Rep. Stan Mayfield said Aug. 26th that he plans to ask the Florida Attorney General to rule on the Vero Beach City Council’s efforts to ignore a law designed to force a referendum on whether to establish an independent authority to run the Vero Beach utilities.

The Vero Beach City Council, which believes it has found two loopholes that will let it ignore the law requiring a utility referendum, had unanimously decided last week not to ask the Attorney General whether this interpretation was correct..

Demands for an independent utility authority stem from the growing anger of non-city residents served by the Vero Beach utility over soaring electric bills. More than half of the utility’s customers live in unincorporated areas of Indian River County or the town of Indian River Shores.

The concerns of the non-city residents focus on the fact that the Vero Beach City Council siphons millions of dollars from electric bills each year to fund a wide variety of totally unrelated municipal activities.

A referendum to replace the City Council as overseer of the utility with an independent utility authority was called for in a bill sponsored during the last session of the legislature by Mayfield. Despite opposition by Vero Beach, the bill was passed and subsequently signed by Gov. Charlie Crist.

However, the Vero Beach City Council believes two loopholes will let it ignore the law requiring a utility referendum.

Mayfield’s legislation did not specifically name Vero Beach (a common artifice to avoid legal issues) but set out four conditions designed to apply to no municipality in Florida .

The first two conditions – that the utility serve two cities in the same county and that it is located in a noncharter county – clearly apply to Vero Beach.

The third condition was that the utility have between 30,000 and 35,000 “named” retail electric customers. While the Vero Beach utility does indeed have a qualifying number of accounts, customer services manager John Lee said in many cases multiple properties are billed to a single name – and the total number of “named” customers as a result is fewer than 28,000.

Another condition was that the utility’s service area not extend beyond its home county. But Lee said the Vero Beach utility provides electricity to one residence that straddles the border of Indian River and St. Lucie counties, and that a second customer is totally on the St. Lucie side.

While City Manager Jim Gabbard suggested the city might ask the State Attorney General for an opinion as to how to proceed, City Attorney Charles Vitunac said he would rather not go to the Attorney General because the legislation “is so flawed it is only going to confuse the issue.”

Vitunac proposed that the city wait three weeks to see if a hand-count of named customers changes the total, and if it doesn’t, “we stay with the position we have already taken, and then we’re done with the issue.”

The City Council quickly approved that proposal on a unanimous 5-to-0 vote.

But Mayfield said that after discussing the matter with the House General Council, “we have concluded that a member of the Florida House has the authority in this case to request such an opinion.

“ I am preparing an Opinion request letter to the Attorney General,” Mayfield said in an email. “I will also be contacting the AG in person to discuss the matter. Hopfully he will agree.”