The Bulletin, a conservative-leaning newspaper with a small town attitude even though Bend is no longer nearly as small as it was just 10 years ago, took upon itself to use solar power to lecture the current City Council to “exercise a high degree of fiscal sanity and resist being blinded by the prospect of achieving environmental stardom.”
Maybe The Bulletin should take their own advice and “exercise a high degree of editorial sanity and resist being blinded by the prospect of achieving ideological stardom”? The author of the editorial obviously did not do his homework. Had he done even a small bit of investigation (see “Central Oregon Solar Progress is Happening . . . Slowly” below) he might not have written the unfairly slanted and amazingly poorly written op-ed piece reprinted below. (And what editorial writer uses the word “whatever” in their editorial?)
From The Bulletin’ Editorial Page – Sunday, December 16, 2007:
Think before acting on solar power plan
When it comes to generating solar power, it can never be too sunny. When it comes to spending public money on politically popular projects, however, an excessively sunny outlook can be a liability. It can leave taxpayers badly burned.
City councilors in Redmond and Bend should keep this in mind. both cities, determined to be good stewards of the environment, are weighting the installation of solar-generation arrays at sewage-treatment plants. Such projects presumably would echo the complicated arrangement by which Bend’s parking garage will support a large solar array. The garage project will provide the city with cheap, green power, and it will allow project investors to cash in on tax credits and other incentives dangled by state and federal governments.
Quibble with the wisdom of using public funds to expand the use of a relatively expensive energy source if you like. but these subsidies were created by state and federal lawmakers, and local solar schemes in Bend and Redmond would simply use those incentives as their creators intended them to be used.
The question local decision-makers should ask is whether the proposed solar arrays do right by local taxpayers. If they do, they should be installed. If not, they shouldn’t be.
In any case, councilors should be willing to press the question hard and act responsibly on the response. The first job of local governments is to spend their constituents’ money efficiently, not to lavish it on grand political gestures.
This ought to be a matter of principle for policymakers. Because it so often is not, however, councilors should consider what happens when they spend their constituents money foolishly. Their constituents lose faith in elected officials and the public institutions they oversee. And when citizens stop believing that their governments can (or will) perform even basic functions – like buying power – efficiently, they refuse to pay for government expansion. Spend foolishly now and pay for it later when voters reject bonds, public transit districts, whatever.
None of this is to suggest that planting solar arrays at sewage plants is a bad idea for local taxpayers. It may be a great idea. The point rather, is that city councilors and other decision-makers owe it to their constituents to exercise a high degree of fiscal sanity and resist being blinded by the prospect of achieving environmental stardom.
