Duval County voters elect their mayor, sheriff, supervisor of elections, clerk of court, property appraiser, 19 City Council members, seven school board members and judges.<\/p>\n
To be sure, there are substantial if subjective complaints about all of them. Claims that donors pull the strings, or that they are driven by some ideological quirk, or that they simply aren\u2019t competent or willing to see the real challenges facing us.<\/p>\n
But if you don\u2019t like them, you can do something about it. Many of these seats will be up on ballots this year or next.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t have that recourse when it comes to boards that control our utilities or our local public transportation system though, and it is to our mutual detriment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is brought in sharpest relief when we look at the recent history of the JEA board, which has bounced from one controversy to another over more than a decade, without any opportunity for public accountability.<\/p>\n
Consider the ill-fated decision to invest in Georgia\u2019s Plant Vogtle, a nuclear power plant riddled by cost overruns and timeline delays<\/a> for more than the last decade. Unless you\u2019re related to them, you probably can\u2019t name the folks who made that decision.<\/p>\n If it were just the choice to go into an out-of-state nuclear consortium as a silent, powerless partner, that would be one thing. But for many years now, this board has been deeply politicized by insiders while making decisions that affect all of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n The party got started in Lenny Curry\u2019s first term, when senior officials in his administration looked to purge many of the JEA board holdovers from the era of former Mayor Alvin Brown. Once that was accomplished, the board and the city took a look at privatizing the utility, an argument that actually had some conceptual merit.<\/p>\n However, concepts aren\u2019t reality. Board member Aaron Zahn<\/a> leapfrogged more qualified applicants from out of state to become CEO as the \u201cshould we sell\u201d question loomed larger, even as questions piled up about his experience, comportment and competence. Those questions were never put to rest, certainly not by a board with too many members who had no business running a utility.<\/p>\n When the planned \u201cperformance unit plan<\/a>\u201d was revealed as a scheme to pay Zahn and other senior staffers a bonus if the utility were sold, the push to sell collapsed. Zahn ultimately was tried and convicted for his role in the plan, serving as a convenient fall guy.<\/p>\n But Zahn\u2019s misdeeds were not simply his own. His rise and fall was aided and abetted by a structure that was fundamentally unaccountable to the public. The board members were largely selected on vibes and willingness to supplicate to the elected power structure. And beyond the very brief public comment periods at their weekday meetings that most locals wouldn\u2019t know how to attend even if they wanted to, they never had to hear how unhappy people might have been.<\/p>\n No one\u2019s trying to sell JEA at this point, but controversy still swirls around the enterprise, amid a proxy war between the Donna Deegan administration and loyalists to former Mayor Curry.<\/p>\n Much of the drama is rooted around CEO Vickie Cavey<\/a>, a JEA lifer who was eventually promoted to lead the utility.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some in City Council allege Cavey is contributing to a culture of racism, favoritism, and a toxicity, with former Curry senior staffer Kurt Wilson, who was removed as Cavey\u2019s chief of staff after conflicts with her, serving as the avatar of the accusations. Deegan, for reasons unclear to this column, called a press conference where she endorsed Cavey and condemned the effort to remove her, which doesn\u2019t exactly quell questions about how independent the independent authority is.<\/p>\n Moves to reshape the board have been in the news, with City Council President Kevin Carrico apparently trying to put his boss at work on the board, as the legislative leader owed him a \u201cbig favor<\/a>.\u201d That was thwarted.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the city council effectively concedes a lack of moral authority to put new members on the board, pausing consideration of two positions <\/a>amid the ongoing questions about leadership. Meanwhile, the board itself doesn\u2019t really want to hear much from city council liaison Ron Salem, including blocking him from speaking at a meeting in February.<\/p>\n That\u2019s sort of like Frankenstein\u2019s monster ignoring the doctor\u2019s calls. A board who only answers to the city council doesn\u2019t even want to hear from them.\u00a0<\/p>\n