Last week, the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce invited local elected officials to attend a July forum called “Growing Your Small Business: An Energy Conversation with Leaders.”
The event would, among other things, include discussion on the impact energy has on small business growth. The Chamber would raise questions “based on the themes of affordability, accountability and openness,” the email invite continued.
County Commissioner Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson took issue with that, saying the event appeared to be another opportunity for opponents of the city’s biomass contract to air their grievances.
Here is Hutchinson’s email response to the Chamber:
Thank you for the invitation to the panel discussion. I’m planning to attend IF I can change some travel plans that have already been made.
I am concerned about how you have framed the scope of the discussion: “In each panel, the Chamber would raise questions based on the themes of affordability, accountability and openness.”
I am curious why these concerns were chosen, rather than energy-related issues of equal or greater importance to the community, such as:
- Local job creation and self-reliance
- Environmental ethics
- Fuel source and price stability
- Reducing risk from regulatory costs
- Incentivizing and financing energy conservation
Frankly, I am concerned that this meeting will become just another forum for the anti-biomass jeering section that is polarizing our local politics while providing little of substance and effectively shutting down rational debate. Your framing of the scope of the discussion simply reinforces this notion.
GRU and its directors have for over a century made difficult, and at the time unpopular decisions, only to be vindicated. Planning for utility growth to meet our communities’ needs is a complex engineering and economics problem that I hope you appreciate is mind-bogglingly difficult for laypersons to understand.
One of the allegations of the critics of GRU’s contract with GREC is that the City should have been able to pull out at any time from the deal – even now – despite the powerplant being 95% complete. As the Chamber of Commerce, which supports business and therefore the fact that businesses must be able to rely upon contractual commitments that involve financial risk, I am stunned that the Chamber is not more forceful in its defense of a business engaged in substantial risk-taking to benefit our community. It may be easy for armchair quarterbacks to second-guess decisions that were made during a completely different regulatory, economic, and technological climate, but I expect a greater depth of understanding from the Chamber than your invitation suggests.
This is important, so count me as a tentative participant in the panel discussion and I’ll confirm with you when I have changed the travel plans with my family.
Respectfully,
Hutch