About a month ago, T & D Services gave a presentation on their nearly two-years-long study of the city-owned electric facility.
The study wasn’t in the city packet, just the brief slide presentation, which would be hard for laymen to decode. The verbal report was slightly better.
City Manager Gary Whitehead said the study would be posted on the city’s website, which I found under “public announcements.” Please find the link here:
Whitehead also said the city would hold a workshop on the study so that the public could ask questions. The workshop has not been scheduled yet.
I, and probably you, have been waiting over four years for some kind of evaluation of the state of the electric facility—since the city announced it was considering selling it to Sierra Electric Cooperative in 2021. A reliable source who wished to remain anonymous told me six studies were done during the nearly three-year consideration period, with the city paying half, supposedly making them public documents. I did a couple of Inspection-of-Public-Records-Act requests and was refused copies under the excuse that the city never received those reports. They never bothered to, if you believe that. Sierra Electric is not subject to IPRA and wouldn’t give me copies either, which is understandable.
City commissioners, for 20 years that I know of, transferred on average $1.5 million a year out of the electric department’s cash—cash from utility fees paid by its 4,000 customers. Some years, especially under City Manager Juan Fuentes’ ten-year tenure, the transfers were much higher–up to $5 million. These transfers covered deficit spending that defied public knowledge and oversight, hidden as it was in a cat’s-cradle mess of transfers followed by transfers from one fund to another.
Past-city commissioners, such as Frances Luna, Jerry Stagner and Evelyn Renfro, openly stated the electric department was the city’s “cash cow.” Past-City Manager Bruce Swingle put a stop to the transfers as soon as he was hired, May 2021, pointing out that the lack of money put back into the facility was killing the cash cow.
Swingle had to make an emergency purchase of about $1.3 million to replace one of the two 60-year-old transformers that step-down Tri-State’s electricity delivery to a lower voltage. The grid almost went down, which may be why Swingle urged the city to consider selling its facility in 2021 to Sierra Electric, besides needing cash to address the water and wastewater systems’ crises.
Three years later, at the Jan. 24, 2024 meeting, the city commission announced it wasn’t going to sell:
https://sierracountycitizen.org/sale-of-t-or-c-electric-facility-ends-in-a-whimper/
Current-Mayor Rolf Hechler, about two or so years into the consideration period, vaguely mentioned during his city commissioner report, that the city needed to get $14 million for the facility. No explanation. Evidently Sierra Electric didn’t offer that price.
Hechler and City Commissioner Merry Jo Fahl admitted that they had learned during the evaluation exercise that Electric Director Bo Easley was “a field guy,” and more was needed.
Which brings us to the $540,000 or so T & D Services evaluation. My anonymous source told me that the city had kept no records on electrical equipment purchases, repairs, maintenance or their locations, making it impossible to know the age, condition and value of the facility. In 2014 T & D had been hired and paid about $160,000 to locate and tag the electric facility’s assets.The city still didn’t keep records after that, never updating the expensive software’s documents or tagging new equipment in the field.
During my interview with Whitehead I asked how much of the $540,000 was redoing and retagging all the assets again. He didn’t know. He said he went into the 2014 program and it was slow and clunky and the new one was lightning fast and much easier to access and update.
I asked if he intended that all city directors do their own asset management plans in the future, to avoid the cost of paying outside firms to do what is normally done in house. “Yes,” Whitehead said. I pointed out that the city purchased an asset management software program more than two years ago and many departments still aren’t using it. Whitehead said training needs to happen to get them on board, and soon Assistant City Manager Traci Alvarez will be freed up enough to help with the staff adapting to and using I-Works. I asked if the T & D software will be translated into or is compatible with I-Works. No, Whitehead said, it isn’t compatible, and will remain separate from the centralized I-Works. Please note that Whitehead was hired at the end of February 2025 and not able to prevent this lack of coordination.
The asset identification and evaluation of the state of the city’s electric department equipment is not included in the 72-page study made available to the public. It’s probably a gigantic file. During the T & D presentation a month ago, the engineers were asked what the facility is worth. The question was side-stepped with the bland statement that they only made a “replacement cost” evaluation, which was $28.6 million.
Electric rates went up considerably in January 2025 and will increase in subsequent years by the same percentage as the consumer price index, starting July 2027: https://sierracountycitizen.org/electric-rates-are-going-up-jan-1-happy-new-year/
That adopted rate schedule was designed to generate $1.5 million a year more than debt and operations and maintenance costs–money to be put into neglected asset repair and replacement.
You may want to come to the workshop when it’s scheduled to exercise public oversight over this facility, which is an integral part of the city’s past and future economic value.