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Hey, where are those lifeboats?

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By STEVE OTTO Steve Otto

sotto@tampatrib.com sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: October 23, 2009

It was getting on in the afternoon when Jim Norman finally cut to the chase and summed up the situation with some accuracy.

"This is the Titanic," he said.

It wasn't too much later that fellow Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe said something about being "rudderless" in a continuation of the same subject that was taking up most of the afternoon's session.

As has been the case recently, the commissioners were spending another weekly session trying to cover their own rear ends, which would have made for good entertainment if it wasn't costing the rest of us money and putting more important matters on hold.

What to do?

This time it was trying to figure out what to do with the county administrator and county attorney, who accepted raises they had given themselves. This came after a session where they tried to come up with a sexual harassment policy after Commissioner Kevin White was found guilty in a case the cost of which in taxpayer-backed legal fees still perplexes the commissioners.

You know, you want to believe this board isn't that bad. As individuals they mostly seem well-meaning and reasonably bright. They started their Wednesday session on a positive note, looking at the possibility of using an old mall as a multiuse facility to deal with the nearly 10,000 people who are homeless in this county.

Unfortunately, it eventually broke down into a lot of pontificating and, with lunchtime near, they turned it over to others to see whether they could come up with something - maybe before winter sets in.

Water, water everywhere

The good news for the commissioners is that Tampa Bay Water met earlier in the week, stealing some of the blunder from the commissioners.
Tampa Bay Water is the regional water utility that spent so much money messing up the desal plant that it thought it would go for the spending record by building a reservoir and then pretending the cracks were part of the plan.

Now TBW members are saying it will cost about $125 million to repair the 15-billion gallon reservoir that cost $147 to build.

All right, you gotta do what you gotta do. The people who live in FishHawk and other surrounding neighborhoods might not appreciate billions of gallons of water doing a tsunami down their streets.

But what this crowd did was to vote to hire a consulting firm to find a reservoir repair company. They voted 4-3 to give KPMG more than $900,000 to get the best that your money can buy. That's a lot of money just to find a repair guy. I mean, how many reservoir repair companies can there be in the phone book? Couldn't Tampa Bay Water just have asked around or maybe checked Angie's List on the computer?

I talked to Tampa Councilman Charlie Miranda, who is on the Tampa Bay Water board and was one of the three members who voted against the idea. Miranda has that sad "I've seen the world and I can't believe it" look. He only could shake his head. Miranda pointed out that there are a number of governments represented on the board and you would think they could round up the expertise to at least select the right company. Guess not.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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