Let’s be done with all that Christmas cheer and move on to less controversial matters like politics and such. You’ve done your part.
Do you guys remember when the news spent days talking about President Trump’s annual physical? They likely lied about his weight and trotted out other nonsense about how healthy he was. It was bogus, we all knew it.
But where is the same kind of news media coverage about the obvious lack of disclosure on President Biden’s mental acuity? It’s obvious that he is compromised, yet there is a simple, no look, no see policy that appears in place and in both instances the citizens are the losers.
At some point in our history, we decided that the president’s health was a matter of importance to the country, yet we’ve now even messed up that simple task.
Just for the sake of full disclosure, my mental acuity is diminished as well. Mostly self-inflicted damage performed in cooperation with Anheuser Busch profit margins. You should already be aware of this if you read this far into this column. If you had not noticed, you might grab some Prevagen at the drug store. Foley does not require any health disclosures to work at The Landmark and I don’t have access to nuclear codes. If you’re breathing, you’re good to go under the current policy so I’ll keep rolling along.
Evergy Energy recently indicated that squirrels were the cause of the most recent publicized Platte County electrical service outage. They “explained” that squirrels use electrical power lines for travel and rest. The company rolled out some squirrel stats in the explanation for what many think is an inordinate number of outages over the last couple of years.
The problem is not squirrels, it’s elephants. Everyone continues to ignore the elephant on the power line. In case you are asked, elephants are not known to rest on power lines, but I don’t live in an area with wild elephants. The real changes and problems that have happened with utility services in the last 20 years have nothing to do with any animals resting on power lines.
This is a typical “old timer” opinion, so reader beware.
Back in the day, cities and counties would award utility franchises and those utilities pay a fee to the local government to operate in that area. That part remains true.
Back in the day, these utilities typically had offices in these towns and had local staff in the town. Depending on the size of the community, you had one to multiple local crew that did a little of everything. They were local. They knew where most everyone lived, and they knew where the problems were. These were often long-time employees, and they trimmed a tree back here and there, read meters, repaired a service, switched out meters or were the first to be on the scene of the pesky transformer blow outs. They knew and fixed problems before they happened, that is what has changed.
In the name of “efficiency” those do-it-all employees with day-in and day-out historical knowledge of all phases of the system are gone or restricted from such tasks now. Third party contractors handle many tasks now and the employees have been consolidated and specialized, perhaps in a more profitable manner, but lacking the overall get-it-done authority from corporate.
It’s a business model that has made utilities less local and less respondent to the community. All elected officials should be considering that every time they vote on a franchise agreement with these utilities, instead of just counting the money they promise, because the service and how they deliver–or don’t deliver–may be as important as the money.
(Guy Speckman can be reached trying to catch squirrels or elephants resting on electrical lines)