Sweeten the deal, Tampa Electric

City leaders call for the company to offers of upgrades.

By Janet Zink, Times Staff Writer
Published March 4, 2008

TAMPA - With the city poised to bind itself legally to Tampa Electric Co. for 25 years, environmental advocates say now is the time for vigorous discussion about how the utility plans to provide for the city's energy future.

By state law, the franchise agreement can address only how much the utility has to pay to use city property for its power lines.

But some say talks about the agreement, if not the contract itself, should also include such topics as conservation and burying power lines, something supporters say would make the city look better and make it less vulnerable to power outages during storms.

"They're asking for a 25-year monopoly, and I feel they need to demonstrate more proactive community values," City Council member Linda Saul-Sena said of the utility.

The old contract, signed in 1986, expired in 2006. The council is scheduled to review the new agreement on March 20.

Saul-Sena and others say that even if the city can't require Tampa Electric to bury power lines, take care when trimming protected trees around existing lines or provide certain types of conservation programs, the utility should offer to do those things on its own.

"We're talking about what do the people in this community want because we're paying the bills," said Ed Turanchik, a West Tampa developer who was one of six presenters at a meeting on the agreement organized by the Sierra Club last month.

Turanchik, Saul-Sena and others point to St. Petersburg-based Progress Energy Florida as a company that offers more programs to promote energy efficiency than Tampa Electric, and Florida Power & Light as a model for burying power lines.

In 2007, FP&L launched a program that pays 25 percent of the cost of burying lines for the governments they serve.

FP&L started the program after hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 left millions of Florida customers without power for more than a week.

[Last modified March 4, 2008, 00:48:38]