JEA confirmed Friday that Chief Financial Officer Ryan Wannemacher is gone from the public-owned utility. Additional details weren’t immediately available.
His departure follows those of CEO Aaron Zahn and Chief Legal Officer Lynne Rhode. JEA spokeswoman Gina Kyle confirmed Wannemacher’s departure in a text exchange with Times-Union columnist Nate Monroe.
Also, late Friday, JEA began releasing some documents related to its Invitations to Negotiate for its potential sale.
RELATED: JEA unanimously approves resolution to cancel ITN process after spending at least $10 million
RELATED: Mayor Curry says 'ITN' bidding for JEA is off the table, describes 'missteps' over past few months
The documents can be found on the What’s Next for JEA website. Not all documents related to the ITN process have been released. Two respondents, NextEra Energy Inc. and American Water Works Co. Inc., objected to the release of documents.
“We are balancing mitigation of potential litigation risk against proceeding with haste on release of information, and have received legal challenges we are addressing,” Kyle wrote in an email to media. “JEA and the Office of General Counsel will continue to work with all respondents in the coming days and weeks to release all information related to ITN 127-19.”
The Times-Union will review the documents in the coming days.
City Council member Rory Diamond called for Wannemacher’s departure after a hearing Dec. 16 when Diamond questioned JEA executives about a controversial bonus plan that has since been canceled.
City auditors had identified a number of concerns with the plan, including the possibility that it could result in a payoff worth hundreds of millions of dollars if JEA was sold for $4 billion. City attorneys concluded it wasn’t legal and advised JEA to abandon the plan.
In a letter to the Times-Union sent last week, Diamond said that in financial terms, “this was the largest scandal in our community’s history, it was both shocking and disgusting and undermined the most important element in any government—trust.”
Wannemacher “knew or should have known about this plan and its outrageous cost to our community (he, too, could have bought in),” Diamon wrote.
Wannemacher had been JEA’s Chief Financial Officer since April 2018, according to the JEA’s website. Before that he was JEA’s Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for three years. And earlier, he was Vice President of Investment Banking at JPMorgan.