backers was not faulty, and even if the alleged $31 million in money actually flowed just to Gainesville rather than to 24 other counties and a multinational Real Estate Investment Trust, the alleged $31 million economic benefit from an overpriced $103 million contract of which $50 million to $60 million in not necessary is no deal at all.

2. The idea that Candidate Hinson-Rawls — who with her backers fully supports the coming GRU-GREC biomass electric rate hike — would “fight to make sure costs to residents are minimized” would be ludicrous if her willingness to carry water for her backers were so invidious and so unfair to residents of the city in particularly and economically depressed District 1 in particular.

3. Candidate Hinson-Rawls’ claim that “there must be a systematic approach to educating residents about how to maximize efficient use of their energy to bring costs down” is even more insulting. In her zeal to support the political motives of her backers over the economic interests of her would-be-constituents Candidate Hinson-Rawls not only defends unjustified and unjustifiable electric rate hikes, but also argues that Gainesville residents are not “educated” and sets the stage for placing the the blame on her her would-be-constituents for the electric rate hikes she should be fighting.

Inasmuch as Candidates Grundy’s and Hinson-Rawls’ position statements are purported to be self-penned, we as voters can take these responses as the actual positions of these candidates.