From Bob Schwartz, City Manager
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→ GCCMA - I will be attending the semiannual meeting and conference of the Georgia City County Managers Association in Athens next week, part of the day Wednesday, all day Thursday, and part of the day Friday. It's a chance to reconnect with other managers in the state and learn what other cities are doing that works.
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→ MEAG - Councilmember Smith and I attended a briefing by Bob Johnson, president of the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, on Friday. It is an annual briefing that he does for MEAG power systems in the area. This one was held in Monroe. Here is what we learned:
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- The debt service that MEAG pays has reached its high watermark. The portion of our bills from MEAG that are devoted to debt service will gradually decline in the future.
- Electrical usage used to grow every year. In fact for 55 years it grew in all but two years. However, five of the last six years have had no growth. This low to no growth is caused by several factors:
- Lighting and appliances are now much more efficient and use much less electricity.
- The recession reduced growth
- One of the reasons may be that every home pretty much has all of the standard electric appliances already. No one is buying their first refrigerator or their first television anymore.
- 80% of the cost of electricity is based on fixed cost.
- Distributed generation-that is solar power-will cut into our load and reduce the number of kilowatt hours we can sell. Because so much of our cost is fixed we may need to adjust our rates to include more of the fixed cost in the base cost and less of the cost in the rate per kilowatt hour.
- Some years ago the City of Oxford made the decision not to invest in reactors 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle. This is turning out to have been a very good decision. The cost of constructing plant Vogtle is continuing to rise and the construction time is escalating by at least 18 months. That means the other MEAG cities will have to bear the interest cost for 18 months before they are able to sell any electricity from the new reactors. All in all, it sounds like we made the right decision when we decided not to invest in this project.
→ And now for some good news – Here’s a report from Chief Dave Harvey. A couple came by the police department after court on Thursday and delivered cupcakes and cookies.
Chief Harvey writes: “The cookies were mine for talking to his daughter about being respectful. She did a turn around and is making straight "A's" now. The cupcakes were from the same family by the mom who had gotten a ticket by Officer Steward. She stated he was very courteous and professional and even though she had to pay a fine, she just wanted to show her appreciation. Both stated they had moved here from a big city where the police were not as professional and nice as the way our officers are. They said with all of the negativity about police recently, it was good to know that there are still good police officers.”
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