About 20 people gathered under umbrellas outside the Gainesville Regional Utility headquarters Monday afternoon with signs reading, “Vote yes for local public utilities.”
Attendees rallied to support an amendment that would return the company’s leadership from state to city control. It will appear on the general election ballot Nov. 5.
GRU was founded as the city’s first public utility in 1912. It was overseen by the Gainesville City Commission until 2023, when the state legislature passed a bill transferring control to a board of directors appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“We have no way of holding them accountable,” said campaign manager Bobby Mermer at the event Monday afternoon. “They only have to listen to who appointed them. And who can tell me who appointed them? Ron DeSantis. And where does he live? Tallahassee.”
The city commission created an ordinance to dissolve the controversial board in 2024, citing accountability concerns.
Mermer pointed to the board’s “Draconian” $12 million budget cut, which passed in June, as evidence of its poor decision-making.
GRU cut operations and maintenance expenses from its budget proposal at the request of the authority, with its chair, Ed Bielarski, citing a commitment to keeping customer rates affordable. The earlier proposal requested base rate increases for electric, gas, water and wastewater, GRU said.
However, the cut also put more pressure on linemen, Mermer said. That pressure peaked during Hurricane Helene, with some employees seeing shifts up to 16 hours after about 40% of the city lost power, he said.
With hurricane season just beginning and Hurricane MiltonMelvin expected to make landfall in a few days, “overworked and understaffed” GRU employees need the board to reverse the cut to have sufficient resources to prepare, he said.
GRU provides not just electric services, but stable jobs and employment, said former GRU employee and Gainesville native Tina Certain. She took the megaphone to thank those employees who have served the city both during storms and every day.
“It used to be the tagline that GRU is owned by the people it serves,” she said. “This is our organization.”
Certain asked the crowd to join her in voting to revert the local utility back to local control.
Jyoti Parmar, a Gainesville resident and representative for the nonprofit environmental group Sierra Club of Florida, led the speeches. A flier distributed at the event informed attendees of “several bad decisions” the authority has made since its creation.
Among the decisions cited were eliminating the chief sustainability officer position formerly held by Eric Walters; ending net-metering, which allowed customers to feed excess energy from solar panels back into the grid; and scrapping the Integrated Resource Plan, which assessed future electric needs.
“They are so partisan that they are ignoring the fact solar energy not only is cleaner, it is cheaper, and it needs to happen in order to build a future,” Parmar said. “We need it, they know it, and they would rather not do it because they are being put in place.”
Before ending the rally to head inside for the monthly GRU Authority meeting, Parmar encouraged people to make sure their friends and family members knew about the amendment. The measure will appear on the very bottom of voters’ ballots next month, she said.
Parmar was inspired to organize the event after a board member asked a resident at its Sept. 4 meeting what people wanted if the city took back control.
“If they were listening, they would know what they want,” she said. “What we want is local control over our utilities.”
Contact Zoey Thomas at zthomas@alligator.org. Follow her on X @zoeythomas39
Zoey Thomas is a media production junior and the Fall 2024 Enterprise Health Reporter for The Alligator. She previously worked on the University and Metro desks. Her most prized assets include her espresso machine, Regal Unlimited movie pass and HOKA running shoes.
