Jeremy Cummings resigned Tuesday after 27 years, effective immediately. The agenda for the meeting that handled it was three lines long, and a vote in open session was not one of them.
The short version
- The president of Columbus Water Works resigned Tuesday, effective immediately. No reason has been given by anyone.
- The Board of Water Commissioners handled it in a called meeting, six days before its regular one. The entire posted agenda was roll call, executive session, adjourn.
- Georgia law allows the closed discussion. It requires that any vote on it be taken in public.
- The written summary of what the board acted on is due Thursday, September 10.
- When the last president left in 2024, the board announced it six weeks ahead and the two men overlapped for two months.
- Interim president is Brittany Brossett, the executive vice president and the board’s own secretary.
COLUMBUS, Ga. — The Board of Water Commissioners called a meeting for Tuesday, September 8. It was not the board’s regular meeting. The regular one is Monday, September 14, at 1:30 in the afternoon, the way it is every second Monday.
The agenda the board posted for Tuesday has three items on it.
The agenda, in full
BOARD OF WATER COMMISSIONERS
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
CALLED MEETING
– AGENDA –
I. Roll Call for Board Members
II. Executive Session
• Personnel Issues
III. Adjourn Meeting
By that evening, Columbus Water Works had a different president.
Jeremy Cummings resigned after 27 years at the utility and a little over two years running it. Brittany Brossett, the executive vice president and the board’s own secretary, is interim president, effective immediately. WRBL reported it Tuesday afternoon.
No reason was given for any of it.
Nick Smith, who chairs the board, said this: “Jeremy has dedicated much of his career to Columbus Water Works and to the community we serve. We’re grateful for his many contributions over the years, and we wish him all the best in his next chapter.”
That is the entire public explanation for the departure of the man who runs the water system for Columbus and Fort Benning.
What the agenda does not say
Georgia lets a public board close the door on this kind of thing. O.C.G.A. § 50-14-3(b)(2) permits a board to discuss and deliberate in private about hiring, discipline, dismissal and the evaluation of a public employee. The Board of Water Commissioners was within its rights to go into executive session on Tuesday.
The same provision says something else. Any vote on those matters has to be taken in public.
The posted agenda goes from executive session straight to adjournment. It lists no open session. It lists no vote to accept a resignation and no vote to appoint an interim president.
That is not proof of anything yet. Georgia law does not bind a board to its posted agenda, and a board can take up an item that was not listed. What settles it is the record of the meeting, and there are two pieces of that record coming.
The first is due Thursday. O.C.G.A. § 50-14-1(e)(2) requires a written summary of what a public body acted on, and who was there, to be available for inspection within two business days of adjournment. For a Tuesday meeting, that is September 10.
The second is the affidavit. Under O.C.G.A. § 50-14-4(b), the officer running a closed meeting has to sign a notarized statement swearing the closed part stayed inside what the law allows. It is a public record.
A key question yet to be answered is whether there was any notice, or any agreement between the board and Mr. Cummings. Another important question is, whether a vote was taken in open session. This story will be updated when that becomes clear.
The utility has done this before, differently
Columbus Water Works has a recent model for how it replaces a president, and it published the model itself.
On Monday, July 22, 2024, the board put out a press release naming Cummings as the next president. It gave a start date six weeks out, September 1. It said Steve Davis, president since 2012, would retire October 1. It said the two men would work together over the following two months to hand off the job. It quoted the chairman, the chair elect, the incoming president and the outgoing one. It listed a contact and a phone number.
Set that beside Tuesday. Same day. Immediate. Interim rather than permanent. No reason. No quote from the man leaving.
As of Tuesday night, nothing about the resignation had appeared on the utility’s own newsroom, where the most recent item is a piece from August 3 about how water gets from the river to your tap. The executive team page still listed Jeremy Cummings as president and chief executive officer.
Who the board is
This matters more than it usually would, because of who sits on it.
