{"id":391191,"date":"2026-09-05T08:04:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T08:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/391191\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T08:04:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T08:04:28","slug":"billionaire-tampa-bay-rays-owner-used-private-jet-to-take-a-jacksonville-councilman-to-a-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/391191\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaire Tampa Bay Rays owner used private jet to take a Jacksonville councilman to a game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Patrick Zalupski Credit: University of Florida<\/a><\/p>\n

Jacksonville City Council President Nick Howland hopped on a billionaire real-estate developer\u2019s private jet this past weekend to attend a Tampa Bay Rays game at Tropicana Field, a trip that Howland, when asked by the Florida Trib about the excursion, said was connected to his political committee.<\/p>\n

Howland joined Patrick Zalupski, the founder and chief executive officer of Jacksonville-based Dream Finders Homes, on his plane for the game, along with others. A person spotted Howland at the private terminal where Zalupski\u2019s Gulfstream G280 took off.<\/p>\n

Zalupski, also appointed to the University of Florida\u2019s Board of Trustees by Governor Ron DeSantis, bought the professional baseball team based in St. Petersburg last year and recently secured an agreement to build a new stadium in Tampa.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zalupski and his company employ several lobbyists registered with Jacksonville City Hall. He was also an advocate for City Hall\u2019s financial investment in a planned UF graduate campus in downtown, to which city officials committed millions of dollars worth of public land and $100 million in direct support.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to publicly available flight data, Zalupski\u2019s corporate jet took off from Jacksonville International Airport Sunday morning, spent 40 minutes in the air, and landed at St. Petersburg Clearwater International Airport. The jet, registered to a company connected to Dream Finders Homes, returned to Jacksonville later that evening.<\/p>\n

Howland told the Trib that he attended the game \u201cto help raise funds for my political committee, Florida Freedom PAC.\u201d He declined to share more specifics about the fundraiser but repeated that \u201cit will all be disclosed in the committee\u2019s finance reports as required by Florida law.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear why Howland decided to hold a fundraiser hours south of Jacksonville.<\/p>\n

Howland, and other elected officials in Florida, are prohibited from accepting gifts valued at more than $100 from lobbyists or their employers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Florida\u2019s lax campaign finance laws allow elected officials to use their political committees \u2013 which can receive donations in unlimited amounts \u2013 to pay for junkets as long as they are connected to some kind of campaign activity, like a fundraiser. In such a case, elected officials can price the seat on a private plane as an economy-class seat on a commercial airline, effectively discounting such trips by thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n

Zalupski himself has two lobbyists registered with the City of Jacksonville, while Dream Finders Homes has employed six lobbyists with different firms registered with the city, including former Mayor Lenny Curry, who was also in St. Pete for the game, according to his social media posts, and Curry\u2019s former chief of staff, Jordan Elsbury.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Controversy around travel has been a recurring theme for years in Jacksonville politics.<\/p>\n

When mayor, Curry often financed his travel with his standing political action committee<\/a>, partially funded by the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Gifts given directly to the elected official have to be disclosed, but no gift disclosure is required if given to a committee associated with the official. Any reimbursements for travel would show up in the committee\u2019s expense reports.<\/p>\n

Zalupski did not return multiple requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Matt Schellenberg, a former Jacksonville City Council member, said he wouldn\u2019t have taken a private plane during his elected official days but would have instead traveled the nearly four-hour trip by car.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s supposed to be a leader,\u201d he said of Howland. \u201cWe\u2019re in a political environment where everything is suspicious, and this, in my opinion, looks very suspicious that he didn\u2019t do it in the open.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using his political committee to pay for the excursion with Zalupski \u201cactually sounds worse\u201d than just paying out of pocket, the former council member told the Trib.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you\u2019re going to have to do is get better council people. Period. I don\u2019t think the law will change what people do behind the scenes,\u201d Schellenberg said. \u201cYou have to depend on elected officials to be as transparent as they can be. No law is going to change that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Molly Farrar is a Report for America corps member and The Florida Trib\u2019s Jacksonville municipal watchdog reporter. She can be reached at [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article<\/a> first appeared on The Florida Trib<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

This article appears in September 03 \u2013 09, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patrick Zalupski Credit: University of Florida Jacksonville City Council President Nick Howland hopped on a billionaire real-estate developer\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117,3815],"class_list":["post-391191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-tampa-bay-rays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}