Governor: Canceling LUMA contract ‘makes no sense’
By The Star Staff
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia insisted on Wednesday that he is not going to cancel the electricity transmission and distribution contract with LUMA Energy, as approved in an ordinary session by the House of Representatives.
“Here some like to play to the crowd,” the governor said at a press conference. “They make decisions basically because a sector of the population may like them, but that is not a responsible way to react to what happened three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks ago no one was talking about LUMA, practically no one. We had a stable service, the number of subscribers who did not have service was negligible and there was improvement in most of the metrics,” Pierluisi said. “Now the issue has resurfaced for obvious reasons; that is, we had that big blackout and obviously that causes annoyance, and then some who have always been hard on this entity before resumed that agenda.”
The governor said canceling the contract would create “a disaster.”
“Canceling a contract of this nature makes no sense,” he said. “What we would have then is a setback for months if not years. Because this is not like you can cancel that contract from one day to the next and then change all the management and personnel that are attending to the energy transmission and distribution area. So it really strikes me how the policy becomes so small and so, to a certain extent, irresponsible.”
Pierluisi insisted that it is not feasible to amend the contract either, because in his opinion, both LUMA, the Financial Oversight and Management Board and the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau would have to agree to the changes.