Seth Johnson
Gov. Ron DeSantis will appoint a new Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority in May following the resignation of all four members this week.
The resignations are all effective 60 days after their submission, meaning the current board members will continue to manage Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) until mid-May. The current board took office in October.
The resignations came after a lawsuit by Robert Hutchinson and Jeffrey Shapiro against DeSantis. The suit argued DeSantis violated the procedure set forth in the bill that created the GRU Authority by failing to give notice of the positions and appointing four members—including one who resigned before taking her seat—who lived in unincorporated Alachua County.
The governor’s office has reopened applications for the GRU Authority. The applications are due by 5 p.m. on April 16.
“It’s chaos, and this chaos could’ve been solved, literally, in October,” said Hutchinson, president of Gainesville Residents United, pointing to when he first raised the issue.
Gainesville Residents United formed in response to the creation of the GRU Authority and has filed several lawsuits to prevent the authority from taking control of the utility. However, Hutchinson said the current lawsuit isn’t about the pros or cons of House Bill 1645 that created the Authority in 2023. He said it’s about the governor following the bill passed by the Legislature even if Hutchinson disagrees with the bill.
The lawsuit had an oral hearing on Feb. 22 in Leon County’s Second Judicial Circuit, and Judge J. Lee Marsh said at the end that he leaned in favor of Hutchinson and Shapiro. But Marsh decided against ruling from the bench. He gave both parties the opportunity to settle the agreement and return with their proposed orders.
The judge gave the parties until March 15 to settle on a course of action, and the governor’s office chose to redo the applications.
“It’s very, very bittersweet,” Hutchinson said. “Why did a citizens group have to sue the top official in the state just to follow the law?”
The creation of the GRU Authority caused contentions since the bill was first proposed, and the city of Gainesville unsuccessfully sued DeSantis to stop the bill. Gainesville Residents United has tracked six different lawsuits concerning the Authority.
In a Friday phone interview, GRU Authority Chair Craig Carter said he heard the resignations and reapplications might be necessary about a week before the board members resigned. But he didn’t know what would happen until he got a call walking him through the plan.
He said he plans to reapply and continue working on the authority and said he doesn’t think the reappointments will cause any delays within GRU.
“Some people see it as a huge victory, and some people see it as a setback,” said Carter, who lives inside the Gainesville city limits. “I just see it as what it is. I mean, we want to make sure everything’s done right, and if it wasn’t done right, the governor wants to make sure it’s done.”
State Rep. Chuck Clemons, R-Newberry, the author of HB 1645, signaled a whole new board was coming during an interview at a Mainstreet Daily News member event Thursday. He addressed the residency issue, saying it wasn’t necessarily his intent to have four authority members from outside of Gainesville. However, he said lawyers interpreted his use of “minimum” to allow more than one member from the unincorporated area.
Clemons, who is term-limited and leaving the Legislature, said he would not apply to join the GRU Authority.
“It will benefit everyone to have a GRU board seated without challenges and can get to work on financial stability and lowering rates for our neighbors,” Clemons said in a Friday statement about the resignations.
The GRU Authority will continue meeting and making decisions for the utility with no planned gaps between the resignations’ effective date and the start of the new members.
Tony Cunningham, CEO and general manager of GRU, said the utility monitored the lawsuit but didn’t take part. He said he wasn’t involved in the governor’s plan to reappoint the board members and learned about the plan as it unfolded.
Regardless of changing board members, Cunningham said services will continue as usual. The GRU Authority will next meet on March 27.
“We’re not on pause. We’re not delaying,” Cunningham said in a Friday interview. “We are and we will continue to operate and function and serve our customers.”
The governor could reappoint Carter and one of the other three members, who all live outside city limits. But several new members will likely now join the board with only a month and a half before an annual budget needs to be submitted.
Cunningham said GRU staff will be focused on quickly getting the new members up to speed and ready to pass a budget. He said the higher decisions don’t impact the work of GRU’s employees, and he added that utility workers are used to adapting to circumstances to continue its services.
“Our employees are just laser focused on what their primary responsibility is—and that is providing power, providing water and wastewater service, natural gas service and telecommunications,” Cunningham said. “They have continued to do that well, and I’ve not seen anything that indicates otherwise.”
Clemons is lying. There is no way the clause mentioning “minimum” can be interpreted to mean this board was legitimate. It clearly spells out a minimum of one out of city member to be increased only when and if non-city customers of GRU increased proportionally to city customers and that has not happened. Why lie about it?
Good for Hutch, Jefferey Shapiro and Gainesville Residents United!
And thank goodness Clemons is term-limited out of office. He did a _terrible_ disservice. Prior to his HB 1645, if we didn’t like the way GRU was being run, we could vote the city commissioners out of office. Now it’s the governor who appoints the Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority; he doesn’t live in the city and he certainly is not going to listen to or heed the will of Gainesville’s electorate.
This article brings up several pertinent points:
*Those of us who are members of Main Street Daily News were at the luncheon to hear Rep. Clemons say that all the GRUA board members would resign.
*If you have read HB 1645, it is obvious that the Authority members were required to live in Gainesville, as noted by author Rep. Clemons at the luncheon and confirmed by a judge.
*HB 1645 continues to create absolute havoc. Our bond holders will now have more uncertainty to add the their list of concerns.
*The new Authority members will have a very short window to get up to speed on a budget that has been significantly affected by the Authority’s changes to payment to the city for services they use and by the city requiring GRU to pay for right of way. It’s complicated at the best of times and these are the worst of times.
*We, the GRU customers, are incredibly fortunate for the dedication of Tony Cunningham and the GRU staff. They have been pushed around, left with uncertainty about their jobs and they continue to wonder who are the people governing the utility? We are all wondering.
you haven’t read it then. It clearly also says that at least 1 member should reside outside the city limits. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1645/BillText/er/PDF
It seems straightforward to me, too:
(2) All members of the Authority shall:
. . .
(d) Be a qualified elector of the City, except that a minimum of one member must be a resident of the unincorporated area of the county or a municipality in the county other than the City of Gainesville.
Read it all Mike and see my comment to infinity above
Read it all infinity. The “minimum” of 1 represents the ratio of non-Gainesville city residents who are GRU electric customers. It can only be increased above the “minimum” of 1 if that ratio increases, not because the Governor is too stupid or lazy to read the law.
That’s a fact! Read it.
“citizen’s group” uhh, yeah pull the other 1 Hutch.
why can’t we have it like the judges and Water Advisory boards where the members are elected? or given a yes/no vote.