News

By Tim O’Meilia

Gulf Stream town commissioners had planned to start excavation to place power, telephone and cable lines underground by last May.

Eight months later and with nary a shovelful of dirt yet turned, grumbling commissioners agreed to complain gently to the state Public Service Commission over the delay. 

The problem is Florida Power & Light Company. By the Jan. 11 commission meeting, FPL had yet to submit a binding cost estimate for doing its share of the work. Estimates from AT&T and Comcast are already in hand. 

Without the estimates, the design can’t be completed and the construction begun. 

“FPL says, ‘We’ll get it next week,’” Brannon told commissioners. “We started last Feb. 1 and still don’t have a design. FPL treats these projects as bottom priority.”

FPL did submit a partial design estimate a week later, but it was incomplete and included some installations the town didn’t need.

Brannon suggested the best solution would be to nudge FPL into action with a positively worded complaint to the PSC. The power company presently has a rate case before the PSC and Brannon said FPL would be “sensitive” to complaints filed while its case is pending. 

“We need to be proactive,” Mayor Joan Orthwein agreed. “I think it’s important we file this complaint in a positive manner.”

The commission took no formal vote, but directed Brannon to file the complaint after the town attorney reviewed it. 

The $5.4 million project, financed through assessments of town property owners, is projected to be completed by late 2014, nearly a year behind schedule. That assumes a May construction start.

The town has spent $344,000 in conceptual design, survey and conversion costs. 

Brannon noted that following the hurricanes of 2004 and ’05, FPL preached a five-point plan to protect the power grid from storms. “No. 5 was undergrounding to improve the distribution system. The fact that they’re giving no priority to this is unreasonable,” he said. “A year is way too long.”

In other business, commissioners advised volunteer sea turtle monitors to seek financial help for expenses from the town’s civic association or the Florida Coalition for Preservation. 

Jackie Kingston and six other volunteers monitor the sea turtle nests from March 1 to Oct. 31 along a 2.5-mile stretch that includes nearly all of Gulf Stream and a bit of Ocean Ridge. 

In a detailed expense report, Kingston appealed to the commission for $514 to pay for wooden stakes, a container for the stakes, white paint, markers, staples and T-shirts for the volunteers for the upcoming nesting season. 

Commissioner Garrett Dering said a contribution would be good publicity for the town, but Commissioner Robert Ganger and Orthwein suggested Kingston approach the civic association or the preservation group. Ganger is former president of the civic group and an officer of the coalition. 

Turtle nest monitors typically receive a small stipend from beach cleaning firms, largely to encourage the monitors to do their jobs early and quickly because beach cleaning cannot be done by law until the monitoring is completed each day. 

 “We do it for the love of doing it. We don’t do it for the money,” said Kingston, who has been counting turtle nests for 12 years. She said the stipend “is on the order of dollars per day.”

Volunteers tallied 584 loggerhead, 289 green and 14 leatherback turtle nests in Gulf Stream last year, the largest by far in at least five years. 

“We’re seeing so many more sea turtle nests annually, we just need a lot of new supplies,” she said. 

The commission also voted to move its March 8 commission meeting to March 15, three days after the annual commission election. The meeting will begin at 11 a.m. with the swearing-in of new commissioners at noon.