Six months in office: looking back
Six things I'm most proud of that we've done at the city - in spite of everything coming from Tallahassee
I was sworn into office at 10 am, January 5, 2023, six months ago. Bright eyed and bushy tailed I had a long list of ideas and policies I was ready to propose. All of that took a wild left turn quickly. By February the state legislature was threatening to have Governor Desantis remove all the Commissioners from office unless we cut budgets, or considered a sale of our 100-year-old utility.
That has dominated the city ever since. These past six months have been hard and chaotic, but also incredibly fulfilling and productive. You would think that our commission and staff would be cowering after the threats and attacks from Tallahassee, but it hasn’t been that way. Even as we’ve responded to these threats and defended ourselves, we’ve also moved forward on some incredible work.
So for all the bad news coming from Tallahassee I wanted to point out some good news. We’ve actually accomplished a lot these past six months. It reminds me of why I love local government - because we get things done - in spite of it all.
1.) Planned for the largest budget cuts in Gainesville history
It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the budget cuts our staff had to make these past few months. In February our City Manager, Mayor, and GRU General Manager were dragged before legislature who demanded that we make “bold” moves to reduce debt at GRU. Make no mistake, our debt at GRU is high for a utility our size. It’s a real issue we have to contend with. But the rhetoric coming from Tallahassee was almost apocalyptic, with talks about “bankruptcy” and a “[utility] that is on the verge of failing – and a city that will tumble after that.” We were told the city needed to raise taxes, cut spending, that the city needed to “feel pain”.
I went into detail about the misinformation and cherry picking of numbers in my article “Correcting the Misinformation on GRU”, but regardless of the accuracy of what the legislature was saying, the end result was we needed to make big changes, fast.
As I pointed out in an April blog post, talking about “sustainability” is all well and good, but it was impossible to know how aggressive they were looking for. GRU is a AA rated utility, what does “sustainability” look like? The final decision was to be very aggressive, and we settled on a cut of $18.9 million, slashing $315 million from GRU’s debt over the next 10 years. This was the largest cut in Gainesville history, dwarfing the great recession cuts of $5.7 million.
None of it was going to be easy. There was definitely “fat” to cut, there always is in government, but far less than some of the city’s harshest critics say. Gainesville has always been a pretty thrifty town. With 44.7% of our land off the tax rolls we’ve had to be. Gainesville’s per capita spending for non-utility work, according to Florida’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research, was $2,968 per person in 2021. For comparison: Tallahassee is $4,267, Tampa is $3,641, and Ocala is $3,4721.
Over three months our staff went through the arduous process of going line by line through each and every budget to figure out how deep to the bone each department would be cut. It was incredibly solemn in City Hall for those months, but the goal was to move quickly. Employees were worried about their jobs, ratings agencies were watching us closely, and the legislature was looking for a response. The city needed to make hard decisions quickly to put uncertainty to rest.
In the end we made some extremely difficult cuts. Beloved programs like Reichert House and much of our nature operations division are gone. We’ve cut 71.2 positions from the City Government. Those are just the wholesale cuts, every department will be feeling some pain, and you will see the impacts of it next year. More heartbreakingly, the families of the people we’ve let go will be feeling the pain too.
But it could have been much worse. Many of our core services will still be adequately staffed, but less than they deserve. Roads are still getting paved, concerts will still be happening in downtown. To lessen the impacts on the people being let go the City has put together an internal group to find new roles for them. It doesn’t stop the pain, but we’re trying to do what’s right for our employees.
We’ve also been able to save some programs that were on the chopping block. Ironwood Golf Course was originally up for a complete elimination, but after an outpouring of community support the golf course will now be staying open on “management watch” over the next six months to find ways to bring in more revenue. GRACE Marketplace was looking at $750,000 cut to their budgets, a cut that would have kicked hundreds of homeless out on the street overnight. We were able to get that back to a regular sized cut, one that will hurt but will allow them to continue their services.
And GRU has also been making cuts to ensure they reach their $315 million deficit cut. We’ve cut $3.4 million annually from GRU’s total budgets. Around $2 million is from personnel and $1.4 million from other expenses.
As of this writing we are about $2 million short of where we need to be, but we believe we can make up for it through very achievable cuts and revenues. It’s all credit to our leadership at City Hall, GRU, the leadership of each of our departments, and our staff who have worked tirelessly to get us here.
2.) Stabilized city government and leadership
It seems funny to talk about “stability” in an era of Tallahassee imposed chaos on our city, but we’ve come a long way.
