by Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson
What is it about Gainesville Regional Utilities that makes it worth fighting over? Every decade or so, GRU faces a new existential crisis, yet our community has frequently played an outsized role in national utility policy as a result of decisions made in our little petri dish.
Gainesville’s utilities became “owned by the people it serves” over a hundred years ago when the private electric utility turned off the power to the streetlights over a billing dispute — so the City took over. Gainesville’s willingness to entice the University of Florida with free water in perpetuity is credited with swaying the decision to locate UF here. In the 1960s, little old Gainesville won Supreme Court cases against Florida’s investor-owned utilities which required these large private companies to inter-connect their lines with the smaller public utilities — forever changing the reliability and the marketing of electricity across the nation’s electric grid.
In the 1970s, GRU built a large coal-fired power plant (Deerhaven 2) over the objections of local environmentalists; the ensuing legal fight resulted in a settlement requiring the utility to invest in energy conservation that changed the energy profile of Gainesville — we still have the lowest energy consumption per capita in the state as a result. The newly inter-connected state grid also allowed GRU to run our new, efficient powerplant at full capacity and sell huge amounts of excess power to other utilities. For more than a decade, GRU had the most inexpensive electricity in the state due to the ratepayers of other communities paying the bill for our over-sized powerplant.
In more recent decades, the City embraced renewable energy. We were the nation’s first community to subsidize rooftop solar on residential and commercial buildings, which jump-started that industry. Faced with the need for additional baseload generating capacity to replace our now aging and dirty powerplants, GRU built, and then bought, the biomass plant that uses waste wood from forestry and conservation lands for fuel. The original contract for the biomass plant’s energy was poorly negotiated, resulting in the City going into substantial debt to buy out the bad contract. Today, the City carries more utility debt than it should, and our electric bills are higher. Most other utilities chose natural gas for their baseload generators, and have benefited from historically (and temporarily) low gas prices.
For more than a decade, when we aren’t fighting among ourselves about GRU, we are fighting the state legislature — a wholly owned corporate subsidiary. Our legislators, who are often at odds with our local city and county officials, find it laughably easy to demagogue utility bills — that thing everybody hates to pay. So, under the cover of caring about poor people (which virtually every other action they take shows they don’t care), legislators carry water for the investor-owned utilities. Florida Power & Light is expressly intent on monopolizing the state’s utility system, and has become the largest investor-owned electric utility in the nation. Many of the bad things that happen in Florida politics have their DNA at the scene.
That brings us to today, where local activists with the League of Women Voters, Central Labor Council, Sierra Club, Gainesville Residents United, Inc. (a purpose-built non-profit), and others are engaged in a fight with our legislative delegation and the Governor-appointed Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority (GRUA). Five lawsuits have been filed by various plaintiffs — some challenging the constitutionality of the bill that transferred our local utility to the Governor, and others challenging aspects of the Utility Authority’s legality. One successful suit required the Governor to actually follow the law, and Ron DeSantis had to appoint a new board that met for the first time in late May.
This chaos is not what a utility system or its customers want or deserve. Also in May, the City Commission unanimously voted to place a referendum on the November ballot to let the voters decide whether to amend the City Charter to take back GRU from Governor DeSantis and our legislative delegation. The City will not be mounting a campaign, but the political committee “Let the Voters Decide” will be advocating for a Yes vote, and they are building an impressive coalition. Opponents are also mounting legal efforts to deny the voters the opportunity to decide who should operate the City’s utility system.
We flip the switch, turn on the tap, flush the toilet, and 99.99999 percent of the time, we take for granted that this magic is deserved. Yet we are truly privileged, compared to people throughout history and around the world today, to enjoy such luxury. But like all freedoms, good utility service must be defended with vigilance against those who would try to control the most basic aspects of our lives. That’s why I will be advocating for the return of GRU to local democratic control against the ongoing authoritarian takeover.
Robert Hutchinson worked in the conservation and public information departments of GRU for a decade in the 1980s. Hutch is a former Alachua County Commissioner, and is president of Gainesville Residents United, Inc. Call/text: 352-256-6043.