Publisher, city reach utility bill accord

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Gallup and the city's leading newspaper have reached a settlement in a lawsuit filed by the city over utility payments.

City Manager Eric Honeyfield said that the city has agreed to accept $55,000 from the Gallup Independent to settle the dispute. The paper has also agreed to pay $5,000 in interest and will be required to pay the settlement in monthly installments over a two-year period.

The official settlement will take place at the next city council meeting, but city officials have signed off on it.

The city originally claimed that the paper owed $180,000 for electricity it used but never paid for during a 24-month period beginning in 2004, but Honeyfield admitted that the figure was not an accurate reflection of what the paper really owed.

The dispute began after the paper put in a new printing press. The city discovered months later that the amount that the city was charging for electricity was too low. The city's utility department began sending paper statements that showed that their electricity use skyrocketed.

Robert Zollinger, publisher of the paper, protested, claiming that figures that showed the Independent used about 30,000 kilowatts of electricity one month and more than 160,000 the next month did not make any sense. Zollinger said the paper's use of electricity was fairly consistent from one month to another.

Over a period of several months, as the city investigated, Honeyfield said the city discovered that several errors had been made in calibrating the paper's bill.

"Our scale was off by a factor of 10," he said.

Another factor in the dispute was over the city's peak hours policy.

The city utility department purchases its electricity from the Public Service Company of New Mexico, which charges the city a premium for going over its regular usage during peak hours, which are in the evenings in the winter and in the afternoons in the summer,

The city, in turn, would charge those high-usage customers who increased their usage during these times an extra fee to compensate for their peak hour usage.

Honeyfield said that the city decided this was not fair to a handful of businesses in town who owned a generator and were able to cut down on their use of city electricity during peak hours. He added that the Independent and a couple of other customers who had that ability were given the opportunity to save on electricity by going to their generators during the peak hours.

When all of this was taken into consideration, and realizing how much it would cost to take the matter to court, Honeyfield said the city was happy to have the Independent pay the $55,000 plus interest. He pointed out that the paper had also paid $30,000 during the dispute, so the amount the city was receiving was actually $90,000.

While the problems started with city workers misreading the meter, Honeyfield said that responsibility for the mistakes had to rest with him. "The buck stops here."

But Zollinger said it's not as simple as that.

Throughout the dispute, he said, his main goal was to get the city to come up with an accurate bill.

But time after time, he said, the statements would come in with fundamental errors. For example, one bill showed the Independent using a lot of electricity on Sunday when it was closed, and using no electricity on Tuesday when it was printing the Independent as well as other papers.

Later, he said, city records showed the paper using electricity during the peak hours when the paper's record showed that it was on the generator.

He placed the blame for the problems squarely on the shoulders of Lance Allgood, the city's utility director.

"He's a bumbling incompetent," Zollinger said. "He should not be in his position."

Every time he presented a statement to the Independent, there would be problems of miscalculation. "His information was just absurd," Zollinger said.

He said he couldn't understand why the city kept him on since he is "unable to perform his job. He's the school system's poster child for dumbing down education."

Even now, after the city has admitted that its figures were wrong, Zollinger said the utility department's records still show that the paper is not using its generator during the peak hours. Zollinger said the paper's record shows that the paper starts using its generator 10 minutes before the peak hours begin.

But both the Honeyfield and Zollinger agreed on one thing.

"I'm glad this is over," Zollinger said.