Soccer, Anyone?

Well, the news out of Washington—or anywhere else in the world, it seems—is so abysmal, so frightening…well, wait. Stop using these puny adjectives: Barack Obama said it in two words in his most recent email to me—we’re finished.

Right—so what’s happening on the island? All going well in the Isle of Enchantment?

Doesn’t seem so. Though there is good news: the children of San Juan, in an imaginative plan, will have a place to play soccer!

Critics sniff at the proposal, of course, saying that the idea of renting out a couple of acres in a park to a developer, who will install three soccer fields and two beach volleyball courts, as well as provide a “deli juice bar” that also has beer—craft beer, that is—and wine is going to benefit only those people (hint, we don’t know them) who can pay 80 bucks an hour. In short, all of the kids in the projects are going to be left playing kick-the-ball in the parking lot.

There’s also a little question about the rent, which according to El Nuevo Día, would be only 2,500 bucks a month. But wait, cried the mayoress of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the developer has promised to give the first weekend of the month, as well as one weekday night, free! This she deems “services in kind,” and so the real sum is a respectable 8,690 bucks a month. Great deal, right?

Predictably, the argument leaves some cold; here’s one critic:

González Costa señaló que en 25 años la empresa “habrá pagado apenas un millón de dólares y lo que va a generar Ecofútbol en un año es cinco  veces lo que generará el Municipio en 25 años”.

(González Costa pointed out that in 25 years the business would have paid scarcely a million dollars, and Ecofútbol would have generated five times in one year what the Municipality earned in 25 years.”)

“Ecofútbol,” you say? What’s so “eco” about soccer?

The plot, as it seems to in the tropics, thickens….

Ecofútbol sprang into existence in—no surprise here—July of last year, and was awarded the contract without a public auction. Why? Well, according to the paper, the matter was in “the public interest.” And the developer behind the project? A father / son team of guys named Víctor González Serrallés and Víctor González Barahona.

The first impression was good; here’s what Wharton School’s alumni magazine had to say about the father, Víctor González Barahona:

Gonzalez’ business ventures are grouped into three companies. Puerto Rico Land and Fruit Co. produces and sells organically grown coffee, manages ecological restoration projects and is involved in setting up a mitigation bank. The concept behind a mitigation bank, says Gonzalez, is to establish an inventory of restored and created wetlands which are then sold as credits to developers whom regulatory agencies allow to impact environmentally sensitive areas.

“No one else in Puerto Rico is doing this, although it is becoming more common in the U.S.,” he adds. “These mitigation banks are seen as a way of resolving the main conflict between the business and environmental communities by offering companies a way to both make money and protect our environment.”

But González is no stranger to controversy. There was the brilliant scheme to put a wind farm in Culebra, a plan that riled the residents, since the turbines…well, consider this source:

This project involves the construction of five wind turbines 390 feet high, four residences, an office structure, a maintenance shop, an electrical substation, and a water storage tank of 10,000 gallons, among other facilities, which are all visible from Flamenco Beach.

Flamenco Beach, by the way, routinely makes the ten-best-beaches-in-the-world list in travel magazines. Here, take a look….

Happily, the residents prevailed—not without a good deal of struggle—and González withdrew the project. But now, he’s back at it, because guess what? According to the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 24 April 2014, the son, Víctor González Serrallés is going to operate Ecofútbol, but papa is going to have “a part” by using solar and wind power to generate electricity.

Wonderful scheme, right?

There is, as always, a problem. We might have the sun, but do we have the wind? Because González put up twenty-five or so wind mills in a fertile valley of Puerto Rico, with the expectation of generating enough energy to sell back to the power company, and now…

…well, I’ve looked, and I can’t tell you. The last thing I remember is that the whole thing was shut down, and the contracts were being “renegotiated.” Oh, and that the whole affair was such an environmental mess that González Barahona had to cede 623 cuerdas (one cuerda is roughly an acre) of land to the Department of Natural Resources. What did he do? He gave up only 427 cuerdas, and then turned around and asked for a million dollar tax credit from the treasury department. Why? He claimed the land was a “donation,” when in fact it was part of a settlement…..

So the news about the wind project is scarce.  What I can tell you is that the company website is, well, unimpressive, and curiously incomplete. I have just spent—what’s time to a blogger?—ten minutes going through the site, and guess what? The Guayanilla project doesn’t appear there. What does? Photos of solar panels on private residences.

Guys? According to the print version of El Nuevo Día, Windmar was awarded six contracts worth 524.6 million dollars, and your company is showing me solar panels on rooftops? Somebody out there, tell me if there isn’t something just a bit screwy about this….

