When the residents of Gainesville, Florida, head to the polls in a few weeks, they won’t just be voting for their favorite presidential candidate — they’ll also be deciding on the future of their municipal electric utility.
For this episode of the Local Energy Rules Podcast, host John Farrell is joined by Bryan Eastman, District IV Commissioner for the City of Gainesville. In their conversation, Commissioner Eastman explains why the state legislature removed local control of the century-old Gainesville Regional Utilities and how the city is gearing up to take it back.
Listen to the full episode and explore more resources below, including a transcript and summary of the episode.
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Bryan Eastman:
This entire discussion was happening about taking GRU and putting it under a governor-appointed board. A number of these same groups went to Tallahassee and said, “If you want this to happen, ask the people if it’s something that they want.” This is our utility that we have invested in for over a hundred years that we have bonded money out for that we’ve taken great risk for that, something that is central to our community. The community needs to be asked before this decision gets made.
John Farrell:
The city of Gainesville, Florida, has owned its electric company since the first decade of the 20th century, but in the last 12 months, it’s lost the power to govern its utility due to a state-imposed change to its city charter. Not only has the state pushed out local control, but the utility leadership under state governance seems poised to ignore its own study suggesting that big investments in solar and batteries could reduce costs and make the city’s electricity cleaner. Joining me in August, 2024, Gainesville City commissioner Bryan Eastman explained the events leading to the state takeover and the upcoming ballot referendum to take back local power.
I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly, power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.
Bryan, thank you so much for joining me on Local Energy Rules.
Bryan Eastman:
Thank you so much, John. I’ve been a big fan and supporter of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for years. I’ve spoken with Chris Mitchell about internet issues. My wife’s actually been on podcasts talking about local zero waste initiatives, and so as a big fan, I’m just really excited to finally be on the podcast and speak.
John Farrell:
I’m so glad to hear that. That’s wonderful that you’ve got the connections to so many of our different areas of work. We sometimes talk about the parable of the elephant where the blind man and the elephant, where they touch the leg and they’re like, it’s a tree, and they touch the tail and it’s like it’s something else, and that people don’t necessarily have a sense for what our organization is about broadly. They know us through one of the specific areas. So it’s great that you’ve encountered both our broadband and our composting initiatives as well. All focus, of course on how communities can have more control over their local economy.
But anyway, to move beyond ILSR and talk about you here, I would love to hear what motivated you to run for the city commission in Gainesville and I guess what has drawn your attention or required you to focus on this issue of Gainesville’s publicly owned electric utility?
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes into a lot of what we were just talking about. I’ve long been fascinated by the things that have an impact on your day-to-day lives, but you may or may not see. I think we think a lot about what the federal government does. We think a lot about what Kamala Harris is doing, what Donald Trump is doing. And I realized over the years that the most important thing that really impacts our day-to-day life are the issues that happen here at the local level. Many times things that you don’t think about the roads that you’re driving down, but those impact you, how long you’re staying in your car to get to your commute as opposed to spending time with your family has a huge impact on your quality of life, whether you’re seeing that as a specific decision that impacted you or not, but how parks are designed, how neighborhoods are designed.
And so I live in Gainesville, Florida.I absolutely love this city. It’s- one of the things that we’re really proud of here in the city of Gainesville is we’re in the state of Florida, but we’re not kind of like the rest of the state of Florida. When you think of Florida, you think of beaches, you think of theme parks, you think of, sort of, reggaeton on South Beach, and we’ve always been sort of that other thing. We are the university town of the state of Florida. We have the University of Florida, the number six public university. We have this rich history of arts and culture here. We’ve had a lot of the great Americana and punk bands that have ever come out of the United States, but particularly the state of Florida. Folks like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Steven Stills, Against Me and Less than Jake — a lot of bands that I grew up with. And I’ve just- this place has always been just a little bit different than the rest of it, which I think has made us very protective of the policies and the problem solving that occurs here at the local level.
