Don’t blame the UEP for rate increases
To the editor:
The sewer and water rate payers of our city are angry because their average bills will be increased by 92 percent over the next five years. I am one of those people. Unfortunately their anger is directed toward the wrong people and that is because both local newspapers have done a very poor job of investigative reporting. Most people believe those rates are going up because the UEP expansion was stopped and therefor there will be fewer people paying for the expansion. What the public has not been told is that the bulk of the expansion was not needed and the money spent to build the Kismet RO Plant was literally wasted.
The plan to expand which was worth tens of millions of profits to MWH, was started in 2004. Some unknown members of the city staff directed our water plant to start selling huge amounts of water to the Lee County and Pine Island Water Utilities. I believe the motive for those sales which continued through 2007 was to make it appear that we were running out of water capacity and needed to expand. Rules say that such sales should only occur in “emergencies” and someone will have to prove to me that this emergency lasted two to three years. During this period, water produced by our SW RO plant went from under 9 million gallons per day to over 13 million gallons per day and that triggered the need to start planning to expand. The law did not say we had to expand, it said we should conduct a study to see if we had to expand. The city hired Tetra Tech to do that study and it told Tetra Tech it would supply the growth data used in the study. I examined that data and concluded it used false data intentionally designed to create a report which said we needed to more than double our capacity. In fact the company which stood to profit from this expansion (MWH) was asked to provide some of the data used which was a clear conflict of interest. Bottom line is our city staff allowed phoney numbers to be used in the study and it never subtracted the water sold to the other two utilities from the study data.
When we were no longer selling to those two utilities, the average production went from over 13 million gallons per day in 2006, to less than 10 million gallons per day in 2008. The so-called emergency disappeared. Predictions that we would be using an average of 15.2 million gallons per day in 2008 never materialized. The expansion of the SWRO plant from 15 to 18.1 million gallons per day was more than enough to satisfy our current rate of growth. We definitely did not need the additional 12 million gallons per day the Kismet plant would provide. There is also over 500 million gallons of water produced which is unaccounted for each year. It just disappears.
Bottom line we spent over $140 million to build the Kismet plant which was not needed and there are plans on the table to spend an additional $350 million for facilities not needed. And that is why our rates are going up and that is why our anger should be directed to the city staff and not the people north of Pine Island road.
Sal Grosso
Cape Coral