CC Minutes 03/24/2003 - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Commission Meeting March 24, 2003 Page 27 PRONOVOST: And certainly what was very disturbing to me is a workshop here that we had with Progress Energy and the following day receiving a letter from the President of Progress Energy that had some clearly misleading, if not fault, statements in it. And the night before hearing the representative from Florida, from Progress Energy talking about trust and our issue being building the trust and the very next day here comes a letter that is doing totally the opposite, breaking trust. DOERNER: You know it is really great too is that we now got copies of all the contracts and you know when somebody states oh this is the contract, when in fact that wasn't the contract that was received, it might have been received later, that this is a negotiating point back and forth perhaps. When you are negotiating, but your putting into a public forum and making misstatements and inaccurate statements in order to do what I have called before the spinning blur, that is bad business, that is bad business. We are a small city, again we have better priorities than to fight this kind of a battle, it is legal, it is not ethical and it has very very poor standards and that is a very said comment on what is being put out. I can't stop them, there is no legal recourse from that and we are public figures but I am confident that this going to have to be reversed affect in the long term. PRONOVOST: And certainly one of the things that I have been thinking about certainly subsequent to the workshop and as well as a variety of things with regards to the rate rebate that is now occurring the next three years with respect to Progress Energy. They are disputing, they are paying approximately 20% of what was originally agreed to. And there is now a dispute over that. There is things like that, the misstatements that we have. Then I take a look at where Progress Energy in fact pled guilty to stealing from the San Francisco School District and they are now being faced with three hundred million dollar civil lawsuit on that. The question that I have is is Progress Energy's word good and the fact is if we were to have a responsive agreement with Florida Power that addressed all the issues of litigation fees, making the City whole, have performance standards with respect to rates and reliability then still I am going towards needing a level of comfort in terms of having books audited to have a level of comfort. But, you have another thought Commissioner .... DOERNER: I, I know what you are talking about, I am not so much interested in if you want to work at a lot of major corporations and their practices in America there is a lot of I will just call distasteful practices and I can start with Enron anyway you want with this and we will be here all night long. That seems to be a reality of corporate America, that's fine, I am not here to slam them in one sense, but I will tell you what, and I will leave it at that, but I am going to tell you, you go out and talk to people, you understand that you are talking horse sense, I am not here to create them as the bad, I don't like Progress Energy, the people that I have dealt with during the election up to this it has just been horrible behavior. If my attorney and the other attorneys say that we can get a good contract and contractually they think it is sound, I trust them to be accurate.