From my email:
While there maybe some who would refute this, the public records will bear me out.
I spent three years of my life lobbying the West Florida Legislative Delegation for the creation of an ELECTED ECUA.
The previous ECUA board was appointed and those responsible for allowing the city to sell another of their losers, the Main Street plant, to ECUA for $10 million.
In the bill creating the authority, any new gas franchise services in the area not already owned by the city was to belong to ECUA. Alas, along came,”Mr. Integrity”, Dr. Larry Walker who pilfered that to the city for $1 million!
At the time of creation, I strongly urged the authority to set aside money for a new central waste water treatment plant. The first board did exactly that. Along came “Mr. Integrity” again and used that money putting in pipelines for developers. He needed their financial support in his life long dream of becoming a county commissioner – thank God he’s not.
I did the responsible thing. It’s local greedy city/county politicians who mucked it up.
If only ECUA had kept the profitable gas franchises – not served developers rather than ratepayers – not subsidized commercial garbage with higher rates for homeowners – not been cowards and told the downtown Chamber of Commerce if they wanted fluoride in the water, they must pay for it and… most certainly, not appointed another greedy J.C. Bradford & Sons bond company representative to the ECUA board.
Now you want ECUA to raise customer rates simply to serve your own selfish interests.
Remove a smelly nuisance and make greedy developers richer at the expense of ratepayers.
Well guess what? Without the downtown crowd’s meddling, ECUA would have the money for a new centralized sewer plant and ratepayers would not have to, once again, be ripped off to satisfy the downtown crowd’s incredible stupidity.
Will Escambia County ever learn to vote for “public servants” not more “collard pot philanthropists!”
Bill Davison