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Time and time again, past and present SPSA officials have assured local citizens and leaders that they had a plan to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, enough space to dump the region's garbage, and a way to trim spiraling operating costs.
They never said, before Wednesday, that to do so would take the highest disposal fees in the nation, if not on the planet. And given the recent history, there's no assurance that fees won't rise again from the startling rate of $245 a ton unveiled this week.
The proposal - prompted by SPSA's financial woes and falling garbage volume - is the latest proof that the Southeastern Public Service Authority must immediately and radically restructure itself, privatize or become some type of public-private hybrid.
The current model, begun 30 years ago, no longer works and has become a financial drag on South Hampton Roads.
Elected officials in the eight communities - Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Franklin and the counties of Isle of Wight and Southampton - have no choice but to treat this as the financial crisis it has become.
On Wednesday, SPSA's board voted 6-2 to endorse the $245 rate, up from the current fee of $104 a ton. In 2006, the rate was just $57 a ton. "I have never heard of a fee as high as $245," Chaz Miller, director of state programs for the National Solid Wastes Management Association, told Virginian-Pilot writer Scott Harper.
At SPSA, the litany of critical financial audits, mismanagement and lack of spending controls is deafening.
Oversight that allowed the agency to postpone financial pain meant the reckoning would be crippling when it came. It has come.
Local leaders have no choice but to fix SPSA now, and not in 2018, when their contracts expire. Their recent efforts, despite this week's evidence, have forced progress on a reluctant agency. But not enough:
- With no public discussion or debate, SPSA's board of directors - one official from each locality - presented the rate hike at a special meeting Wednesday. Too often, that's the way SPSA officials do most of their work: outside of public view. SPSA will hold a public hearing Jan. 28, and it must vote again, but all that seems likely to be a fait accompli.
- SPSA dismissed, with little public input, a $205 million proposal by a New York state company to buy all of SPSA's operations, assets and debt. ReEnergy Holdings LLC boasts industry veterans and the local firm Kaufman & Canoles. The proposal was sweeping, and it offered a lifeline that SPSA refused.
- Donald Williams, SPSA's chair and a Norfolk city councilman, wrote in a Jan. 7 letter to ReEnergy, in part: "A sale of all of SPSA's assets to your company will leave the localities with only one solid waste option in the region." Unanswered is how that would be different from life under SPSA.
- The agency has 470 employees. Several private sector industry officials contend SPSA remains bloated, even following employee buyouts in recent years.
SPSA's debts now total about $245 million. It faces a current budget shortfall of $16 million. Revenues are declining, partly because we are throwing away less.
All those are issues that SPSA - or its successor - will have to address.
What is clear, even without fixing SPSA's woes, is that the agency cannot sustain itself, not in its current form. Before the garbage starts piling up, local leaders better design a waste model that works.
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Objective look?
An objective look from a SPSA Board Member? Sure, let's let those that make excuses for constant failure explain why they rain an organization funded by taxpayer dollars in the ground. They all need to be fired and SPSA disolved.
Anger for reason
Well, let's have an objective look. SPSA has selected two proposals from qualified firms under the statute that governs PPEA's in Virginia, and these firms have paid the money for SPSA to evaluate these proposals and to select the best one. The firms that make up ReEnergy could have made such a submission, but chose not to. In their concept, the members must agree to new contracts, and since SPSA has contracts with the cities now, SPSA has no ability to suspend these contracts unless all the members are willing to do so. The proposal was not rejected, it was simply not accepted, and any discussion of whether it has merit will have to wait until the members decide if they wish to pursue it. This wailing about the highest tip fee in the country ignores the basic issue; the system tip fee is about $65/ton; the issue is that some pay nothing, some pay less, and a few pay an exhorbitant amount. Unless we address the disparity and seek reorganization as you have suggested, we are simply substituting anger for reason.