The Gainesville Sun Editorial Board
When Gainesville Regional Utilities moved into a new operations center on North Main Street in 2011, it opened up the opportunity to redevelop industrial land that GRU no longer needed downtown.
Ten years later, the redevelopment plan for the Power District is still a work in progress. In the meantime, affordable housing has dwindled and west-side sprawl has accelerated. Officials need to finally decide on a plan for the Power District and stick to it.
The Power District gets its name from GRU s continuing operations of the Kelly natural gas power plant downtown. The city-owned utility’s other properties in the area including parking lots, warehouses and even its downtown office are envisioned as possible locations for a walkable, mixed-use development that brings new jobs, residents and visitors to the heart of the city.
Letters to the editor for April 18, 2021
The Gainesville Sun
Be careful with development
A lack of transparency and public involvement stood out this month in plans to market 12 to 22 acres of city property downtown. The money would be squandered like the millions already flowing to consultants, incentives, creditors and excess admin.
Selling property beats giving it away, as the city and county have done, but not to just grab some money. Prized green space is at stake, and we’ve seen promises of housing evaporate and unique homegrown enterprises lose out to chain retail.
City properties within neighborhoods also might be sold to private interests. Piecemeal spot-zoning is in the works. East-side reinvestment priorities are hijacked. These decisions are driven by big interests, not public input.
What actually is built there will be determined by proposals that will soon be sought from developers.
Gainesville city officials, with the help of a real estate company, are trying to revive the project that s been in limbo for several years.
The city recently hired Colliers International to help the city develop guidelines for the project to pique developers interests.
Company hired to market idea to developers
The site is located on Gainesville Regional Utilities properties north of Depot Park and surrounding the Kelly natural gas power plant
Those proposed guidelines, including building heights, will be reviewed by the City Commission in a couple of months after the Gainesville Community Reinvestment Area advisory board reviews it first, City Manager Lee Feldman said at workshop earlier this month.
At a neighborhood meeting last November, representatives from Origis Energy and Gainesville Regional Utilities sought to allay concerns about a proposed solar farm in the Sand Bluff neighborhood near Archer.
At that November meeting, a few local residents charged that the site selection had been racist: The county was once again conspiring to dump a dirty industry onto a Black and brown neighborhood (in this case a proud, multi-generational farming community).
Origis Energy, the solar contracting company that selected the Sand Bluff site, vigorously pushed back against that view. They noted that the site had been chosen for practical reasons.
The Gainesville Sun Editorial Board
Over much of the past decade, financial decisions involving Gainesville Regional Utilities have forced elected officials to choose between bad and worse.
The Gainesville City Commission now faces another rotten choice in finding the right combination of utility rate hikes, property tax increases and cuts to government services to balance the city budget. Commissioners should prevent GRU’s already-high electric rates from soaring out of control by moving more aggressively away from relying so much on utility revenue.
Revenue from city-owned GRU currently funds around 30% of the city s general government budget. The revenue helps pay for law enforcement and other services in a city where more than half the property is not taxed, due to the University of Florida and other government entities owning the land.