During a regular meeting on Thursday, the High Springs City Commission heard updates on the staff’s investigation into an unexpected $900,000 bill and held off on renewing its solid waste contract.  

Before the unanimous vote to adopt an ordinance amending the 2024-25 fiscal year budget, Commissioner Tristan Grunder asked City Manager Jeremy Marshall if the city had taken the steps needed to prevent finding any more surprise bills.  

Last month, the commission used emergency cash funds from the city’s infrastructure fees account to cover an $896,861.35 bill from Evoqua Water Technologies related to the city’s wastewater treatment facility project.  

Although the purchase order was placed over two years prior to when the project started, it evaded staff, external auditors and the commission until September this year.  

Marshall said he’d make a timeline and go through emails from former staff members, including former City Manager Ashley Stathatos, to understand how the bill went overlooked. 

Marshall reported he’s still going through the emails to track down all payments of the city’s $2 million responsibility to the project. Once he’s done with that, he said he will go through the process of the purchase order to figure out what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.  

“Before I can fix it, I want to make sure there’s nothing else out there, and I’m getting more and more confident by the day that we’re good,” Marshall said. “But until I have every penny of that $2 million accounted for, I’m still working.” 

Finance Director Diane Wilson also said in addition to issues with the purchase order, the funding source was also a problem.  

She said the former city manager told staff that any bills coming from the project were reimbursable and covered by funding, which wasn’t true.  

Commissioner Katherine Weitz said she’d started making public records requests to go through former staff’s emails herself, and that it would take time because of the volume of them. 

“I think trying to put together a clear picture is critical, absolutely critical,” she said. “But it’s going to take time to make sure we get the right answer, not any kind of version.” 

Although the City Commission planned to make a final decision on renewing the city’s solid waste contract on Thursday, it voted 3-2 instead to punt the contract to its next meeting on Jan. 8 to allow all potential contractors to get their bids before the city. 

High Springs has been under contract with Waste Pro since 2023. Its current contract expires in April. 

Multiple commissioners expressed they were pleased with Waste Pro’s service and ready to sign a new contract.  

However, they also hadn’t received potential rates from GFL Environmental and Alachua County and wanted to wait to enter a new contract until they had.  

Vice Mayor Wayne Bloodsworth Jr. said the city owed its citizens the due diligence of ensuring the cheapest solid waste rates possible after rates had already risen. 

“I still think we owe it to our citizens to dig into this, and I’m disappointed that we don’t have this in place tonight,” he said. 

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.