And as I’ve been interested in Gainesville and cities and how policies change, one of the things that we definitely don’t think about and we sort of take for granted is the wires that sit overhead, the pipes that sit under our feet, the fact that when we flip on a light electricity just comes out. It’s this amazing balance of this grid where energy must be created at the exact second that it is used. In a lot of ways, we take it for granted, and I think we take it for granted at the city level. So much of what we love about this city and what makes this city what it is, is because we made the great decision back over a hundred years ago, back in 1912, to invest in a municipal utility. When the governor of the state of Florida was looking at creating the land grant university for the state, we had an early water treatment plant that allowed us to offer water to this new land grant university, which is now the University of Florida, which without that being here, there would be no municipality. Gainesville would be a small town that people would drive past, but instead, we are the university city. A lot of our parks over the years have been stitched together through utility land that was purchased for one reason but then was able to be utilized for some of the great trails and parks and green space. That is really one of the things that draws people to our community. We’ve been a city that is more affordable than the rest of the state of Florida, and a lot of that is thanks to having lower taxes because instead of sending our municipal profits over to investors that are in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, we’re able to keep it locally and reinvest it here. And so as you start seeing what it is about the city, as someone who cares deeply about it, it’s really hard to miss the importance of our municipal utility in all of that. And so that’s what got me running for office and that’s why I’ve been interested in what is happening with our municipal utility and how we bring that into a better future.
John Farrell:
One of the things I think is so interesting is to look back and realize how long the Gainesville’s publicly owned utility has been an early leader on clean energy. I remember talking to Ed Regan, who was the eighth episode I ever recorded of this podcast, about a solar feed-in tariff to encourage more local development of solar that would serve the utility. So it was a little disappointing to hear that recently it’s been in the news as a subject of some contention. Was there any sign of problems for the utility before, I don’t know, like 2023 when the utility’s debt got into the news?
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s funny, I was just- stumbled upon an old Gainesville Sun article from 1960 that feels like it could have been written just yesterday. It was going over the history of our utility and it was asking, is our city of Gainesville’s utilities, is it this money eating monster? Is it this great investment that is pushing us into this future? Just talking about how contentious this has been all the way going back to 1907 when we originally pulled the franchise agreement from Gainesville Gas and Electric Company. We have always been arguing as a community about this utility, and that certainly picked up in recent years, but we’re a university town in a college town and we’re the town who likes to discuss debate and come up with things for how we’re moving forward. And our utility has always been in the center of it.
As it relates to recent years, we were an early investor and early focused on renewable energy as a community. Ed Regan was actually very central in all of that. It’s funny that he was the eighth person that you spoke on your podcast. When Ed Regan had come in, the person before him and the leadership at Gainesville Regional Utilities had come forward with a 220 megawatt coal plant that they wanted to have invested in, which would’ve meant 50% of our energy at Gainesville Regional Utilities would be in coal. That was 2007. The year before that An Inconvenient Truth had come out. Our community has always been a very environmental community, always proud of what we do for our environment and for our broader community. And so, working with the business community, working on trying to find the best financial decision for the future of our utility, the decision was made to invest instead in a biomass plant as well as into a solar feed-in tariff instead of the coal plant. And we went through the state of Florida, went through a number of other regulatory agencies in order to get that approved. They got that approved, and it was just the wrong place, wrong time for all of that to happen. Right after they had approved that, natural gas prices shot down. The contract, which was first of its kind across the nation, ended up having provisions in there that did not benefit the utility to the extent that they wanted it to. And we ended up becoming a much more expensive utility than anyone expected when we originally got into that contract.
And so ever since that decision about 15 years ago, a time when I was still in high school — so no one on the current Gainesville City Commission had anything whatsoever to do with any of those early decisions — but because of that, we have been in focus not just as a city that signed one contract back 15 years ago, but is one that was held up in the culture wars of the state of Florida as one that had invested in renewable energy — “Look at how renewable energy does not do the things that it says it will do” — and it’s kind of been dragged and put into those bigger fights that had less to do with the utility ratepayers and a lot more to do with larger national discussions that were going on.