“Windmar has acquired extensive experience with the local government permitting process and has received several PPOA’s for wind and solar projects from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (“PREPA”).”

That’s from the home page of the company website.

And it seems it’s not just “extensive experience with the local government permitting process” that Windmar has acquired. They also seem to know how to bamboozle the municipality of San Juan….

An alternative for the municipality….

A Walk Through a New Day

Right—time to take a walk through the new day. Or rather, The New Day, since that’s what the premiere and maybe at this point only newspaper on the island is called: El Nuevo Día. So what kind of day are we having?

Rotten, if the Day is to be believed. We start off grimly enough with the news that many of us, living in violence-prone communities, now have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—the same PTSD that soldiers coming back from Iraq are experiencing. So what percentage of the population suffers from PTSD in these communities? Forty percent.

I know all of this because I saw the headline online—The Day, however, has taken to not publishing its main story online: you have to buy the paper in paper, or buy the paper in eInk (at last! A red squiggle I like—I’m totally with you, computer….) So I went to the drug store, where I bought the paper—approximately the size of the New York City telephone book, or at least the one twenty years ago, before people had smart phones….

“It’s Like Living a Civil War,” says the lead story, which goes on to point out that in the last six years, we’ve had 5,637 murders on the island versus 2,291 deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. Granted, at its peak the US presence in Afghanistan was only 140,000 soldiers, versus a population of 3.7 million people on the island. But still—what to make of the fact that New York City, with 8 million people or so, has considerably fewer murders than Puerto Rico? 

Particularly worrisome is how are kids are doing: 40,000 have major depression and 53,000 are said to have suicidal ideation. Say what? Almost by definition, wouldn’t you assume that anyone with suicidal ideation suffers from major depression? Seems screwy to me….

We are, in short, all cocked up. So what’s the solution? Well, the Day has the answer (or perhaps The Answer), and that is integration of programs that have proven effective in Puerto Rico. And the Day lists them; curiously, all but one of the nine programs is named in English.

Well, that’s good to know, and very much needed, because on turning the page we get to the story about the school principal who got gunned down on a highly transited road while driving at 7:30 in the evening. Oh, and there are no leads, though lieutenant Elexis Torres, who’s investigating the case, said there has to be someone who saw the car, or the color of the car, or even the license plate of the car. But guess what? No one’s talking….

OK—wrap my head around that, and doesn’t it seem logical that the next page is a long interview with our new chief of police, James Tuller, who was born in New York but lived on the island for much of his childhood and has “close ties” to the island. He has, however, 40 years experience of being a cop, all of it in New York City.

And he was around for the “broken window” program, more formally known as the Bratton Plan. You’ll remember the theory—go after the small stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself. So that meant cracking down on people who were jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, fixing broken windows, fining the guys out washing car windows and shaking down the motorists who hadn’t wanted the service.

Well, Tuller is going to have his hands full. Or rather, there are many opportunities here. We could start with the people who are selling parking on public streets, and promising to offer “protection” for your car. Who knows what might happen? You wouldn’t want to come back and find your windshield broken—would you? Just a few bucks and everything will be all right. Worth it, really, for the peace of mind….

Right, skip gently over the news that DTOP—that’s the Department of Transportation and Public Works—is offering a 35% amnesty on traffic tickets. Oh, and we’re getting a new president of the University of Puerto Rico, which, it turns out, gets a third of its funds from federal money.

Lastly, we come to an opinion piece by Benjamín Torres Gotay, who uses the sorry situation of the putative super port of Ponce as a metaphor for our society.

Ponce, you see, is our second largest city, and is incidentally one of the fifteen most crime-ridden cities from page 4. And twenty years ago, the mayor of Ponce hit on the idea: expand and dredge the harbor, get the big cranes in, and make a super port. Merchandise would come in from Asia or wherever in huge ships, and then get put into smaller ships to be shipped around the Caribbean and the Americas.

Great idea, right? Nor is it just an idea—since in the twenty years since the idea was proposed, some quarter of a billion dollars has been spent. And not without something to show for it.

I’ve seen them—the two cranes—and they are massive. I saw them on a voyage into the absurd that my friend Harry drove me through last year. First we passed a wind farm with some 50 or 60 massive turbines that were supposed to be spinning. They weren’t, so what was the problem? Well, the company that made them had announced that the blade was falling on some identical models somewhere else in the world. But that wasn’t the only problem, because if seemed that the valley had insufficient wind. In fact, there is nowhere on the island where there is enough wind to make this project profitable.

