The $400,000 contract the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority signed to seed clouds over its reservoirs is now being called void by the senator investigating it — and at the hearing where that happened, the utility acknowledged something more serious: its own employees had manipulated valves and shut down pumps at filtration plants.
Senator Héctor Joaquín Sánchez Álvarez, who chairs the Senate Commission on Transportation, Telecommunications, Public Services and Consumer Affairs, put the contract question conditionally but bluntly: “Si no se hicieron unos procesos que establece la ley, ese contrato es nulo” — if the processes the law sets out were not carried out, that contract is void. His grounds are that the AAA’s Governing Board was never consulted.
That much the board does not dispute. Verónica Rodríguez Irizarry, who represents the Association of Mayors on the board, said last week the project was never presented to it. But she also said board approval was not legally required, because the contract falls below the $1 million threshold that would have triggered it; she called the omission a communication failure rather than a breach.
Those two positions are not yet reconciled, and the difference matters: a communication failure is an internal embarrassment, while a void contract is $400,000 of public money spent without authority.
The contract itself was expedited on August 19 under the drought state of emergency, hiring Seeding Operations & Atmospheric Research. Seeding began September 5 and runs to November. SOAR is the same firm Puerto Rico used during the 2015 drought, when the results came in below expectations — a record that was public before the contract was signed.
The valve admission is the thread with further to run. AAA officials told the commission that employees had manipulated valves and shut off pumps at filtration plants; Sánchez Álvarez described that as possible sabotage of the drinking-water supply. AAA president Luis González Delgado has separately confirmed he made internal referrals over incidents under investigation at the corporation, including dredging work at a plant.
What has not been published is the substance: how many incidents, at which plants, over what period, whether any reached a prosecutor, and whether any of it affected service during the metro rotation. Those are the questions the commission said this hearing would be its last chance to put.
Reporting by NotiUno, El Nuevo Día and El Vocero. 787 Daily will update this piece as the commission’s findings are published.