John Farrell:
I mean, if there’s particulars about the contract with the biomass plant that are worth sharing, feel free. But I guess that gets to my next question, which is most utilities have debt because they use it along with their own capital to buy new power plants to make investments in infrastructure. So the fact that the Gainesville utility had debt at all didn’t seem very remarkable, but it looks like its debt load was several times more than the typical city-owned utility. Was that basically all because of this biomass plant? Were there any other things that were driving that financial difficulty for the utility?
Bryan Eastman:
No, it’s entirely tied to the biomass plant. The original power purchase agreement that we signed had certain minimum payments that had to be made within there. I think the assumption at the time that Ed Regan and Bob Hunsinger, who were running the utility at the time, made was that Florida Power and Light, who surrounds us, they did not have enough energy capacity at that time to fund the very large network that they had. So their thought was, we can make money by building a much larger plant and reselling that back to those that surround us. That didn’t turn out well in large part because of the hydraulic fracturing findings that occurred right after that. And so, then in 2018, to get out of that contract, the new Gainesville Regional Utilities general manager ended up spending $750 million to buy us out of that.
And so a lot of the discussions and the arguments within our community over these last 10 years are that original power purchase agreement, was that the wrong decision to make, and was it the wrong decision to spend that amount of money to get us out of that? And the impact that has had has certainly a lot to do with the debt, but it’s also meant that it is harder for us to reinvest in our existing infrastructure. So we have very outdated natural gas plants that are inefficient, which add to our fuel adjustment rate, which causes rates to be higher than in some other areas. We’re starting to turn around on that now. Our utility rates are down near a little bit above average, but lower than investor owned utilities within the state of Florida. But it’s been a challenge and something that we’ve been working on.
John Farrell:
I’m kind of curious these days there are so many data centers, large corporate users that are really interested in buying clean electricity. Was that just not the case in 20- I mean you weren’t on the commission in 2018, but I guess it’s sort of surprising in a way that they didn’t find another buyer that would be interested in coming in. Or is it just the fact that maybe the power wasn’t as competitive with things like wind and solar that have been getting so much cheaper since the days of Ed Regan and some of those early investments?
Bryan Eastman:
I can’t speak to it, John. I don’t really know. I know that there was a lot of push to try to get that excess capacity offloaded into other areas. For whatever reason, we weren’t able to. We had been pushing for the University of Florida to purchase more power from us. They would be a huge energy purchaser, and that’s not worked out well. So we have tried to push our capacity. We’ve also tried to just use demand side management type tactics in order to reduce the amount of investments that need to be made for future energy generation.
I think the hard part about this particular world is, and as a policymaker, not someone from the utility industry, is you are doing your operations for a long period of time and then suddenly you have to make these big decisions for investments. You have to say, okay, we need to shut this plant down in the next four years. What exactly are you going to do with that? And you have to decide what makes sense for the next 30 years. Of course, we don’t know what natural gas prices are going to look like in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. We don’t know. There’s going to be new solar investments that are coming online. We don’t know what nuclear generation’s going to look like. There’s so much volatility in the market that you’re really just estimating and guessing as to the future, and sometimes you make investment decisions that in hindsight, you wish you did something different. But that’s sort of the nature of this particular industry.
John Farrell:
So I wanted to turn and talk about the impact that the challenges for GRU for the utility have had on the city. So most municipally owned utilities make payments to their city government, sometimes they’re called payments in lieu of taxes that a for-profit utility would’ve otherwise paid, although they tend to be a little bit higher and have a sort of better financial impact. Can you talk about how the proposals to reduce the utility’s debt have now had an impact on the city government’s budget?
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, for sure. So we transferred every year about $36 million from the utility to the city of Gainesville. I want to say it was about 7% of the total amount, which was somewhere in the lower half of large municipal utilities within the state of Florida. After this had come out, after the state of Florida had requested that we do more to reduce our debt, we reduced that down to $15.3 million, which puts us far and away the lowest of the large municipal utilities in the state of Florida. And the impacts of that were pretty severe. We eliminated 125.5 positions from our city, and we took our taxes, which as I mentioned have always been lower as a city because we’ve been able to return that investment back into the community, up from 5.5 mills to a full mill above, which puts us from the lower portion of taxes to somewhere in the middle there. So the impact has been huge and our employees and the residents are starting to feel the impact.
