Puerto Rico’s water utility signed off on its $400,000 cloud-seeding contract without bringing it to its own governing board, according to testimony at a Senate hearing this week.
AAA President Luis González Delgado told senators the contract with SOAR — the same cloud-seeding operator behind the effort over Carraízo and La Plata — was handled as an operational matter, not something requiring board review. Under AAA’s own rules, contracts below $1 million don’t legally require board approval.
Board member Verónica Rodríguez Irizarry didn’t dispute that the contract fell under the threshold, but said the lack of communication to the board itself was a problem. She characterized it as a governance failure, even if not a legal one.
The hearing did not produce a new performance report on the cloud-seeding flights themselves — AAA has said it will release operational data once the program, which runs through November, concludes.
Related coverage: Cloud Seeding Returns Despite Limited Results in 2015
Sources: El Nuevo Día
