The GRU Authority

October 5, 2023

Months of fighting, lawsuits, and protests came to an end last night when the Mayor swore in 4 of the 5 members of the GRU Authority at City Hall, completing the transfer of half of our city government to the State of Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The members are:

Chair: Craig Carter
Vice-Chair: James Coats IV
Tara Ezzell
Robert Karow
C. Eric Lawson

You can read about them more in the Gainesville Sun.

All things considered, the selections could have been much worse, and I have nothing bad to say about any of them personally. I know some of the members, don’t know most of them, but they seem to have pretty good resumes and none seem to be coming in with an axe to grind.

Considering how partisan and misleading the campaign leading up to this was, that was a pleasant surprise. Frankly, we as a Commission are going to need to work with them in the coming years to get through the multitude of issues this bill presents, and the monumental task of creating an unprecedented merging of City and State Government unlike anything else in the United States. So in that spirit I have nothing to say about them personally except to say “Welcome” and let’s try to make this work.

With that said, I have to say that their appointments strike me as more than a little hypocritical. Throughout this process, the arguments from Chuck Clemons were that this takeover was needed in order to ensure the utility is run by people “with utility experience” that represents “all of the ratepayers”, which will be represented by a “majority of Gainesville seats”.

None of that has turned out to be true. Almost none have utility experience. The only one close is Robert Karow, who worked in oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which is tangentially related to utilities, but miles away from what we do at GRU. Craig Carter was a City Commissioner, which means he spent years voting on GRU-related issues, but the core of the argument Clemons made was that being an elected official is not adequate experience to run a major utility.

At the same time, the bill is very clear that the representation of the board needs to be set by total electric meter customers, with a specific formula ensuring that the City has a majority number of seats representative to our electric metering. At the current number of meters that comes out to one county resident to four city residents. Chuck Clemons made this a main selling point when pitching the takeover to residents.

But four of them live outside the city, with only one inside the city, directly against the bill.

Of course, none of this is the fault of the members themselves, it’s the fault of the Governor and his staff. I’m still giving the board members the benefit of the doubt, and look forward to working with them on doing what is best for our City and ratepayers.

What Comes Next

On Friday Judge Angela Dempsey ruled against the city in our lawsuit against the Governor. This wasn’t a complete surprise, Judge Dempsey, a Bush appointee, has ruled with the Governor on everything from abortion restrictions to allowing him to withhold public records in his now infamous migrant flights.

We knew going into it that the deck was stacked against us in this judicial system, but the magnitude of the case, and the precedent it sets, required us to try. The basic right of residents of a city to select who makes their laws is “settled law” according to McQuillins Law of Municipal Corporations. State takeovers of portions of municipalities have been struck down in every state that I can find, from Georgia to New York. It has never been upheld.

But now it has, even on the weird technicality of the City not having standing. It’s a sad state of affairs for Florida, which seems to be sliding further and further from the basic tenets of democracy. This isn’t the end of the case though. Gainesville Residents United is a community group suing in federal court on the constitutionality of the takeover, and filed another court case on Monday against the appointments being outside the city. You can read more about those in the Gainesville Sun link above.

You can read more of LWV of Alachua County's actions and updates on the GRU controversy in our Article and Action Alert.