John Farrell:
This is where the story takes an interesting turn. So up until now, it’s mostly been a story of, well, there was this investment in hindsight that wasn’t great, that was expensive, and now it’s caused some adjustment by the city itself in terms of reducing the payments that it was otherwise receiving, some hardship for employment and services that the city’s offering, hardship for city residents in terms of property taxes. But then the state government decided to get involved in certain rather extraordinary measure. The state legislature passes a law taking oversight of the city’s utility out of the hands of you and the other elected commissioners, and instead gives it to a five member board appointed by the governor. So I guess I’m curious, reading through the news about how this played out over the past couple of years, it looked like the city had already made the changes that the state was really angling for them to make, which was reduce the payments, allow that to help reduce the debt of the utility. What was the state thinking? What was their rationale they gave for doing this?
Bryan Eastman:
So to back up a bit, this has been an ongoing discussion among the state legislature for many, many years. I would say following the biomass plant, we have had a number of state Republicans, and in really the areas around the city of Gainesville, who have really politicized the utility over time. So in 2018, there was a state senator who was running a campaign essentially against GRU. It was a multimillion dollar campaign where they were claiming that the city of Gainesville needs to lower its rates, and that was the real push that he was using to win his election. At the same time, there was a referendum that was on the ballot that was to create this type of thing, a Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority that would be appointed by the residents of the city of Gainesville. And millions of dollars were put into this campaign mostly by the state Republican party and various other conservatives that were at the state level that ended up dying here at the city of Gainesville, 64.
Fast forward to 2024, and those same state senator and same state representative are now in senior leadership of both the state House and the state Senate. And so late in the legislative session came forward a local bill. Local bills are generally things that help with small appropriations. They’re usually saying, okay, we’re passing this local bill that would change this one portion of this area in order to allow this city to do something that it wouldn’t normally be allowed to do under the existing state laws. It’s usually uncontroversial. Usually everyone is in favor of it. They use the same process in order to change our city charter without a vote of the residents to do it.
And just to go off here for a second, there is no other structure that is anything like this anywhere in the United States. You will have independent utility authorities that are usually appointed by their city commission or city councils. That way there is at least some level of accountability that flows up through that appointed commission up through the city council. This is not like that. This is a utility authority appointed by the governor, but with full control over the assets, employees and debt of the city of Gainesville. There is no utility that I can find that’s anything like this — and really any municipality that is anything like this. There is no city in the United States in which the governor has control over portions of the city that the city taxpayers pay the bills on that the city taxpayers take the legal and financial responsibilities of.
It was an extraordinary measure, and I think the rationale at the time was, well, one, there was the politics and the history that had gone into all of this, but I think the idea was that the local city commission had made mistakes. They continued to invest in renewable energy, and what we need to do is get business professionals and people with utility experience to run it instead of having the city. This had passed, this had gone through, and I’ll tell you John, there’s no one on the utility authority right now that has any utility experience. Some of them are successful business people, some of them have done different things, but I think the promise that you are going to have utility experts running the utility after this just really hasn’t panned out.
John Farrell:
What I find fascinating is there are a couple of historical examples of similar sort of separations between authority over a utility and governance by local residents. So Long Island had a public utility, which is now private, and there’s been talks about taking it public again, but when it was public 10 or 15 years ago, its board was entirely appointed by the governor and it was run really poorly, basically into the ground. And there had always been a frustration among residents of Long Island that we have a publicly owned utility, but it doesn’t really belong to us because there’s been a series of governors in New York, of course, who are fairly heavy handed in terms of exercising their authority. So you can imagine that they weren’t terribly good at taking local perspectives into account.
And then we also have the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is a federal power generation utility, but it serves all of these communities across the southeast. Many of them that have their own city owned utilities who have been trying to get the TVA to do things differently because it’s been making expensive bets on fossil fuel infrastructure, and feeling very frustrated by that. And again, that divorce between local control of a publicly owned institution there has caused problems for them.
