Opinion by Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
There are bad nights for a football team, and then there are bad nights for an entire city. Monday was both on a national scale. For any growing business or high school senior thinking about relocating to Tallahassee, this was the city’s one chance to make a first impression, and it blew it.
With a national television audience watching, Doak Campbell Stadium lost power shortly before Florida State was supposed to kick off against SMU. The game finally began nearly two hours late, with portions of the stadium still without power. The scoreboard was dark. The public-address system wasn’t functioning. Coaches lost electronic communications and sideline technology.
Miami immediately piled on. ESPN chronicled the trolling. And Tallahassee residents heard from friends and family around the country asking some version of the same question: What in the world happened in Tallahassee?
Good question.
This was a failure of leadership
Whatever the technical explanation turns out to be, Monday night was a failure of leadership.
That doesn’t mean the mayor, city manager or FSU president was supposed to know how to repair a transformer. It means people at the top are responsible for making sure their organizations are prepared when something goes wrong — and for communicating with the public when it does.
Neither happened very well Monday night.
Tens of thousands of fans sat inside and around Doak for nearly two hours with remarkably little information. Even after the PA system returned, there was no meaningful explanation or apology from university leadership and no thank-you to the fans who stuck around. As of 9:30 Tuesday morning, there had been no apology from FSU’s top leadership and nothing meaningful from City Hall, the mayor or the city manager.
For a city and university with plenty of professional communicators, Tallahassee suddenly became remarkably shy.
And communication wasn’t the only question.
This wasn’t the first outage
Thousands of City utility customers lost power the night before the game. We don’t yet know whether that had anything to do with what happened at Doak Monday night, and it may not have.
But it raises an obvious question: After a significant outage less than 24 hours before one of the largest events Tallahassee hosts all year, did anyone make sure the electrical infrastructure serving Doak was ready? Did the City talk with FSU? Were systems checked? Was backup power available?
Maybe all of that happened. Maybe Sunday’s outage and Monday’s failure were completely unrelated. Fine. Tell us. But after the night Tallahassee just had, “these things happen” isn’t much of an answer.
About that $27 million
There is another piece of history that makes Monday night’s embarrassment almost painfully ironic.
When FSU came to local taxpayers for help with Doak Campbell Stadium in 2021, it wasn’t asking for money to make the stadium prettier. The case for the $20 million Blueprint appropriation was built around aging infrastructure and public safety.
And right there on the list were electricity and lighting.
Contemporary reporting described the needs as including the stadium’s foundation, electricity, lighting and drainage. The final list included emergency lighting and aging electrical equipment, along with safety, ADA and code-compliance work. Because Blueprint borrowed the $20 million, the ultimate cost to local taxpayers was projected at nearly $27 million.
Think about that for a moment.
Local taxpayers were asked to spend nearly $27 million, including borrowing costs, to help FSU address aging stadium infrastructure that specifically included electricity and lighting.
Four years later, on national television, the lights went out.
That doesn’t establish that Monday night’s failure involved any equipment repaired with Blueprint money. We don’t know that yet. But it certainly makes taxpayers entitled to know exactly what electrical work their money paid for, what equipment failed Monday night and whether there is any connection between the two.
The irony doesn’t end there. As FSU’s much larger $265 million renovation neared completion, the university reported about $25 million in savings. Some argued that, given the local taxpayers’ contribution, FSU should give money back. Instead, FSU received approval to expand the project and use the savings for, among other things, new Jumbotrons and video boards.
Monday night, the Jumbotrons went dark along with everything else.
Madame Sunshine already knows what happened
Fortunately, Red Tape Florida’s Madame Sunshine has peered into her crystal ball.
She sees an investigation followed by an “isolated equipment failure” or an “unforeseeable electrical event.” There are already reports floating around about a vehicle striking a transformer, so perhaps that will prove to be the culprit. And perhaps it really was.
What Madame Sunshine has more trouble seeing is anyone stepping to a microphone and saying: “This happened on our watch. It was unacceptable. We should have been better prepared. Here’s what went wrong, and here’s what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
She also predicts that Sunday’s outages and Monday’s stadium failure will become completely unrelated events with remarkable speed — at least when the subject turns to responsibility.
Maybe they were unrelated. Let’s see the records.
Awards are nice. Performance is better.
There is some irony here.
Just last month, the City Commission celebrated City Manager Reese Goad receiving the E.C. Shreve Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Municipal Electric Association. The agenda item touted Tallahassee’s smart-grid technology, its commitment to reliable and high-quality service and its recognition as the “No. 1 Public Utility in America” and a “Utility of the Future, Today.”
Good for Goad. But this is the problem with government’s fixation on awards: people tend to remember performance more than plaques.
Monday night was about as visible a performance as Tallahassee could get: tens of thousands of people, a nationally televised football game and the eyes of the college football world on the city.
The lights went out, the game was delayed nearly two hours and the response from the people in charge was mostly silence.
That’s the kind of first impression that lingers for years.