While 73% of Gainesville voters cast their November ballots in favor of returning control over public utilities back to the city, the issue remains unresolved — and has moved to a courtroom. A judge ruled on April 2 the Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority Board will remain in control of city utilities due to misleading language on the ballot referendum.
Judge George M. Wright of the Eighth Judicial Circuit ruled that while there’s room for the charter to be amended in the future, the language in the November referendum was unclear. Under the judge’s ruling, the referendum can be placed back on the ballot in future elections.
The November referendum deleted an article of the city’s charter, which created the GRU Authority. The original change to the city’s charter was made because of the Florida legislature's passing of HB 1645, filed by Rep. Chuck Clemons, R-Newberry. The law removed the general manager of Gainesvlle’s utilities, replacing them with the Authority Board.
In response to the referendum, the GRU Authority filed a complaint against the city, resulting in the April 2 hearing. The complaint protested the proposed referendum, citing the language was misleading and in direct opposition to HB 1645.
Robert Hutchinson, a board member and the former president of Gainesville Residents United, said the city needs to get started on a new referendum, as the judge suggested.
Gainesville Residents United, a community advocacy group, has been involved in several cases over GRU’s ownership and arguing against the authority board.
The importance of who controls the city’s utilities comes down to public power, Hutchinson said.
“I worked for GRU for nearly a decade,” he said. “When power companies are run by elected governing boards, they are more responsive to all kinds of issues.”
Residents having the power to vote who controls their utilities is paramount, he said. Control over the Gainesville utilities is important, he said, because it controls resources like water, natural gas and some internet services.
“Right now, there's one person who puts the people on the utility authority, and that's the governor of the state of Florida, who knows nothing about the local conditions here on the ground,” Hutchinson said.
Ed Bielarski, the CEO of GRU, said the company is planning to appeal the judge’s ruling that allows for a future referendum.
Bielarski said the company is moving toward a customer-first organization, and in terms of managing the city’s utilities, the GRU Authority has made several beneficial changes. Bielarski said the Authority Board lowered residential bills and entered a series of transactions the company wasn’t allowed to under the city commission.
The GRU Authority approved a resolution in December expanding the number of people qualifying for the lowest-use tier, who pay less than customers who use more energy. At the same time, the authority increased prices for the higher tier. In doing so, GRU aimed to improve rates for the majority of GRU customers while forcing those using larger amounts of energy per month to pay more.
“The organization is moving toward a business type of organization that will be searching for efficiencies, lower costs and lower rates, by comparison to the other utilities in the state,” Bielarski said.
Bielarski compared the situation to the actions of a parent requiring intervention from social services, likening the City of Gainesville to a parent harming their children — in this case, GRU. The state had to step in and intervene through HB 1645, he said, to “override the local ability to abuse the customers of GRU.”
The city commission, he said, was the aggressor. The city burdened GRU with $2 billion of debt and solar feed-in tariffs, Bielarski said, resulting in the highest utility rates in the state. The GRU Authority is correcting the damage done to the low-income households the city commission put in jeopardy through those actions, he said.
For electricity prices specifically, GRU rates ranked the fourth-most expensive among Florida companies for residential customers in 2023, according to data from the US Energy Information Association. It was the highest among municipal-owned companies. In 2022, it ranked second.
The original referendum was misleading from the start, he said, and therefore prevented voters from voting with full information.
“When something is misleading, it's hard to verify the veracity of the vote,” he said. “Because if you don't know what you're voting for, whether it was 80% or 20%, you didn't know what you were voting for.”
City Commissioner Casey Willits said the city commission plans to appeal as well, defending the language of the initial referendum.
The judge found a lack of clarity in whether the general manager of Gainesville’s utilities would be elected or appointed, he said, which might mislead voters. Willits said he believes there’s enough precedent about intention to win the appeal on the issue, and the ballot was carefully created to be as concise as possible.
“We didn't get to 73% because a bunch of people were confused,” he said. “We got to 73% because of a long history of public utilities, a long history of voters – if not always – trusting the commission that they vote for.”
However, Willits said if the commission doesn’t win the appeal, it has every intention of sending the decision back to voters. To those who were part of the 73%, he said to remember why they voted and be prepared to return to the ballot box.
“Democracy doesn’t happen just in one election,” he said. “So join us for this journey.”
Contact Kaysheri Haffner at khaffner@alligator.org. Follow her on X @kaysheri_h.
Kaysheri Haffner is a second-year journalism major and the Criminal Justice reporter for the Alligator. When she's not on the clock, she can be found reading a book or working on a creative writing project.
