NOREEN: Springs utilities' tail wags the dog
“Colorado Springs Utilities. It’s how we’re all connected.”
“We’re your utility.”
“A utility you can call your own.”
“We are actively involved in the community and support community goals."
“Citizens have a voice in the decisions we make.”
”We listen.”
Those statements and many more are included in a slick pamphlet sitting on a rack outside a Colorado Springs Utilities Board meeting room in the South Tower of the Plaza of the Rockies Building in downtown Colorado Springs.
Long-time observers of the city-owned utility have a hard time digesting the pamphlet’s contents. It’s just an awful lot to chew up and choke down.
Inside that same meeting room Wednesday, members of the City Council, which also sits as utilities board, failed to move the monolith.
First, the four-service utility wouldn’t budge in a disagreement on the amount it owes the city in its annual payment-in-lieu-of-taxes. Next, the utility dug in over the accounting involving a vacant building once used by the gas department.
Finally, and most frustrating of all, the utility’s managers explained why most city parks will just have to turn brown this year, because no creative solution can be found to water the city’s parks with the city’s own water. While plenty of other cities either give water to their parks or sell it at a discount, the best our utility could come up with — after paying a consultant to analyze it for months — is a two-year pilot water-conservation program involving 19 of the city’s 137 parks.
Colorado Springs charges its own park system a commercial rate for water, and that’s crazy, and the utility says virtually nothing can be done about it.
“I just think we make things so hard,” Councilwoman Jan Martin said. “No wonder the public gets confused. No wonder the public wonders what’s going on.”
Councilman Larry Small was a bit rougher.
“They say ‘it’s how we’re all connected,’” Small said Thursday, reciting utilities’ motto. “I say it’s how we’re all strung along.”
Small said the pilot program is “not meeting the requirement of saving the parks. We’ve had this problem with utilities over and over again. It’s an immovable object. It’s a bureaucracy.”
At the meeting, utilities CEO Jerry Forte said, “We are not trying to be a roadblock here. I realize this is frustrating.”
Truth is, utilities has been disconnected with community goals (see my blog) since long before Forte was here. It took 24 years for utilities to open the north slope of Pikes Peak to recreation after voters mandated it, and the same foot-dragging is now occurring on the South Slope.
Now we can't water the parks.
How long will utilities remain intransigent? For as long as the public allows it.
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