Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Hermine caused widespread extended power outages in Tallahassee, regulators and reformers are working to find ways to prevent a repeat when the next tropical system impacts Florida.

  • Critics allege utilities were unprepared for Hurricane Hermine
  • Utility executives lay out their plans for state regulators

Citizens for Responsible Spending, a Tallahassee government watchdog group, is forming a Post-Hurricane Recovery Best Practices Task Force made up of former government officials and a former utility executive. The panel will investigate the factors contributing to the Hermine power outages and make reform recommendations to state and local leaders.

Despite the fact Tallahassee's municipally-run utility restored power to the vast majority of its customers within two days of the storm, the task force's chairman, former Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, suggested Wednesday the recovery process could have occurred even more swiftly.

"If we're reporting at one point that 92 percent of people had power, if you're in the eight percent, that doesn't make you feel any better," Kottkamp said. "So, we just want to make sure that everybody's confident, everything's being done that can be done."

Conservatives including Gov. Rick Scott have taken particular exception to reports that Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and the city's utility director rejected offers of help from privately-owned power companies. Florida Power and Light, in particular, had placed hundreds of linemen on standby to assist the city's utility crews repair the power grid.

Gillum, a Democrat widely seen as a future candidate for statewide office, argued that accepting FP&L's assistance when it was offered would only have complicated the recovery process. He also criticized Scott's comments as less than helpful.

"Your offers of help would be so much more authentic if they also did not come at the same time as press releases were being sent out," Gillum told Scott at a meeting at the state Emergency Operations Center.

Dissecting the Scott-Gillum rift, Kottkamp said, would be a focus of the task force only inasmuch as it sheds light on miscommunication between state and local officials and utilities. The panel's recommendations are due Oct. 7.