We skimmed through the feasibility report on the purchase of Wendover Gas today.
It is not that we were disinterested we just knew what its conclusions would be. In fact we never had any doubt. Pay anyone $10,000 to tell you what you want to hear and you should get it.
It is a rare ‘expert’ who will fee or no fee tell you that your plan is, pardon the expression, facacta.
This is how we see it: the City of West Wendover will buy a failing business and with the efficiency of public government and paying union scale wages will make a profit without even having to expand its customer base or raising rates.
For those whose command of Yiddish is limited we thought about providing a definition to facacta but we realized that the above paragraph does a pretty good job all by itself.
With the Nevada PUC imminent forced transition this summer the dire straights of Wendover Propane users are really not so dire after all.
Yes the city had to bail out Wendover Gas this winter but that money will be paid back so no harm no foul and we won’t have to go through it again.
So why buy Wendover Gas?
Natural Gas we are told is the answer.
Yes that would be a pretty neat thing.
Almost as neat as a fancy new runway for the airport that almost put Wendover, Utah into bankruptcy or a fancy new golf course that we would never have to pay for and have been paying for the last 20 years.
We weren’t supposed to feel the cost of the new city hall either what with the natural 10 percent annual growth in West Wendover, that stopped a year before the city hall was built.
Reality is pesky and it always ruins projections.
Even at its lowest and unbelievable $10 million price tag the pipeline would be the largest public project ever tackled by Wendover. Yes the golf course and the city hall ended up costing more but they were projected to come in at around half their final cost.
We have no problem with taking a chance. We do that every week betting that something in our window will induce someone to spend 75¢.
But taking a risk with the people’s money is a whole another thing.
This should be done by the private sector first of all because people working for profit have a real incentive to make things work and secondly because in the private sector facacta will get you fired where as in the public sector facacta will get you promoted.
We would like to congratulate all of West Wendover High School for its academic achievement over the past five years.
We cut our teeth on the school beat some 25 years ago when we smack into what George W. bush called the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It was rather shocking to be told by a school superintendent that Wendover’s scores were among the lowest in the state of Utah because our kids were just too poor, too Mexican and too far a way to be bothered with.
We still wonder how he could not understand why that would make us so angry.