Leadership from the V.I. Water and Power Authority Tuesday bristled at questions from the V.I. Public Services Commission after providing an update on the authority’s ongoing solicitation for a long-term supplier of liquefied petroleum gas.
The authority came under scrutiny last summer when its board approved a two-year fuel supply contract with the Puerto Rico-based Empire Gas outside of the normal solicitation process. The board voted to rescind the contract in August and a second request for proposals was issued in September. On Tuesday, WAPA contract administration manager Nicole Aubain said the authority received proposals from five companies and that an evaluation committee’s recommendation will be submitted for board approval in December.
The meeting came one month after PSC Vice Chair David Hughes, who was absent from Tuesday’s meeting, grilled WAPA leadership over the reissued RFP, citing concerns from a rejected vendor who reportedly thought some provisions in the original solicitation “indicated a substantial misunderstanding — by WAPA — on how fuel moves.” Responding to questions from PSC Chair Pedro Williams about that vendor, WAPA general counsel Dionne Sinclair said that “the vendor that’s been advocated for has submitted a proposal.”
Williams disputed the use of the word “advocated.” He later asked the utility to confidentially share the names of its evaluation committee members, prompting several minutes of back-and-forth before WAPA Chief Executive Karl Knight cut in.
“We are in the midst of a procurement process,” he said. “They’re trying to preserve the integrity of the procurement process. Your request is an unprecedented request of the authority in the midst of a procurement process. I do not reveal the identity of the evaluation committee until they submit their report, because I do not want individuals to compromise or attempt to compromise the folks who are doing this work.”
Knight added that the names of evaluators and their scores would be made available after the solicitation was complete and continued to question the commission’s intentions, asking if they intended to investigate evaluators for potential conflicts of interest. Sen. Carla Joseph, who sits on the PSC as an ex officio member, noted that conflicts of interest have happened before and said the commission’s request came from “a sense of transparency and a sense of building trust.”
“And when you’re building trust and you want to have that art — that fine art of transparency — you provide the information,” she said. “The back-and-forth is leading even to other persons, who are hearing this, to have a question about the trust … in confidentiality.”
Knight responded by asking commissioners if they were “aware that one of your members was openly advocating for one of the active participants in this RFP,” referencing Hughes. Williams said it depended on the definition of “advocating.”
“I think we’re all completely aware of the discussions with the vice chair and members of your team relative to a particular entity,” he said. “If you consider that ‘advocating for’ — again, that’s your definition of ‘advocating for,’ I don’t necessarily characterize it as such — if that is your concern, I hear the concern. And one of the things I ask is that you just submit the information to me alone, and I will handle it and maintain the confidentiality.”
The meeting moved on to hear testimony related to WAPA’s billing practices. The commission’s assistant executive director, Tisean Hendricks, shared a report outlining a “surge” in complaints tied to issues with electrical meters and the utility’s reliance on estimated billing.
“Some customers have reported that immediately following the installation of the new meter, inflated bills were received and, further, disputed,” she said, adding that the PSC received 35 complaints in the last year, which resulted in replaced meters. Since then, she said, 17 of those customers have complained about inflated bills.
WAPA Chief Financial Officer Lorraine Kelly and customer service director Marlene Francis acknowledged that the authority has had to estimate bills because of the territory’s failing advanced metering infrastructure. Francis explained that, where necessary, bills are estimated by taking the average of three months’ energy consumption. Kelly said that when a meter is replaced, “there’s one of two outcomes.”
“The bill is higher or the bill is lower,” she said. In the latter case, Kelly said WAPA credits the customer’s account. “However, on the flip side, if the estimate was lower than it should be, i.e., the actual read now says we underestimated the customer … by its nature, that does not mean it is wrong. It means that the estimate was lower, and now the actual read is indicating that we underbilled the customer.”