Councilman: For months, JEA ignored auditors questioning PUP’s legality

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A Jacksonville City Councilman says JEA went months without responding to auditors during talks of a sale and controversial bonus program.

That Performance Unit Plan, known as the PUP, could have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, the entire JEA Board of Directors plans to resign as the former CEO is fired. Who is calling for greater oversight and change on FOX30 at 10.

It led to the firing of then-CEO Aaron Zahn.

This month, Councilman Rory Diamond filed a bill that would require JEA respond to city auditors within 48 hours.

Diamond is also the chair of the committee heading the council-led investigation into the embattled utility.

JEA is also the subject of a federal probe.

“[JEA was] giving the council auditor the Heisman the entire time, just nonstop, not answering the council auditor’s questions, for two months, they didn’t,” Diamond said.

Action News Jax has been pouring through Diamond’s nearly 500-page public records request into the PUP.

In an August 2019 email to JEA executives, a council auditor has 22 concerns with the PUP. He asks, “What is its purpose?” and “What makes it a legal form of compensation?”

The utility’s since-fired CFO, Ryan Wannemacher, responds five days later, referring the auditor to the “plan documents and award agreement,” saying they’ll “circle up in a few weeks.”

Days later, a firm hired by JEA tells Wannemacher and others in an email, “The PUP formula is spitting out much larger numbers than we anticipated.”

The same day, a different firm tells the same group of execs, ‘I think we should delete the audit requirement since there would likely not be an audit after a sale of the entire utility.’

“There were multiple things that were coming up in these emails that say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’ve got a huge problem. We’ve got lawyers saying we should take audit requirements out, we’ve got lawyers saying, ‘Hey this is spitting out huge numbers, you’re going to make hundreds of millions of dollars off of this,’ and then the JEA executives do nothing at all,” Diamond said.

Ben Frazier, the president of the 1,200-member Northside Coalition, called the JEA saga a debacle.

“We think that the city has been hamstrung by charges of corruption, cover up, conflicts of interest,” Frazier said.

Tuesday, the same day the entire JEA board resigned, Frazier called for Mayor Lenny Curry to also step down.

“We’re not suggesting for one moment that the mayor is holding a smoking gun,” Frazier said. “We will, however, tell you that whatever has happened, has happened during Mayor Lenny Curry’s watch.”

The Mayor’s Office had no comment for Action News Jax about Frazier’s remarks.

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