So I do think it’s interesting. There’s no example I can think of that’s exactly the same here, but the two things I can think of that are similar have both gotten very badly in terms of the relationship between the communities they serve and the utility because of that lack of local connection.
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, absolutely. As I was doing research into this, the Long Island Power Authority and the TVA also came up in mind, which of course, in the Long Island Power Authority, is still owned by the state of Florida, like a lot of authorities are that are up there. That- the assets, the debt, everything that the Long Island Power Authority would have is either set aside in its own enterprise fund or under the state of New York more broadly. I can’t remember exactly the structure of it. And so yes, there have been those, and I’ve seen the same thing. The rates are not particularly low for Long Island Power Authority, and the Tennessee Valley Authority does have a lot of issues with that. They have found certain structures in order to ensure that there’s some payment in lieu of taxes that goes through the Tennessee Valley Authority, if I recall correctly. But there is very little check and balance that we have here. And that is really the whole promise of what a locally owned public utility is. What people want out of their utilities are not that different from investor-owned utilities and public utilities, right? You want a utility that is affordable. You want a utility that is reliable that will stay on, and now you want a utility that is sustainable. And so at the end of the day, hearing from your local community, letting your local community have input into how those things go, I think is really the right way that utilities should be run.
John Farrell:
As should just note for listeners that if folks want to hear an episode we did about TVA, I can’t remember the episode number, but it was with Maggie Shober, if you look that up, who works with many of the communities in the Southeast with their frustration about wanting more local control. So dive in there if you’re interested.
We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, we talk about the odd decisions the state appointed authority has been making, how it differs from how the city approached the utility’s problems and the referendum in November that could allow the city to retake control. You are listening to a Local Energy Rules podcast with Gainesville District Four City Commissioner Bryan Eastman.
Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — five stars if you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now back to the program.
I want to come back then to this… So we’ve kind of talked about the extraordinary measure of the state government removing local governance from GRU. Two of the actions that they’ve taken, or two of the early actions that that appointed authority did once they were seated, was one, giving the new CEO the highest salary that’s ever been given to a GRU CEO, and then also cutting compensation for rooftop solar customers. So I’m kind of curious, how does that square with what the city commission, were it still in charge, would be wanting to do with the utility? And are there other decisions like that that are sort of out of step with what residents in Gainesville and their elected officials would want the utility to be doing?
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, I went out knocking on thousands of doors when I ran for office, which is what, at least in our local community, that is how you win elections. We have small enough areas where you really get to know your constituents and you go out and you talk to each one of them and hear what matters to them. And rooftop solar is not a huge cost to the utility. I believe they budgeted about $60,000. It would be the cost for the feed-in cost that was going into it. But it makes a huge difference for folks that want to get off of the grid, want to create their own energy and want to do it in a simple and sustainable way. That almost certainly never would’ve happened if you had people that were accountable to the voters who were making that decision.
And as it relates to the salary, I’ll say that when we have been laying off employees, we have been cutting budgets — it has been a very difficult time since coming in. I came into office in January of 2023 and by February this process of taking the utility away from the local residents was already beginning. And so from the very beginning, we have been dealing with the fallout of this, trying to figure out how exactly do we protect the investments and the public safety officers and the employees of our community while going forward with this. One of the first things that we did as this began was to roll back- We were due for a large salary increase coming in, and we decided we were going to reverse that salary increase because if you were leading a community, the last thing that you want to do is be taking big salary increases for yourself while also saying we’re putting the pain onto our residents and onto our employees. The same thing with our former utility manager. When they did work for the city commission, they refused to take a salary increase during that time. Do I think that the extra money will bankrupt the utility? Not likely, but I do think that leaders need to show their example, and then when there is pain across the board, then they need to take that pain along with it.