In 2021 the City seemed to be in a civil war. The Director of the Office of Equity and Inclusion resigned in May, blaming the Gainesville City Commission. City Commissioner Gail Johnson resigned in September accusing the City Manager of a number of ethical issues. That City Manager, Lee Feldman, resigned shortly thereafter, having had enough of Gainesville. The GRU General Manager was asked to resign by the Mayor in September, but narrowly kept his position. He was later fired in January and immediately announced he was running for mayor. For the next nine months Ed Bielarski took the anger he previously directed at Chuck Clemons, Keith Perry, and the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee and turned it on his former bosses, accusing Commissioners of anything and everything under the sun.
During all of this we were going through a wrenching pandemic and a wholesale upzoning of single-family neighborhoods. These issues split the community, and the Commission, in a way I’d never seen before. It was an ugly time, and it was happening all during the biggest election in Gainesville’s history. For the first time Gainesville had elections in the fall and a full changeover of leadership was coming: a new Mayor and three new commissioners. Elections have a way of bringing out the worst in everyone, and this one was no different.
The impacts of all of this were more far reaching than a few bad headlines. It hurt morale at the city, eroded trust with the public, and made it harder to do basic services. We were hardly the only organization going through a rough patch, the pandemic created a lot of organizational strife in businesses and cities across the US, but we were feeling it more than most.
So it’s a small miracle that, six months into our term, a lot of that has melted away. Our Charter Officers, now solidified in their roles, are getting along and working together. The GRU General Manager and the City Manager were able to come to an agreement on an historic drop in the General Funds Transfer, which has been a bone of contention for years. We’ve been able to recruit for key positions and move forward on programs and core services.
Our City Commission is also working together well. There is a lot of diversity on the City Commission, and we don’t always agree on things. My viewpoints are different than Ed Book’s, which is different than Desmond Duncan Walker’s, which is different than Reina Saco’s. That is exactly what you want in an elected board, but it hasn’t stopped us from finding common ground, getting to solutions, and moving forward. The factionalism and no holds barred approach of Commissions past isn’t there.
This was something I really wanted to see coming into office. The chaos of these past few years has done little to actually help the residents of our city. I have no control over what will happen when Ron Desantis appointees take over half of our city government via the GRU takeover, but I’m proud to see us move forward and build a more stable city government while we still can.
3.) Invested in renewable energy while lowering GRU bills
In the midst of turmoil over GRU we were able to accomplish what Commissions past had long hoped for but couldn’t achieve: investment in renewable energy and reduction of GRU bills.
It has long been on GRU’s plans to expand utility scale solar energy. As solar prices have gone down the return on investment for solar energy has looked better and better. GRU’s 2019 Integrated Resource Plan planned for 80MW of solar coming online by 2021, not because of our renewable energy goals but because it’s the cheapest path to powering our city. It’s the same reason that Duke Energy, Florida Power & Light, and many others are investing heavily in solar: it just makes sense.
But the best laid plans don’t always get done. After our vendor, Origis Energy Solar, selected a location in Archer for the planned solar project, frequent Commission critic Nathan Skop sued along with local residents to stop the project from getting built. After a year of wrangling, Origis found a new location, away from anyone who may have issues with it. Just as we were ready to move forward the legislature stepped in. They demanded to get more information about the deal, and almost scuttled the whole project. But we opened up the contract, gave them everything they asked for, and in April we approved 75MW of solar energy to come onto our grid.
While doing all of that we’ve brought down GRU bills. In April, GRU announced a $15 decrease in the fuel adjustment, with another $15 decrease announced in July. After hard summer last year where GRU bills were skyrocketing right in the hottest months, we will now be going into summer with GRU bills lower than Florida Power & Light NWFl.
4.) Historic investments in affordable housing
Affordable housing, especially at the lowest income, is something close to my heart. I served as vice-chair for GRACE Marketplace for years, and hoped to be able to do more to create homes for our working class and poor residents. Over the past four decades federal government investment in low-income housing has dried up, and options for poor and working-class Americans are getting slimmer and slimmer.
Cities need to play a bigger role in solving this issue, but the problem is the cost of building affordable housing is astronomical. Especially for a city the size of Gainesville it’s hard to get the upfront capital to get large housing programs off the ground.
The American Rescue Plan Act gave our city a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do that, and we did. The previous commission allocated $7.2 million to building affordable housing, and the proposals came to us last month.
