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  • Dennis Haynes is seen in this 2010 file photo taken during the first GUSC meeting. Amanda Shavers-Davis

    Dennis Haynes

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March 31, 2011

GUSC member says county could have influenced water rates

By Benjamin Bullard The Cullman Times

Now that there is no more GUSC; no more SCCD; no more litigation tying the hands and sealing the lips of those who served on the county’s short-lived and controversial water utility boards, it’s a little easier for members of the now-defunct bodies to share their thoughts on the strange year they spent in the public eye.

Dennis Haynes — who served on both boards from the beginning and who took an active role in the later stages of their heavily-litigated fight for survival in the court of public opinion, as well as before both local and state courts — said Wednesday he’s disappointed that the boards weren’t given a chance to survive, describing their voluntary dissolution in the face of heavy opposition a missed opportunity for Cullman County.

“At this point in time, what disappoints me so much — and one reason I’m so dismayed to see this effort come to an end — is the realization that an opportunity has been lost,” said Haynes. “For the city to have such a desire and such an urgency to build a dam on Duck Creek that they would have almost stopped at nothing to see that come to fruition — that was an opportunity for Cullman County to negotiate fairness into a water purchase agreement with the city, and the new county commissioners missed it.”

Haynes has maintained that the water purchase agreement Cullman County signed with the city of Cullman last November — a contract that secures the biggest of the city’s water wholesale customers and thereby guarantees a steady stream of revenue necessary to back the borrowing of $70 million in bonds to finance the Duck River dam project — was a chance for Cullman County to use its leverage as a make-or-break customer as a bargaining chip to seek a more favorable wholesale water rate from the city for the next 30 years.

That, he said, never happened.

“If those who were negotiating an agreement with the city could have taken the position that they would agree to join them in funding the construction of this [Duck River] dam, and in exchange for that say, ‘We expect to be granted fairness in the water purchase agreement,’ that would have been a way to negotiate that fairness, to have that leverage,” said Haynes.

 

* Read the full story in the Thursday, March 31, 2011, print edition of The Cullman Times.

* Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.

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