By Richard Boetteger

Are Keys water, sewer, and electrical utilities a billion-dollar piggy bank for Keys political insiders? Engineering watchdog Walt Drabinski worries that may be so.

 

 

Walt has deservedly been in the news this year for successfully stopping the installation of thousands of “grinder pump” sewer systems in his hometown, Cudjoe Key. The County, working with the Aqueduct Authority, had planned to install the grinder pumps in homes where the usual gravity systems were clearly superior.

 

 

In brief, normal sewers use free and dependable gravity to move your sewage from your home to the treatment plant. The pipes are bigger and more expensive to install. If you are the only home on a lot 400 yards from anyone else, it makes sense to have an electric-powered grinder pump your sewage through thinner pipes over to a gravity connection.

 

 

But Cudjoe residents were surprised to see that entire blocks of fully-developed homes were going to have the grinder pumps instead of gravity lines. That means they would be paying for the electricity for their sewage, and when the electrical goes out, say after a hurricane, they would not have working toilet.

 

 

The County and Aqueduct authority looked at the monetary savings of the grinder pumps, which was mainly from cheaper repaving of the skinnier ditches needed for those lines. But the streets affected were already scheduled for long-overdue repaving going back to the installation of new water lines years before. So such savings were false.

 

 

But once the bad plans had been made, the engineers and county commissioners dug in their heels and refused to change what was clearly a bad plan. Only extended publicity, legal actions, and the possibility of losing $90 million in state funding due to the dubious plans, as well-described to the Governor’s office, finally got them to change. Months of perseverance, firing multiple arrows from his bow, made Walt successful in defending common sense in his hometown.

 

 

We need to worry that the hundreds of millions of dollars We the People are spending on our utilities have too little oversight. The Clerk has not audited these monies in twenty years. If other decisions are made as haphazardly as the grinders pumps were, We the People have much to fear. The sums are tempting, and we know what has happened in the past, as in the Gang of Three days.

 

 

We the People voted with a huge 65% majority to have our Aqueduct board be elected, not appointed. Our new state senator, Dwight Bullard, has introduced 19 bills in his year on the job, but not one bill to get elected Aqueduct board members. Why not?

 

 

Another oddity is that Keys Electric covers most of the Keys, but the members are elected only by voters in Key West. Walt Drabinski has a better engineering resume than, say, anyone actually employed by the utility. But he cannot run, living in Cudjoe. That odd rule could be changed by the current board themselves. It would make sense. Currently, everyone outside of Key West has “Electrification Without Representation!” That riled up folks back in 1776.

 

 

We found out how We the People feel about cruise ships, three to one against. The people in the County feel two to one in favor of elected representation on our powerful Aqueduct Authority. Mosquito Control does quite well with its county-wide elected board members. Can we get the Aqueduct and Keys Electric under democratic control? Do our votes matter?

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