President Ronald Reagan once said that the most terrifying thing we can hear is: “I’m from the guvmint and I’m here to help you”.
An organization proposing (with abundant sweet talk, probable fuzzy math, and vague promises) to bring Community Choice Aggregates is commonly known as the Regional Council of Governments (RCOG) or something similarly named..
Unable to indefinitely raise taxes without accountability, Councils of Government have been established to generate income for various nefarious projects that taxpayers would normally reject or demand solid information on before passing a referendum or a tax increase.
Essentially a COG is an end-run around taxpayers and is unaccountable to taxpayers. A COG is another unelected tier of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of consumers, aka rate payers, aka citizens, aka tax payers.
"Essentially a COG is an end-run around taxpayers and is unaccountable to taxpayers. A COG is another unelected tier of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of consumers, aka rate payers, aka citizens, aka tax payers."
No COG has never been authorized by taxpayers. A COG is a creation of bureaucrats and elected officials to provide money for a variety of projects and benefits NOT authorized by taxpayers.
Many of those expenditures are of a very questionable nature and some of them apparently go to benefit the politicians who support COGs or are some who are even employed in one manner or another by WRCOG where they receive generous stipends and allowances that they do not have to account for (the personal expenditure of those many thousands of dollars). In other words, some of those funds are apparently a generous slush fund. Government slush funds are illegal.
The intent here is to place a COG in a position between electric utilities and we-the-people, the rate payers. Yes, ANOTHER bureaucracy of unaccountable administrators to make decisions that will (not can but will) eventually be costly to rate payers - and to tell us how to live. Do we need more high paid useless bureaucrats telling us how to live?
We all know and understand that a bunch of highly paid bureaucrats can never, ever be efficient – efficiency is not the nature of, nor the driving force behind any COG. They would just place a bigger burden on rate payers and taxpayers to do little of anything truly or remarkably beneficial to we-the-people.
COG members are NOT elected, and cannot be held accountable by taxpayers, citizens, ratepayers, residents, or consumers. Its members are appointed by politicians.
If anyone was to sit down and study their founding documents, you would be pulling your hair out after ten pages of equivocation, double speak, and obfuscation that would lead an honest attorney to suicide.
The contract city/community city would sign would grant monopoly power to the COG to regulate electricity – for about thirty years. Any opting out, cancellation, or getting rid of this bad deal would cost every individual rate payer and taxpayer thousands of dollars.
Do we need more costly, ineffective burdens?
As people go to their City Councils about this need to ask questions: The “choice” part of a CCA is that instead of just paying the one rate afforded by electricity providers, consumers could choose from various “cleaner” options to meet their energy needs.
Can individual consumers choose, or is it a community choice?
Who verifies the sources of electricity?
Can we receive normal (fossil fuel) electricity and be charged the higher rate for renewable electricity? How would we ever know if we were being cheated or not?
Who reviews the justification for rates set by a CCA, or are they arbitrarily set by a “committee” of unelected bureaucrats?
What about the growing number of self-sufficient or nearly self-sufficient consumers who are now using solar collectors, batteries, generators or other systems and emerging technology for their electricity? Will they face having to deal with this outfit demanding money from them?
The new “agency” must compete with the local utility company for customers. Government can make everyone their customer for a moment, but then they have to keep them. So, what’s their pitch? Is the energy they’re selling greener than, say, the local electricity provider? Is it cheaper? How much cheaper and for how long? What are the guarantees? Is it managed by superior experts in the energy industry or just another tier of bureaucrats?
At the end of the day ... Community Choice Aggregates offer nothing truly beneficial to we-the-people over the long run. CCA’s carry a strong scent of ENRON and other failed scams that cost people millions of dollars about 25-years ago.
Yogi Berra coined: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
James E. Horn is a Retired American Diplomat
He is an activist, a writer, and a speaker who knows his subject
He can be reached at
james@portervillepost.com