John Farrell:
I just have to relate to this other thing I read in trying to understand kind of what’s been going on that really struck me as an odd turn of events, and I don’t know if there’s more that you would say about it, but when the city was still in control of the utility, it fired the general manager of the utility in 2022. But then notably, one of the governor’s appointees to this new authority included that previous general manager. Then this new authority fired the replacement for the general manager that was fired by the city and now he’s back in that job, and then he fired other people who had been kept by the city commission. So it also sounds like there’s a bunch of turmoil among leadership at the utility in part because of the way the state has stepped in and been looking to change things in a way that were not the direction that the city commission was giving.
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve never seen anything quite like taking a volunteer board member and putting them into a very highly paid salary, which is sort of what happened there. I’ll say that that same person that was fired by the City Commission and then ran for mayor and now was appointed to the utility authority.
And all of this, not to get into the drama and everything else that’s going on with our utility, but I will say that when you talk to GRU employees, the number one frustration that they have is that they are very proud of the work that they do. They’re very proud of having some of the top reliability in the state of Florida for their electricity. The folks that do our water wastewater are very proud of the quality of the water and the lack of issues that they have with the water. We have people that are very proud of the work that they do, and they are frustrated that they seemingly are always getting politicized that there is some politician here or another politician there that wants to take the very real work that they are doing and use it as a way to either get elected or to make a salary or to push this in one direction or another.
And so, as I see all this stuff happening with the appointment of a former politician to run the utility and large salary increases and the constant fighting back and forth, it’s just sad. And I hope we get back to a point where the utility gets some stability and our employees and our ratepayers get back to a point where the utility is just working itself like a utility and doing the best job that they possibly can.
John Farrell:
So one of the things I’ve noted in recent years and had been thinking about when we first connected,, Bryan was that investor-owned utility Florida Power and Light, which you mentioned before, serves a lot of the area around Gainesville and most of the state of Florida, they’ve been trying to buy the municipal utility in Jacksonville, Florida, and in fact have been caught doing things like trying to bribe a city councilman there to take another job in order to get them off the council to basically get rid of the vote that they would’ve had against that private takeover. So I have to ask, is there any indication that Florida Power and Light is involved in the state’s decision related to GRU governance and meddling with any of that, given their history with that in Jacksonville?
Bryan Eastman:
There’s a lot of things that could be going into everything that’s happening here. I’ll say that Florida Power, even before it was called Florida Power and Light, has been looking at buying the city of Gainesville’s electric utility for 50-60 years. In that article I was mentioning at the beginning, they mentioned that it was right in the middle of a discussion as to whether to sell portions of the utility to a early version of Florida Power and Light. And all the things that were happening with Jacksonville Electric Authority, at that same time, there was money that was also being thrown into local Gainesville elections that we now know from some of the criminal proceedings that have gone on since then. How much of what’s happening here in Gainesville is special interest money versus just typical culture wars versus some real honest to goodness discussions about how is this utility going to go forward and how can we make this less expensive? We’re all still trying to figure that out at the time, but I do think that we would be naive in thinking that the very large investor-owned utilities aren’t at least watching the situation very carefully and hoping for certain outcomes that would benefit their bottom line.
John Farrell:
Right. So let’s talk about the future here a bit. So you have this action by the state legislature to take over. You now have this governor-appointed commission, but you have a ballot initiative coming up here in November to a referendum that would essentially eliminate this board and bring back governance to the city commission. Can you talk a little bit about why that’s going on the ballot? And then I guess also, can you do that? Because what we’ve seen is in so many other issues — you mentioned before you talked to ILSR about broadband things before — we’ve seen state legislatures come in and preempt cities from doing publicly owned broadband networks, for example. Can it work to take back authority from the state when they have nosed in and removed that local authority?
Bryan Eastman:
Yeah, so the ballot referendum is going to be on the November 5th ballot right there along the presidential election, and by all indications, we have the authority to change this. When they changed this portion of our city charter, all they did was change the city charter, which state law allows us to change in a number of different ways, either through a citizen initiative or through a super majority vote of the city commission to put it on the ballot. What the legislature will do in the future, we’re not sure. What I do know is that we had a number of local community groups come to us right after the legislative session ended. These included local democracy groups like the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, who represents the GRU employees, and they said that they wanted to have a voice and have a vote as to the future of their utility.
