The High Springs City Commission experienced highs and lows during its regular meeting on Thursday, with a swearing-in following last week’s election, before staff presented an unexpected bill of nearly $900,000 for the city’s sewer project.
Commissioner and former mayor Tristan Grunder slipped into a dress jacket as City Clerk Angela Stone swore him back onto the commission for another three-year term.
Grunder secured almost 68% of the votes cast during the Nov. 4 election to defeat Seat 3 challenger and High Springs Charter Review Board member Julie Ann Tapia-Ruano, 587 to 279.
He thanked his family for their support and the citizens of High Springs for trusting him. Grunder will also serve as chair of the Community Redevelopment Agency board alongside Commissioner Chad Howell as vice chair.
“This town is a very amazing, wonderful, beautiful place to live,” Grunder said. “We’ve got our problems, but we’ve got better people and that was decided. I feel so honored to represent this town for a second term and I will do absolutely everything and anything I can.”
The dais reshuffled again after Grunder made a motion to elect commissioner and former Vice Mayor Andrew Miller as mayor, which the commission unanimously approved.
The commission also approved Commissioner Katherine Weitz’s nomination for Commissioner Wayne Bloodsworth Jr. as vice mayor.
Miller and Bloodsworth Jr.’s terms on the City Commission end in 2026.
“I would like to say thank you for trusting me for being mayor this upcoming year,” Miller said. “I’m excited to see the city move forward in a positive way.”
Thursday’s agenda was amended earlier in the week when staff added an item to discuss, consider and act on paying an $896,861.35 bill from Evoqua Water Technologies. The commission did act to pay the bill, but not without discussion and consideration.
The invoice comes from the city’s new wastewater treatment facility project, specifically for the construction of a treatment tank and rehabbing the system’s old tank.
Even though purchase orders for the project were approved at the start of the project almost three years ago, staff explained the city just recently received the Evoqua invoice on Sept. 22 because that part of the project had to be completed first.
City Manager Jeremy Marshall said he wanted to bring the invoice before the commission to be transparent about why so much money would now be leaving the city and that staff were negotiating a late fee, which could bring the bill up to $910,314.27 since it wasn’t paid by Oct. 10.
Emergency cash funds will pay the invoice from the city’s infrastructure fees account, which funds projects like roads, water and sewer lines.
Finance Director Diane Wilson said the account has over $1 million in it and that while this bill would drain most of it, chunks of cash from revenues, like property taxes, would start coming in this month to replenish it.
Wilson said this is the kind of incident she’s been nervous about happening since the city already faces a $723,000 deficit. She said it further emphasized the need for long-term solutions to build reserves.
“I don’t know how many other ways to say it, we are in a spot, and I’ve been saying it and now it’s happened,” Wilson said. “This just solidifies that we need to speed up our short long-term planning.”
Wilson and Marshall said they’ve been having to do a lot of digging to figure out why this purchase order failed to come up in the city’s system for any staff or external auditors to find, since it was approved.
Although they did not name her, Weitz and Wilson said the incident seemed to be another incident of hidden misspending consistent with Marshall’s predecessor, Ashley Stathatos, who resigned in November 2023.
Also, not naming Stathatos, Marshall said he is launching an investigation into the wastewater project and will search through emails from his predecessor and former staff members to figure out how the misplacement of this bill happened and who needs to be held accountable.
Despite the weight of having to pay the bill, the commission, staff and some citizens agreed it was good to have transparency, unlike in the past.
“What you have now that you didn’t have three years ago, two years ago, we’re having honest conversations here, and that’s what the people of this community deserve,” Weitz said. “And we, the five of us, are going to have to figure it out. That’s why we’re here.”
Editor’s note: This story was underwritten by a grant from the Rural Reporting Initiative at the Community Foundation of North Central Florida. To learn more or get involved, click here.