MAYOR ROY'S ADMINISTRATIVE BRIEFING OF 3-3-2010 ON THE CLECO DEAL

Alexandria's Mayor Jacques Roy delivered his weekly administrative briefing on March 3, 2010. This portion of the briefing, unlike that detailed in "JACQUES ROY ATTACKS THE LOCAL BLOGS", which dealt with the levees and the downtown hotels, concerned the rebates we can expect from the Cleco settlement.

See the video here:



First, Mayor Roy said, clearly for the first time, that we would get no rebates until the settlement or judgment of the Armested Franklin et al. case, and the determination, either by vote or a declaratory judgment, exactly what funds are considered rebates to the ratepayers compared to those that are corporate (the City's) funds.

Second, Mayor Roy, although it is water under the bridge now that the deal has been perfected with Cleco, failed to specifically tell us what the rates were which were quoted by the 8 electrical providers to show us definitively how Cleco was the best deal we could possibly get.

Third, in Mayor Roy's continual harping on how good of a deal we got from Cleco, he pointed out that protracted litigation with Cleco would have taken approximately 10 years to complete and it would have cost us about $4 million in in legal fees. As I have previously shown you, there is no way this litigation would have taken 10 years. In a case I recently had in federal court, the lawsuit was removed to federal court, after a judgment there it went up on appeal to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal, was reversed and sent back to state court for a trial, and we had a judgment in that case in approximately 3 years. Also, if the City will spend about $4 million in legal fees, I would suggest that they should have hired some cheaper lawyers.

Fourth, although Mayor Roy said that he knew exactly what the amount of our rebates would be, he did not tell us what that figure would be in a clear and straight forward manner, The best that several other people and myself could figure out from the mayor's talk was that we would get somewhere between 4% and 15% of $50.7 million. Well Mayor, that is a big difference between 4% and 15% of $50.7 million.

Fifth, Mayor Roy told us that taking less of our rebates could give us cheaper electricity from Cleco. This is where Mayor Roy speaks with a forked tongue, telling us on one hand that he favors 100% rebates to us ratepayers, but on the other hand telling us that he favors us giving some of our rebates back for cheaper electricity.

Sixth, Mayor Roy informs us that, if we didn't take the Cleco offer, we would have had to pay $43 million in upgrades to our electrical lines if we had gotten electricity from someone other than Cleco. But according to the Naked Utility, wrote that:

"At today's Mayoral briefing, city finance director David Crutchfield said that, in the process of settling the fraud lawsuit with Cleco, the Roy administration avoided paying $43M to $58M to Cleco to upgrade Cleco's transmission system. The Naked Utility sees no evidence to support Mr. Crutchfield's claim. Furthermore, the information publicly available on Cleco's OATT website suggests that this amount should have been, at most, $9.9M."

That is a major difference in the cost, and, if the Naked Utility is correct, that was just another scare tactic by Mayor Roy to get us to accept the Cleco deal.

And Jacques mention about the "professional media", no matter whether they are citizens of Alexandria or not, and not us bloggers, who are unprofessional media, will be in the group which will be able to ask questions on the deal. But Jacques also mentioned the classes of small business owners and residents, which at least Steve Coco and myself are members of those two groups.

And finally, Mayor Roy said that the City had to accept the Cleco deal rather than going to court because of the "fiduciary duty" our City elected officials owed to the public.

But what Mayor Roy failed to explain to us was that our City officials owed us no duty to accept Cleco's deal if their decision was "based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform their policymaking or discretionary acts when such acts are within the course and scope of their lawful powers and duties". (See: LSA-R.S. 9:2798.1 and the case of Fossier v. Jefferson Parish, 985 So.2d 255 (La. App., 2008)).

These are the fallacies that I see with Mayor Roy's arguments in support of this deal with Cleco. Of course, the deal is done. I just wish that the Mayor would stop bullshitting us in order to get our approval of the Cleco deal that was already entered into.

See Also:

RUSTON ELECTRICAL CUSTOMERS GET CASH FOR BEING OVERCHARGED and the posts linked thereunder