A former neighbor of mine had been an attorney for GRU. Once, a long, long, long time ago, I asked him what he thought about a new city-county agreement regarding who should pay for street lights and fire hydrants in the unincorporated area (i.e. outside city limits).
My neighbor, being a taciturn sort of guy, didn’t get into specifics, other than to point out that the agreement stuck GNV with the county’s street lights and fire hydrants bill for as long as “the grass grows and the river flows.”
He made that observation nearly 35 years ago. The grass has continued to grow and the rivers flow.
And GNV continues to pay a bill that helps support suburban sprawl out in the unincorporated county.
So it surprised me not at all that, this week, the City Commission once again asked Alachua County to renegotiate the street lights and fire hydrants agreement. This time on the grounds that GRU is no longer under City Commission control.
“We cannot deliver utility functions,” Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward told county commissioners. “The payment is actually moot in the process because we simply can’t meet the terms of delivering utility services in the county or outside the county or in the city or outside the city. I would like to see us dissolve the agreement and start from scratch because we do not deliver utility services through the Gainesville City Commission.”
County commissioners were not immediately swayed by Ward’s logic. And frankly, why should they be?
If GRU continues to foot the bill for street lights and fire hydrants in the county its new Great DeSanitizer-installed governors will almost certainly deduct said cost from the City’s annual utility transfer.
In other words, city taxpayers will continue to pay to light county streets and support county fire suppression whether they want to or not.
Listen, if you just got here you may wonder how and why the City of GNV agreed to foot a county bill basically forever. In the interest of providing some background, I herewith reprint excerpts from a column I wrote for the GNV Sun 20 years ago. (Click on this link to read the whole column.)
Enjoy.
A Blast From The Past
Gainesville Sun, Feb. 14, 2004
One of the things you have to love about this place is the way we keep fighting the same battles over and over again.
This is especially true when it comes to Gainesville-Alachua County battles.
Annexation, fire service agreements, emergency communications conflicts; you name it, we could put it on a schedule.
Anyway, knowing the cyclical nature of city-county feuds, I wasn’t surprised when an oldie goldie surfaced the other day.
Street lights and fire hydrants.
Specifically, street lights and fire hydrants in the unincorporated area.
And more specifically still, Gainesville’s obligation to pay roughly $1 million a year to operate street lights and fire hydrants in the unincorporated area.
For as long as the grass grows and the river flows.
Or until Gainesville gets enough leverage over Alachua County to get out of its eternal contractual obligation.
The last time city and county commissioners openly fought about the street light and fire hydrant issue was about 15 years ago. But the issue surfaced the other day at a City Commission retreat, when Commissioner Tony Domenech asked why Gainesville was shelling out a cool million to benefit people who don’t even live within the city limits.
Ah, ha! replied Mayor Tom Bussing, or words to that effect.
Bussing has been asking that same question for three years now. He thinks the city is being taken advantage of. He wants to put the street lights and fire hydrants issue back on the table.
So it is probably worth recalling how the city came to be paying for street lights and fire hydrants out in the county.
Actually, it first took on the obligation as part of the old “RUB-Out” agreement in the 1970s. RUB was the Regional Utilities Board, a well-intended but ill-fated attempt by the city and county to jointly set utility policy.
Under RUB-Out, the city agreed to pay for street lights and fire hydrants until 1987. After that, the city expected the county to pay the bill.
Instead, the county argued that since GRU was assessing unincorporated customers a 10 percent surcharge anyway, Gainesville could darn well keep paying the bill.
The city threatened to sue the county. The county threatened to sue the city.
The county asked the Legislative delegation for a local law to force the city to keep paying the bill. County commissioners also threatened to tax GRU to run its wires along county rights-of-way.
Alas, as so often happens, politics spoiled everything.
In 1989, Doug McGann, who was the last kick-butt-and-take-names school superintendent we had around here, put together a local option sales tax initiative that would have raised $215 million a year for new schools and city and county roads and other infrastructure.
But the street lights and fire hydrants fight was all over the front pages, and McGann worried that disgusted voters would kill the sales tax initiative to spite the city and county.
Enter Cynthia Chestnut, then Gainesville’s mayor and a school district employee (and now a county commissioner).
“The $215 million from the sales tax is too much to gamble and lose for $593,000 (then the yearly lights and hydrants bill.)” Chestnut said.
So she brokered the deal that led to the city’s agreeing to pay for street lights and fire hydrants in perpetuity.
The good news is that voters did not defeat the sales tax initiative out of disgust over city-county feuding.
The bad news is that voters defeated the sales tax initiative; they didn’t like new taxes.
I can see where Bussing and Domenech might feel like previous city commissioners made a bad deal.
Still, in retrospect, the deal wasn’t really as one-sided as it may appear.
For one thing, it probably helped defuse a political movement then gaining steam to take GRU out of the city’s hands and turn it over to an independent authority. And the County didn’t impose its threatened utility franchise fees.
And as a lucid and insightful Sun editorial of the time (written by me, I think) noted:
“Implicit in the agreement by Gainesville city commissioners to pay Alachua County’s street lights and fire hydrants bill was the acknowledgement that unincorporated customers of the city-owned GRU are entitled to some tangible benefit in return for the surcharge they pay on their utility bills.”
I don’t know if street lights and fire hydrants will become a hot issue again or not. But it is worth noting that the $919,000 the city says the county owes for fire fighting is on top of the money that unincorporated residents (aka cash cows) pay every month in their utility bills to support the Gainesville Fire Department and other city services that they get no benefit from.
So it’s difficult to begrudge them a little kickback to keep their street lights on and their fire hydrants working.
****
So here we are, two decades later, and the street lights and fire hydrants issue seems to have become a ‘hot issue’ again. But I don’t see where the current city commission has much leverage to renegotiate the agreement.
What would the County Commission gain by letting the City off the hook?
And not to forget that the Legislature’s hostile takeover of GRU was engineered by suburban politicians who hate GNV and would be more than happy to see city taxpayers continue to foot the bill to support suburban sprawl in the unincorporated county….
…for as long as the grass grows and the river flows.
My former neighbor thought it was sheer folly for the City to sign the street lights and fire hydrants agreement without throwing in some sort of sunset clause.
In retrospect I think he was right.
FreeGNV 