As someone who’s been elected by the people, I think that’s important. It is something that we asked for from the very beginning. When this entire discussion was happening about taking GRU and putting it under a governor-appointed board, a number of these same groups went to Tallahassee and said, “If you want this to happen, ask the people if it’s something that they want.” This is our utility that we have invested in for over a hundred years, that we have bonded money out for that, we’ve taken great risk for, something that is central to our community. The community needs to be asked before this decision gets made, and that was something they just flatly refuse to do.
And so I’m excited that we get to put it back on the ballot. I hope the legislature will not take the extraordinary move once again. I think the hopes and dreams that they had that this board would be more efficient, more businesslike, that they would not be making decisions in certain ways… I think it would be hard to look at it and see that they are making decisions in those ways. And so hopefully they will stay out of it into the future. But that’s up to them at this point. What I know is that the people deserve a right to say what happens in their utility, and that’s what we’re giving them.
John Farrell:
So Bryan, let’s imagine it’s November 6th and this referendum has passed and the city has exerted its control over the utility. Once again, do you have a short list of things that you and or your fellow commissioners are hoping to do? I dunno, maybe like the first a hundred days of we control our own utility again, what do you have in mind if this referendum is successful?
Bryan Eastman:
Well, we haven’t voted on anything yet. I’m one of seven votes on the Gainesville City Commission, but I’ll say that what is frustrating about all this is it feels like Gainesville Regional Utilities was finally starting to turn a corner.
As I mentioned, and you mentioned we were early investors and early supporters of renewable energy. The most recent study that came back, our integrated resource plan that actually came to this new authority, it was created by this new authority, showed a massive increase in solar and battery power is the least expensive option that we have for Gainesville Regional Utilities. They recommended 475 megawatts of solar, which would put us at about a third at peak would be solar energy. Right now about a third of our energy is by biomass, so that would put us over a majority of our energy would be in renewable energy. They recommended 250 megawatts of new battery. We have the ability here to turn a corner to be a much more renewable utility, a one that is a lot less expensive than it currently is, and one that really reflects the values of the community. And so I’m excited to see that get done.
When that study came back, the GRU Authority and the new CEO that was just appointed, basically put a stop to it, said that, “We do not want to continue doing this integrated resource plan. We’re not interested in this integrated resource plan. Why is there so much solar in this integrated resource plan?” Which I think is a shame. I think it is a shame that we have data and studies back that show that renewable energy will be the least expensive option for us, and I would like for us to continue working on that and moving forward with a better utility into the future.
But really what we need from this utility is we just need stability for the folks that are working there. We need to rebuild portions of it. Our employees have been taken back and forth through all of these different governance changes, all of these different things that are happening over there. And there just needs to be a bit of a breath and a bit of treating the utility like a utility and not like a political football that goes back and forth that will help either one side or the other. And so that would be my first 100 days is kind of just the old boring: figure out a plan, stick with it, give our employees a little bit of stability.
John Farrell:
Well, Bryan, thank you so much for joining me on Local Energy Rules to talk about what’s going on in Gainesville and about this effort to maintain local control over the utility. Well, we wish you the best in the work and hope that you’re able to be successful at aligning what the local interests are with that local utility.
Bryan Eastman:
Thank you, John. And thank you for everything you guys do at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. As I said, I’m a big fan, even back when I was an activist before getting on the city commission, the expertise that you guys bring to such a wide variety of things is so helpful for us here on the ground level doing this work. So I’m just really honored that you’d have me on the podcast and thank you for having me.
John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Gainesville District Four City Commissioner Bryan Eastman, discussing the events leading up to a state takeover of the Gainesville, Florida, publicly owned electric utility and the upcoming referendum to take it back
On the show page, look for a link to news stories about the utility struggles and about the upcoming referendum. We’ll also share links to our podcast about the utility’s early investments in renewable energy with Ed Regan in episode eight and our podcast discussion with city leaders about their vision for 100% renewable energy from episode 114, as well as provide a link to our episode about the tension between TVA and the communities it serves with Maggie Shober in episode 183.
Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Maria McCoy, with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschback. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.
One Hundred Years of Public Power
Gainesville formed its municipal utility in the early part of the 20th century. Since then, Gainesville Regional Utilities — which provides electric, gas, water, and wastewater services — has been a driver of growth for the city. According to Eastman, Gainesville’s early water treatment facilities made the city an attractive home for the University of Florida, and over the years, the municipal utility has reinvested in the local economy and community.
“So much of what we love about this city and what makes this city what it is, is because we made the great decision back over a hundred years ago, back in 1912, to invest in a municipal utility.”
Gainesville Regional Utilities was also an early adopter of renewable energy. When utility leadership proposed building a new coal power plant in 2007, the city decided instead to invest in a biomass plant and in rooftop solar, as more environmentally friendly alternatives.
State Legislature Steps In
Unfortunately, the decision to invest in biomass proved to be a financial miscalculation, leaving Gainesville Regional Utilities with a high debt load compared to other municipal utilities. The final power purchase agreement with the biomass plant closely preceded a big, unexpected drop in methane gas prices, and the utility struggled to sell excess generation from the plant.
As Eastman explains, certain Republican state lawmakers had long opposed both the biomass plant and the municipal utility itself, and once they gained leadership roles, they were able to push through legislation that took Gainesville Regional Utilities out of the city’s hands. The 2023 law unilaterally changed the city’s charter, establishing an independent authority with a governor-appointed board to run the utility, which has put Gainesville in the unique position of having a municipal utility that is controlled by the state.
“There is no [other] city in the United States in which the governor has control over portions of the city that the city taxpayers pay the bills on, that the city taxpayers take the legal and financial responsibilities of.”
Putting Local Control to a Vote
The new Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority has not improved the situation at the utility. Before losing control to the state, Gainesville had already made efforts to address the utility’s debt load, at the great cost of laying off 125 city employees and raising local taxes. In comparison, Eastman shares that the governor-appointed board has increased CEO pay, cut rooftop solar compensation, moved away from affordable renewable energy options, and overall, created a chaotic environment for utility employees.
“When you talk to GRU employees, the number one frustration that they have is that they are very proud of the work that they do . . . and they are frustrated that they seemingly are always getting politicized.”
On November 5, Gainesville voters will be asked if they want to return control of the municipal utility to the city. The referendum, which the City Commission voted to place on the ballot, would remove the section of the charter that created the Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority . If it’s successful, Eastman says that they would focus on following studies that show renewable energy is their least cost option, creating stability for utility employees, and treating the utility “like a utility and not like a political football.”
Episode Notes
See these resources for more behind the story:
- Read Bryan Eastman’s overview of the fight over Gainesville’s municipal utility.
- Learn more about the timeline of Gainesville Regional Utilities over the past two years and about the upcoming city referendum.
- Listen to other interviews with Gainesville leaders on the city’s early investments in solar and its clean energy goals in episode 8 and episode 114 of Local Energy Rules.
- Hear from Maggie Shober on the Tennessee Valley Authority in episode 183 of Local Energy Rules.
- Listen to Bryan Eastman’s wife, Nina Bhattacharyya, discuss Gainesville’s zero waste efforts on episode 131 of ILSR’s Building Local Power podcast.
For concrete examples of how towns and cities can take action toward gaining more control over their clean energy future, explore ILSR’s Community Power Toolkit.
Explore local and state policies and programs that help advance clean energy goals across the country using ILSR’s interactive Community Power Map.
This is the 221st episode of Local Energy Rules, an ILSR podcast with Energy Democracy Director John Farrell, which shares stories of communities taking on concentrated power to transform the energy system.
Local Energy Rules is produced by ILSR’s John Farrell and Maria McCoy. Audio engineering by Drew Birschbach.
For timely updates from the Energy Democracy Initiative, follow John Farrell on Twitter and subscribe to the Energy Democracy weekly update.