April 27
April 23, 2007April 25
April 25, 2007
The Terrebonne Parish Council will allow Utilities Director Tom Bourg four weeks to issue a report on the parish-owned natural gas supply system as part of an effort to sell or lease Terrebonne Parish’s electricity and gas supply operation to an outside party.
“We have everything on the electric system,” Bourg told the Council’s Public Services Committee Monday. “We’re in the process of compiling information on the natural gas system.”
“It’s just taking time” to gather the information, he said later.
On Friday, Bourg sent an 80-plus page report to Entergy Services in Beaumont, Texas, describing the operations of the City of Houma Electric Utility System, most of it listing the “Hourly Load in Megawatts” used in Houma during 2004-2006.
Bourg writes in the report that “on or around April 25, 2006… Entergy expressed interest in offering proposals for firm power supply to the Houma system or acquiring the system under unspecified terms.”
There was a “data request from Entergy,” Bourg said. The report was “a response to a specific inquiry.”
According to the report’s “Asset List,” the “original installed cost of all assets” was $81,191,976 for the City of Houma Electric Utility System. The “current book value of all assets” is $26,322,835.
A small part of the report gives information about the parish’s natural gas supply system. Terrebonne Parish treats its electrical and gas supply systems as a single unit.
At its Feb. 19 meeting, the council committee gave Bourg 45 days to produce a report describing the value of Houma’s electrical supply system. Councilman Clayton Voisin said at the meeting that the council is “talking about another four weeks” before the report about the parish’s gas supply system is produced.
Councilman Harold Lapeyre made “a motion to keep (the report) in committee to allow Mr. Bourg to come up with a whole package-gas and electricity-and bring this back to the committee to distribute” to interested parties.
“Entergy is interested,” he said. “There may be others which are interested.”
Lapeyre said that Terrebonne Parish has been interested in selling or leasing the electricity and gas supply system “for about a year.”
“The parish president formed an energy committee (which had four councilmen) to get a package together so that bidders could analyze it,” he said, following Monday’s meeting.
The council committee did not mention the energy committee during its discussion with Bourg.
In February, Bourg said that “[t]here are 20 municipal electric utilities in Louisiana. There are advantages and disadvantages to municipal electric utilities.
“The primary benefit is that the profits that would go to shareholders with a private utility company goes to municipal residents,” he said. The profits are “put into a general fund.”
“If a private company took over the utility, would it cause a tax increase?” he asked. “It has got to come from somewhere.”
Bourg said the drawback with a municipal electric utility is its lack of purchasing capacity, and that “local politics may govern decision making instead of sound business reasoning.”
Bourg said he believes Terrebonne Parish wants to sell its electrical and gas supply system because “in the recent past the utility has not been as competitive,” citing the electric utility’s reliance on natural gas to generate power, and problems with “natural gas prices.”