In total we funded 3 rental projects and 2 homeownership projects. In the next few years we can expect to see 203 affordable rental homes coming online. These include 51 homes for seniors, 144 very low income homes in conjunction with the Gainesville Housing Authority, and 8 homes in a mixed income development. All of these are going to be at least 60% area median income, designated as “low income” by Housing and Urban Development.
It also includes subsidies for 17 homes that will be single-family, owner-occupied homes. It’s a good mix of homes that will remain affordable for at least 30 years. That’s hundreds of families that will now have an affordable place to live that didn’t before.
5.) Protecting Gainesville’s environment
From Payne’s Prairie to Hogtown Creek, Gainesville’s environmental lands are the jewel of our community. Protecting, preserving, and improving our environment has always been a core value of our city, and we’ve made a number of big - and small - moves to improve that.
In April our City Commission approved the largest tract of actively managed conservation land in city limits. This 1,778 acre parcel comes from finally reaching a negotiation with Weyerhaeuser, who has gone back and forth with the city on lawsuits over the large tract of land north on 441 for over a decade.
The final compromise was complicated and imperfect but was a clear a win for conservation land. In total 1,161 acres of wetlands and uplands will now go from agriculture/timber to active environmental management under the direct supervision of our city. Those lands include 337 acres of upland pine habitat and 773 acres of wetlands.
We also planned for a future of expansion of environmental areas and greenways. In June I proposed a plan to expand greenways and trails across Gainesville, protecting our water resources and creating more linear parks and recreational opportunities directly in the heart of the city. It passed unanimously. I’ll write a full post about this in a future blog post, but with minimal cost we can create trails and greenways that are embedded in the fabric of our community.
Part of what makes this possible is set aside funds to purchase and protect land. The Commission approved a change to the tree mitigation ordinance that opens up millions of dollars for land protection, giving us the opportunity to grow our environmental lands in a way we didn’t have before.
And we’re moving forward with our zero-waste initiative. After a grant from the US Department of Agriculture we are expanding our residential composting program. This means that residents can have their food scraps taken directly from their front door if they live in the areas we’re targeting for the next phase of the pilot.
If you live in Sugarfoot, Libby Heights, Westmoreland, Forest Ridge, Ridgewood, Madison Park, Raintree, Brywood, or Golf Club Manor there are still some spots available to be a part of the pilot. Sign up today!
6.) Planning the future of public spaces
The core job of a city is to design and create public spaces. From our roads to our parks to our water lines, cities design and create things, it’s what we do. With the recent approval of Wild Spaces and Public Places, those public spaces are about to see some real investments in the coming years.
You can already see the impact of previous decisions on our public spaces. West Side Park Playground opened in April and Cherry H. Spurgeon Pool opened last month and are filled with people.
We just broke ground on our Eastside Health and Economic Development Initiative. After years of discussion about lack of healthcare options on the eastside, the University of Florida and the City are partnering to create an urgent care clinic, with the city also investing in a bus depot, grocery store, and a lot more on Hawthorne Road adjacent to GTEC.
We voted on repaving two of the worst, and highly used, roads in Gainesville: NE 9th and N Main Street. These are two local roads that have long needed some love, and it’s great that we can move forward on repaving them with our new pedestrian and bicycle standards passed late last year.
The Fire Department has been in dire need of updated facilities, and this new money is going to help us build a new administration building and a station in South West Gainesville. We are doing feasibility studies on building a Cultural Arts Center and on improvements to NE Park on 8th and Waldo.
The sheer scale and number of projects in the hopper is overwhelming, so I just put the slides above so you can see them all. There are exciting extensions of our multiuse trails, needed improvements for our parks, growing our pickleball courts, renovating T.B. McPherson, renovating Albert Ray Massey Recreation Center, rebuilding the Thelma Bolton Center, locating and creating a park in Southwest Gainesville.
All of these are subject to change, but staff has been working hard to listen to the community, assess infrastructure needs, and come up with plans to give residents the quality of life they voted for and are paying for.
Making local government work
A tremendous amount of credit needs to go to our staff, from City Manager Cynthia Curry down to our GRU line workers and our department heads. It’s worth remembering that for all the controversy, politics, legislative interference and infighting that there is important work being done. Because for all of the talk of “state takeovers” the core of what we do as a city is to make people’s lives better. It’s what I love about local government, and for all of the bad news and issues I’ve brought up in prior blogs I wanted to hold up some of the good we’re doing - because there’s a lot of it.
Bryan Eastman
City Commissioner District 4
I got to these numbers by downloading the state spreadsheets for each city and removing Water, Wastewater, Electricity, and Natural Gas services.
excellent report!
Thanks!