RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. — Residents in Riviera Beach want to know why a former city official offered to cut a plant an 88% discount on a fine for discharging polluted water into the city's wastewater system.
After offering the discount, he later got a job with the bottling company.
Records show six times in the past 2 1/2 years that Riviera Beach cited the PepsiCo bottling plant, located on Garden Road, for having high levels of pollutants discharged into the city's wastewater system.
Under city statutes, the violations resulted in a fine called a wastewater surcharge.
The bottling plant, located on Garden Road, has faced some stiff surcharges for its water pollution discharges.
The Riviera Beach Utilities Department wrote up a fine of $48,444 for the bottler in November 2020. Then-acting Utilities Director Jonathan Batista offered to lower that to just $5,218.
Shortly afterward, Batista left the city to work for Pepsico.
"With a resident actually coming to the city, and saying, 'Hey, I'm going to work for the city of Riviera Beach. I'm going to offer a credit behind the back of staff and the council,'" said Riviera Beach City Council Member Doug Lawson. "That's something we're going to have to press charges and look into."
"We need to do an investigation of what happened with that, to get to the bottom of it," added council member Julia Botel. "It should never happen again."
More pollution was measured in the wastewater from the PepsiCo plant in September 2021.
Batista, now working for Pepsico, went to the Riviera Beach department that he used to lead, and asked that it be lowered to $7,520.
The city turned down his offer.
City manager Jonathan Evans said the city did not give Pepsico the breaks Batista asked for when he was a city department head in 2020 or a Pepsico worker in 2021.
"We looked into it, and we made sure that will not happen," Evans said. "[We want to] make sure we preserve the public's trust related to this."
Pepsico did not return calls to Contact 5, and we were unable to reach Batista for comment.