Tonight's Special City Commission Meeting (1/31)

The items on this agenda are leftovers from the January 17th regular that are utility related - plus further discussion/negotiation of Casino tenant leases.  For those of us interested in the torture chamber also known as utilities customer service, you really need to check out the first item on the agenda.  The city has a proposal from Data Management Associates, Inc. to essentially take-over all aspects of utility customer service - making current employees their employees beginning February 3rd - for a period of two years.  Depending on where you read it in the staff back-up material, the city has an option for one or two, one year extensions of the contract - with the provision to revert staff back to city employees at the end of their term of service.  Included in the back-up are summaries of recent findings by outside groups regarding the deplorable and sorry state of this department and the facility it occupies.  It seems that no part of the organization is immune to dysfunction.  It is no wonder people have little trust in what their utility bill ends up being each month.  On average there are about 100 accounts that have some sort of inquiry regarding accuracy and many of those go unresolved.  Collections are problematic and there is no standard policy directive for how to interact with the public or address routine problems.  The cost of this new approach is about a break-even proposition, but one just hope that this works.  How could anything get this screwed up?  It is not comforting when you realize that as a proportion of the total city budget, utilities represent almost 80% of the total revenue.

Later on:  An alert reader points out that what is in the back-up transmittal memo does not appear in the contract - especially the part about current employees coming under the control of the contractor.  This reader further points out that the employees are subject to their union contract.  This reader also points out that this is evidence that the city cannot manage one of its major functions and perhaps it is an admission that the electric utility would be better run by someone else - like FPL.