Bryan’s Chief of Staff, Karl Knight, Voted as WAPA’s Next Executive Director

Information reaching the Consortium is that Karl Knight, chief of staff to Governor Albert Bryan Jr., was approved as the next executive director of the Water and Power Authority. The vote for Mr. Knight was taken during the executive session of Thursday’s meeting of WAPA’s governing board.

During a press conference earlier this month, Consortium journalists asked Governor Albert Bryan Jr. whether he was lobbying for the appointment of Mr. Knight to replace Mr. Smith as WAPA’s executive director, as reported by the Consortium.‌

The governor began his response by saying, “I don’t want to lose my chief of staff,” before launching into a passionate argument about why he felt Mr. Knight was ideally suited for the job, beginning with the urgency of the appointment. “I am not willing to wait for a search committee to do six months of searching to bring me another person that’s not familiar with what we’re dealing with,” Governor Bryan declared. He touted Mr. Knight’s “ability to deal with the legislature, our administration, that transparency and trust that’s already established”, which he said would “allow for us to make an approach."

He extolled Mr. Knight’s academic prowess and detailed his long-term close association with WAPA: from the utility company funding his engineering training to him returning to work with WAPA for years. According to Governor Bryan, Mr. Knight “led the effort to write the strategic plan for WAPA at that time, worked in the plants for a number of years.” After leaving WAPA’s employ, Mr. Knight returned as a board member “through a lot of our troubled times,” Mr. Bryan continued. Those times included the period in which WAPA embarked on the ill-fated propane conversion project with Vitol, which ended up costing Virgin Islanders over $113 million more than the initial $87 million estimate. With the project still incomplete as of press time, the Vitol misadventure ultimately required a $145 million bailout from the federal government in order for WAPA to take ownership of the propane infrastructure.