New book explores struggle between GRU, City Hall from eyes of former general manager

A new book released by the former leader of Gainesville Regional Utilities offers readers a first-hand account of the internal drama at City Hall.

The book, titled “The City That Lost Control," was written by Ed Bielarski and released on Amazon last week. It encapsulates more than a decade of major events that led to impacts on GRU and its customers.

It is self-published through Lava Lamp Books, an LLC created by Bielarski and his wife in April, and comes on the heels of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to strip away the Gainesville City Commission’s century-long control of the municipal utility.

“The city has lost the governance of the utility all through events that we should've seen,” Bielarski said in a phone interview with The Gainesville Sun. “I don't think anybody wanted this, but they're the consequences of two decades of malfeasance. We were trying to save the world while we couldn't manage our own checkbook.”

More: Gov. Ron DeSantis signs controversial state takeover of Gainesville utilities

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Bielarski, a first-time author at age 66, starts the book by seemingly comparing the bombing of Pearl Harbor to his near termination in 2017 after a series of critical articles from The Sun.

“On the seventy-six-year anniversary of that attack, December 7, 2017, I spun into Gainesville’s City Hall parking lot, racing on a path to avoid my own day of infamy − being publicly ousted as the general manager of the city’s utility by the elected seven-member commission,” he wrote.

The book goes on to air his grievances with major players at City Hall, including the mayor, other elected officials, former city managers and, at times, local media outlets. Bielarski, who was hired as GRU’s general manager just two years earlier as the city's highest-paid employee ever at the time, appeared before the commission that evening to shed light on his perspective of issues facing the utility and clear up any misunderstandings.

In the end, he kept his job, though his fight wasn't over.

About the book

From there, Bielarski takes readers through a journey of events that largely revolve around his struggle with the commission and the decisions that led to the state taking control of the utility through legislation that gave the governor the authority to appoint a five-member board for all GRU-related decisions.

He expresses disappointment in the city’s continued path of costly green initiatives while electric rates were still among the highest in the state. He also takes issue with constant attacks on GRU from local politicians, namely Sen. Keith Perry and Rep. Chuck Clemons.

While locals were targeting GRU, Bielarski said people failed to connect it was decisions from the City Commission that led to the impacts facing ratepayers, not GRU leadership or employees.

That narrative shifted, he said, during his unsuccessful run for mayor, a campaign he announced moments prior to his termination in 2022. To some, the campaign became a beacon of hope for critics who harped on GRU-related issues.

Bielarski’s opponents, however, argued that some negative impacts were the former GRU leader’s fault and that financials have improved since his departure. To his credit, through Bielarski's negotiations also discussed in the book, GRU lowered its overall debt during his tenure by nearly $300 million.

Though Bielarski’s campaign fell short, the Republican-led legislature passed the law to take away the commission’s control of GRU, many of whom used his messaging as talking points as reasoning to support the governance change.

Bielarski, who is now well-positioned to sit on the new GRU Authority board if he chooses to apply, said he hopes readers better understand the series of events that led to the state’s takeover of GRU, as well as his position and reasoning for certain actions.

As of Tuesday, the book is listed No. 3 on Amazon’s “corruption and misconduct” new release category.

“It’s a real story,” he said. “I lived it. I take the reality and the facts and present them with my experiences in a non-fiction narrative … Even though things transpire in and around us, it really takes a certain amount of retrospection to see the importance of it. We can't let this kind of failure of governance continue. We’ve got to make people accountable for what they do.”

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Ed Bielarski releases Amazon book about GRU, City Hall struggles