Winter Park board crafts policy to protect utility funds

A Winter Park advisory board is taking action to ensure the city’s utility funding isn’t spent on charities and projects in other cities.

Winter Park’s Utilities Advisory Board took its first step last Tuesday toward recommending a new policy that would encourage the City Commission to refrain from tapping into its budget to give donations to outside organizations.

Organizational funding previously came entirely from the general fund, but was chosen to be split with utility funds when the current annual budget was approved in November.

Board Chair Katherine Johnson presented a policy recommendation to the board last week that requests the city stop using utility funds to foot the bill for donations given to other cities.

“Basically this came out of discussions we’ve had in the past few months recently discovering that some of the utility revenues have been diverted to the general fund and used for charitable purposes when we think maybe it’s best to keep those funds in house to do things like, I don’t know, undergrounding?” Johnson said.

The policy specifically mentioned the city’s donation to Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, an agreement of $100,000 to the center each year for the next 10 years.

That donation has received much criticism from residents, and raised some eyebrows of Utilities Advisory Board members during their meeting last month.

“I find it hard to believe that [the city] thought ‘Gee, it would be a great idea to donate money to Dr. Phillips,’” board member David Smith said.

Of the $257,000 the city will contribute to outside organizations this year, $171,000 – or roughly 66 percent – will come from the electric, water and sewer funds.

Other organizations receiving donations include Winter Park Day Nursery, United Arts, the Winter Park Historical Association and Mead Garden.

But board member Linda Lindsey said the policy should focus more on the city’s ratepayers, not which organizations are receiving donations.

“If we want to make it a policy recommendation, I’d like to see it a little bit more broadly discussing both utilities and the impact on rate payers, flowing something that’s basically a government charity contribution through the utility,” Lindsey said.

Johnson said her biggest concern was not allowing the city’s actions to become a trend.

“I think the bigger issue in addition to the transparency is the precedent,” Johnson said. “This raiding of the utility funds for other purposes is a problem that is systemic in other jurisdictions that I’m familiar with, especially energy efficiency surcharges that get put into the general fund and then manage to kill energy efficiency programs. They’ve been doing it for a long time in New York, Wisconsin and other places.”

Johnson said it’s important for the board to speak up now before the city’s use of utility funds becomes a bigger problem.

“It starts out small; it’s like a slippery slope and then we fall down,” Johnson said.

The current policy will be revised to add an emphasis on transparency from the city and how using utility funds affects city ratepayers. Johnson said an updated policy will be presented at the board meeting next month.