Columbus Water Works describes itself, on its own website, as “an executive department of the consolidated government.” It is not an independent authority. It is funded by what ratepayers pay and takes no tax dollars.
The Board of Water Commissioners has five members. Four are appointed by Columbus Council, two from districts and two at large, for staggered four year terms. The fifth is the mayor.
Skip Henderson sits on this board. He was at the July meeting. Whether he was in the room Tuesday is a question the minutes will answer.
The four appointed members are Nick Smith, the chairman, whose term runs out at the end of this year; Jennifer Upshaw, the vice chair; Oz Roberts; and Brooks Yancey.
There is a wrinkle in how Cummings himself appears. The consolidated government’s roster of boards and commissions lists him on the Board of Water Commissioners under the heading of president. Columbus Water Works, on its own page, describes a five member board and does not include him among the five. The two records do not agree, and we have asked which is right.
What he was in the middle of
Cummings did not preside over a quiet summer.
On July 20 the board approved preconstruction contracts for PFAS treatment, the work that has to happen before the federal limits arrive in 2029. Haskell got $400,000 for the Fort Benning water treatment plant and $850,000 for the North Columbus Water Resources Facility. Cummings had written to every customer in the 2025 water quality report that the utility “continues to meet or exceed all current regulatory requirements and is prepared to meet the upcoming PFAS standards in 2029.”
On July 27 somebody got into the systems Columbus Water Works uses to watch its own water remotely. The utility shut off the automation and ran the plants by hand. Nothing happened to the water. The public was told eight days later. Columbus Water Works confirmed the intrusion and then declined to say how the attackers got in.
The board met on August 10, six days after the public learned about the intrusion. The agenda for that meeting lists an emergency water main repair and an item called PowerConnect AI. We do not know what PowerConnect AI is and we are not going to guess. The minutes for that meeting are not posted. The link on the utility’s website where the August action items should be points to a file from July.
Behind all of it is Project Ruby. Cummings is the source of the number Columbus has been given about the proposed data center’s water. He told the Development Authority the city processes 90 million gallons a day and uses about a third of it. He said publicly the project would not affect customer bills. When we reported on the overlay in June, he held a seat on the board of the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce, the private group that pushed the zoning change the project needs, while running the public utility that would have to supply it. Whether he still holds that seat is one of the things we asked.
None of that is a reason for a resignation. Nobody has connected any of it to his departure, and neither do we. It is a list of what was on his desk when he left it.
What is not known
Whether he quit or was asked to. Whether there is a severance agreement, and whether it contains a clause about what he can say. Why immediately. Whether the board and its president disagreed about something. Where he is going.
Six of those are answerable from records that Georgia law makes public. The seventh is answerable by Jeremy Cummings.
The summary of Tuesday’s meeting is due Thursday. The board meets again Monday at 1:30, in the Chattahoochee Room at 1421 Veterans Parkway. That meeting is open to the public.
The notice, agenda, summary, minutes and executive session affidavit from the September 8 called meeting are public records under Georgia law. So are Mr. Cummings’s resignation letter and any separation agreement between him and the board. Any one of them would answer a question the board has so far left open.
Sources
Jazmine Mills, “Columbus Water Works names interim president, effective immediately,” WRBL, September 8, 2026.
Board of Water Commissioners, agenda for the called meeting of Tuesday, September 8, 2026, posted at cwwga.org. Summary of action items, regular meeting of July 20, 2026, signed by Brittany Brossett, secretary. Agenda for the regular meeting of August 10, 2026.
Columbus Water Works, “Press Release – Board of Water Commissioners Announces Next President,” July 22, 2024. Board of Water Commissioners and Executive Team pages, cwwga.org, as they read on September 8, 2026. 2025 Water Quality Report.
Columbus Consolidated Government, boards and commissions roster for the Board of Water Commissioners.
706report.com, “Nobody Will Say How Many Other Georgia Systems Were Hit,” August 2026, and previous reporting on Project Ruby.
O.C.G.A. § 50-14-1, § 50-14-3 and § 50-14-4.
