We Can Easily Mitigate the $800,000 FP&L Over Payment Problem

At a council meeting this past April, the city manager informed the council that FPL had overpaid Miami Springs $800,000 in franchise fees that they shouldn’t have, and now they want their money back! Overcharging residents for power should mitigate any return of funds to them, but that may not happen.

I’m here to help. I figured out a way to bring in extra revenue and ‘balance’ the books that FP&L has re-written. Written, seemingly by a doctor with hand-cramps and a case of dysgraphia who never paid attention during penmanship class.

We need an ongoing revenue stream which will not raise taxes. The transponder, which I count among the world’s great inventions, is right up there with the Cotton Gin which produces gin from ordinary cotton and the Candwich, a sandwich in a can.

Where was I? Oh yeah, new funding stream for Miami Springs….

There exists a “Toll-by-Plate” system. On some South Florida roadways, tolls are deducted from your account automatically whenever you pass beneath some overhead technology. It’s an open road or cashless tolling system and I wonder if we can utilize that technology to our advantage. If your vehicle does not have a Sun-Pass transponder and you pass through a toll area, a camera will snap a photo of the vehicle’s license plate and a bill for the toll will be sent to the registered owner.

Let me ask a question. If you signed up for the automatic payment from your toll account when the transponder dips below $10, do you track it? If occasionally a small deduction were made, would you even know about it? I’m counting on the majority saying “No”.

Let’s take that technology and install it Northbound and Southbound around the Miami Springs circle to ‘identify’ the cut through traffic at peak times. To protect residents, we’ll issue a ‘blocker’ to every resident vehicle and only activate the system for ‘cut throughs’ during rush hour.

Every time a non-resident cuts through Miami Springs a ‘small’ amount will be deducted from their transponder. If they continually cut through, it will be a sliding scale. We’re not greedy here.

We’re going to have to let the county in on this one because we can’t just have our crew go in at night and install the overhead system which could be embedded in a ‘Welcome to Miami Springs’ banner with a pueblo revival style motif. Drivers will look at the pretty banner and never know what happened. They’ll think that ‘beep’ was from their phone. I’m counting on the fact that we residents don’t mention this bit of subversive activity except to our close friends and relatives.

We’ll have to throw the county a ‘bone’ in the form of suggesting that they install the same type of system into all our stop signs for a little additional revenue. Whenever someone rolls through a stop sign an amount is deducted from the transponder. To let the driver know what just happened, a speaker will activate, and a prerecorded voice will say ‘Whoooops!!!’

A complete stop instantly de-activates the technology. Same with traffic lights. When you run the red light, an amount is deducted from the transponder. This will be easy all around with no tickets sent in the mail and no points deducted from your license because really, all they seem to care about is the money. Drivers will be more prone to actually stop for a red light and accident rates will go down. When accident incidents decrease, insurance might be lower. Everybody wins and we can start shopping outside the zip code!