VERO BEACH — City Manager Jim O’Connor said Thursday that he met earlier this week with representatives from Florida Power and Light, and that the topic of FPL purchasing the Town of Indian River Shores electric assets and customers did come up, but that it was not a fruitful meeting.
O’Connor said FPL reached out to him last Friday asking to get together in person for a quick “update” on where things stand. They set a time for Monday, sandwiched in between an event at Piper Aircraft and an appointment O’Connor already had on the books.
O’Connor said they did discuss the fact that there had been no progress on a sale and that no headway had been made in finding a way out of the long-term contracts with the Florida Municipal Power Agency co-op.
In the meeting was Sam Forrest, vice president of energy and marketing. O’Connor said Forrest told him that, during the mutually agreed upon “options review period” in the mediation of the Shores’ lawsuit against Vero, FPL had discussed various options with the Shores — one of those being a potential purchase of the Shores portion of the system from the City of Vero Beach.
At that point, O’Connor said he laid out three major reasons why, in his opinion, that a sale of the Shores portion of the Vero system was a non-starter; the three reasons being:
- In O’Connor’s view, the City is in litigation with both the Town of Indian River Shores (in Circuit Court) and Indian River County (in a Florida Supreme Court appeal of a February ruling of the Florida Public Service Commission in Vero’s favor). “I cannot offer something to one that I cannot offer to the other,” O’Connor said.
- Within the Shores is an electric substation that O’Connor said is integral to Vero’s transmission and distribution system on the barrier island that, along with major power lines, provides service and redundancy to beachside customers.
- The matter of any potential “stranded costs” that might be sought from Vero by the FMPA due to losing the Shores customers would need to be addressed, O’Connor said.
In conclusion, O’Connor said he did not feel that, by the end of the meeting he had left the FPL representatives with the expectation that Vero was interested in opening up negotiations to sell the Shores portion of the system.
O’Connor said he didn’t think any more about it until he got some questions on Thursday about correspondence from Shores attorney Bruce May and the city’s legal counsel Robert Scheffel “Schef” Wright wishing to add a potential sale of the Shores to FPL be discussed on May 1 when Vero and the Shores are scheduled to have a mediation session.
