TorC will purchase electric smart meters for $1 million

by Kathleen Sloan | September 9, 2019
5 min read
The Truth or Consequences self-owned electric utility will upgrade to smart meters for its 4,000 residential and commercial customers. 

The upgrade will cost $1 million and will take about six months. The City Commission unanimously approved hiring Landis + Gyr to do the work at its August 27 meeting. 

City Manager Morris Madrid said “experts” developed the city’s RFP or request for professional services. About half a dozen companies responded. An unnamed city-employee panel narrowed the candidates to three and then heard their presentations. The panel gave Landis + Gyr the highest grade. 

No rate hike was discussed at the August 27 city commission meeting, nor was the source of payment. City Manager Morris Madrid told commissioners it will cost $1 million after he negotiated an 8.5-percent “discount” given by the company, which would otherwise have consisted of “gross receipts tax.” Since cities are not required to pay tax, it is no discount. 

Asked how it will be paid for, Madrid said it will come out of the electric “enterprise fund.”  

Asked if a cost analysis had been done, Madrid said “I can give you one right now verbally.” There are currently three meter readers costing about $60,000 a year, which includes their benefits, and one of them will be eliminated “for now,” he said. Fuel and some operating costs will also be saved, he said.  

The main reason given for upgrading to smart meters is to make it unnecessary for meter readers to go onto private property. Bo Easley, electric department director, gave a presentation showing dogs, locked fences, weeds and other obstructions that must be braved to get to meters. 

A law on city books requires customers to make their meters available, but it has not been enforced, City Commissioner George Szigeti pointed out. He said the city will still need access to the meters to ensure they are operating correctly and requested the code be enforced. 

Mayor Pro-Tem Kathy Clark asked for assurance that commercial customers not be required to “bring their building up to code” in order to be “compatible” with the new meters. Easley said the “40 or 50” commercial customers will keep their old meters, which will still be read “by hand.” 

No public comment was allowed at the meeting. The City Commission recently passed a new policy restricting it to the first meeting and disallowing it at the second meeting in the month. 

After the meeting Mayor Sandra Whitehead said an ordinance would be coming up concerning the smart-meter purchase and the public may weigh in then.  Asked in an email if the city would already be financially obligated to purchase the meters, making any comment moot, Whitehead did not respond within seven days. Whitehead did say she would provide answers to numerous questions by Sept. 10, the next meeting. 

Related background
Will smart meters be required by Sierra Co. Co-op? 

Madrid said during the August 27 meeting that the Sierra County Electric Cooperative, one of the two companies from which the city purchases electricity, may require smart meters in the future. If the company does, it would be going against the state’s Public Regulation Commission, which rejected another company’s bid to install smart meters. 

According to the Santa Fe New Mexican’s April 2018 article, “Regulators reject PNM plan to install smart meters,” the PRC “unanimously rejected Public Service Company of New Mexico’s proposal for a new remote metering system that the electric utility claimed would save customers $20 million over the next two decades and give consumers the ability to monitor their power use online.

“PRC Chairman Sandy Jones issued a statement saying the regulatory body rejected so-called smart meters, “citing rate increases, an excessive opt-out fee, and layoffs as deal breakers.”

Although TorC’s self-owned utility and its relationship with Sierra County Electric Cooperative is beyond the PRC’s purview, the company’s relationship with other towns is overseen by PRC. 

The electric utility fund is the city’s cash cow.

The city’s general fund expenditures were about $5 million a year since 2012, rising to $5.4 million this year, according to the 2019-2020 preliminary budget. For the last three years the city has transferred $1.65 million from the electric fund into the general fund to meet expenses. The July preliminary budget calls for a $1.4-million transfer, but the waste water fund will be tapped for $100,000 for the first time and the solid waste department will contribute $55,000 more than last year to nearly make up the difference. 

Without the electric fund transfers the city would run budget deficits every year. Therefore how the city commission decides to spend the profit from its electric-bill charges affects city expenditures in general. 

Whitehead offered to gather any documents and answer questions about the purchase by Sept. 10, a two-week wait. The Sierra County Sun has requested it be provided with any cost analysis the city may have done to determine $1 million should be spent on electric smart meters. The purchase was not part of the city’s Aug. 27 approval of its Infrastructure Capital Improvements Plan, nor is it mentioned in the 2014 Comprehensive Plan. 

A copy of the electric department study on the state of its equipment and transmission lines, referred to in the 2014 Comprehensive Plan, has also been requested. 

The Comprehensive Plan states, “The inherent inefficiencies and the age of the old transformers and distribution network cause excessive loss of energy. Approximately 15 to 20 percent of the city’s annual cost of electricity is due to losses from this older portion of the distribution system.” ​

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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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