We then got to the Playa de Ponce , a community so poor that a nun—the sister of a former governor—had to start a community center for the people there. And what was there? Two enormous piles of junk metal.

“It’s the only thing we export,” said Harry gloomily. “Oh sure, some specialty coffee, and some specialty fruits—but nothing else. The only thing that the world wants or needs from Puerto Rico? Our trash—that’s all we produce….”

Then we went a bit further, and came to the massive cranes—erected who knows when and never used. What’s happened? Well, they’ve been the focus of political squabbles –the most recent of which is whether the project should be in the hands of the municipality of Ponce or of the central government.

Guys?

Twenty years, and you are arguing this? And Torres Gotay says it best: in the time that we have spent arguing whether the color should be yellow or orange, the Dominican Republic—as corrupt as it is—has managed to build a super port of its own. So guess what? We may as well skip the idea, wait until the salt air takes its toll and the cranes are in imminent danger of collapse.

And then what?

Well, there’s a nice pile of junk metal nearby….  

Fertile Fields

This being a decent blog, I can’t repeat what I said when I saw them, that day with Harry, but it was something like, “what the fuh…?”

Harry was driving; we were on the highway to Ponce, the island’s second largest city. And right there, where Santa Isabel should be, was this:

Yup, 44 windmills in a plain between two mountains. Quite a cite / sight it was, and a bit difficult to overlook.

“They’re completely worthless,” said Harry. “They’re not producing any energy, really. It was another stupid plan of your governor….”

It was a joke—OK, maybe the slightest of jabs. Harry favors independence, but fears gravely that I am a statehooder.

“I’m not surprised,” I said, “that it’s not producing any energy. I tried for years to get Wal-Mart to install windmills, and the sustainability guy told me there’s nowhere on the island with enough wind.”

Actually, if memory serves, the only place with enough wind was alongside of the expressway we were driving on. Cars moving at 65 miles per hour create a lot of air movement.

We had been talking, Harry and I, of the wonderful developments in Puerto Rico. The statue of Christopher Colombus, a monstrosity bigger than the Statue of Liberty, had been shipped off to Arecibo, a town west of San Juan, where it was to be erected. It had been offered to several cities in the US, but curiously, nobody wanted it. Could it be because it looked like this?

“Well, not every statue has to be beautiful,” I said to Harry. And he agreed: there has to be a place for diversity of aesthetics in our society. And went on to tell me that the windmill parts had been stored in his neighborhood, and that each blade was exactly one city block long. He even showed me the block.

“There are two over at Bacardi,” I said, “and one sitting on the municipal dump.”

Right, so Harry had to tell me the story on that.

The governor, wanting to promote this excellent scheme, had erected the windmill on the dump, and they had all watched breathlessly for the majestic white—symbolic for clean and renewable—blades to spin. They were as still as corpses.

Well, that was a problem, but not for long, and not for our governor. What did he do? Rigged it up with electricity, and we now have, as Harry explained it, an enormous fan slowly twirling in public view. See? Instead of producing any energy, it is in fact consuming it….

This made perfect sense, in a tropical sort of way; it was a precise example of a previous, also statehood, governor’s campaign motto: “¿Problema? ¡Resuelto!”

(Problem? Fixed!)

Well, it was a thing to know about, so I looked it up, after I got home. And found that a company, Pattern Energy, had invested 215 million bucks into this project, and were intending to sell the power company 95 MW, enough to power 33 thousand homes.

Yes, and this would be a savings of $13,000 per hour for the company, and thus for us!

Well, the news came out, a week ago. The windmills have been stopped, for the time being. And why? It seems that the turbines have an unfortunate habit—the blades are flying off. So, shut down until further notice.

Fear not, Readers, that we will be sitting in the dark, reduced to rubbing sticks to light the fires to heat our food. For the new director of the energy company—for we have a new governor, so everybody has to change, even the president of the University of Puerto Rico—has just stated what Marc and Harry knew that day in September.

There’s no wind.

The project, in fact, generates all of 3% of the energy on the island. And the turbines are working at only 20% of capacity, not the 40%-50% that is expected. So Pattern Energy, “one of North America’s leading independent wind and transmission companies,” according to their website, has just stuck in $215,000,000 to Puerto Rico, and is getting back…

…what?

“Did García Márquez really say that about Puerto Rico?” I asked Harry. He knew immediately the remark; it’s part of Puerto Rican folklore. When asked why he didn’t write about Puerto Rico, García Márquez said something like, “they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico….”

“Absolutely,” returned Harry. 

Good to know. What would I write about, if I woke up and found everything normal?