Tavares, FL - Nov 20, 2011
Leesburg City's attempts to blow through tax money on a smart meter boondoggle has been covered several times in Lauren Ritchie's columns. It seems it is easy to be the City Commissioners to consider such programs - so be warned - it could happen to you:
Read Lauren's article from today's paper AND read all the comments first HERE.
Here is my comment posted on the website, including "bonus" comments not on the OS site:
Lauren is right. (egads...)!
Leesburg City Manager Jay Evans seems to be practicing methods to ramrod staff supported spending or policy programs through elected official boards much like socialists teach city planners to do for "green" programs really designed to remove property rights. He seems to use the "Delphi" fake consensus technique of holding meetings with no formal votes and one sided facts to get "public support". He hides or downplays or delays the true costs (or any costs), allows last minute contract modifications to increase benefits to the contractor, fails to go for public bids again after making significant changes in the contracts, provides one sided back door information to apparently lazy elected officials using emotional pleas. Another commenter compared this debacle to the County incinerator system, but there was also the Motorola contract. The Leesburg taxpayers will get screwed for years if they don't wake up. The biggest problem in Lake County is failure to elect SMART officials who challenge staff on boondoggles like this. And, then there are all the YouTube videos about smartmeter data uses to violate privacy & radiation hazards of the smart meters. Lauren hasn't covered that, but radiation leakage is much higher from those meters than cell phones. But, we all need a tumor to make life interesting. Leesburg residents could be recognized from odd lumps in their heads.
And, here are some more of my comments since the Sentinel has a limit on words:
- Doesn't the method of pushing this smart meter system through the Leesburg City Commission seem just like how Obamacare was pushed through Congress? I always say we don't have to just look at Federal government for spending boondoggles because the same situations occur every week someowhere in local Lake County government agencies (or Districts, or CRA's). Just recently, the Lake County school district floated a $6-million LOAN to finance an energy upgrade system through a division of a utility company because the staff AND Board failed to budget adequately for maintenance over the last several years. GEE, do you think government staff go to classes held by bond and municipal financing guys on how to push these spending programs past the voters and elected officials?
- As Lauren says, the program can run $30-million or more (I don't have the details) but I am betting that NOWHERE does Jay Evans, or the Board, if they approve this, say they personally will make up losses if costs are exceeded. That is one of the problems with government managers, they benefit from poor cost forecasts to justify programs (like SunRail) but RARELY are around when the real numbers come in. Lake County almost needs a citizen's action committee to verify all budgets, cost justifications, program costs over $1-million, etc. and this is a good example.
- Smartmeters are a favorite of socialists, because they allow collection of data on your energy usage, then later government can use it to force you, or fine you if you use certain energy types during the day. This is step one in socialism 101. The real objective is not to "possibly" let YOU adjust energy usage to lower cost times, but to establish a system of central control to force you to follow socialist defined energy usage limits in the future.
- Socialists don't care about how much of taxpayer funds are used for costly programs like this, since a side benefit is it gives more power to government, or large "public-private" partnerships like utilities that ARE subject to government control. Socialists want you to depend on government and regulations rather than free will, and smart grids enable their future control of you energy usage.
- Smartmeters send collected data to central servers using cell phone like devices that have more radiation emissions than cell phones. Just do a google search on "Smart Meter radiation" and you will find many articles and videos on the issue. Here is just ONE article. So, just the issue of health effects is probably enough reason to kill the smart meter program.
- The cost of solar panels keep dropping. Imagine if it soon becomes cheaper to finance a solar installation on your house and disconnect from the Leesburg power system. Then I bet the CIT?Y is guaranteeing the bonds or future revenues to GE for the smart meter system, and will RAISE the rates to remaining users as others start disconnecting from the system. Or, the unrecovered cost will be shifted to general property taxes like the water processing plant boondoggle in one of those South Lake County cities.
- Please protect all of us from staff driven spending boondoggles by government agencies.
vj
