JEA is considering raising rates again because of a budget shortfall. | Jacksonville Today file photo
Published on April 12, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Jacksonville Today seeks to include a diverse set of perspectives that add context or unique insight to the news of the day. Regular opinion columnists are independent contractors who are not involved in news decisions. Want to submit your own column on a matter of public interest? Email pitches to jessica@jaxtoday.org.
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.
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’t competent or willing to see the real challenges facing us.
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But if you don’t like them, you can do something about it. Many of these seats will be up on ballots this year or next.
We don’t 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.
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.
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Consider the ill-fated decision to invest in Georgia’s Plant Vogtle, a nuclear power plant riddled by cost overruns and timeline delays for more than the last decade. Unless you’re related to them, you probably can’t name the folks who made that decision.
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.
The party got started in Lenny Curry’s 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.
However, concepts aren’t reality. Board member Aaron Zahn leapfrogged more qualified applicants from out of state to become CEO as the “should we sell” 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.
When the planned “performance unit plan” 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.
But Zahn’s 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’t know how to attend even if they wanted to, they never had to hear how unhappy people might have been.
No one’s 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.
Much of the drama is rooted around CEO Vickie Cavey, a JEA lifer who was eventually promoted to lead the utility.
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’s 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’t exactly quell questions about how independent the independent authority is.
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 “big favor.” That was thwarted.
Meanwhile, the city council effectively concedes a lack of moral authority to put new members on the board, pausing consideration of two positions amid the ongoing questions about leadership. Meanwhile, the board itself doesn’t really want to hear much from city council liaison Ron Salem, including blocking him from speaking at a meeting in February.
That’s sort of like Frankenstein’s monster ignoring the doctor’s calls. A board who only answers to the city council doesn’t even want to hear from them.
All the while, the utility raises rates and manages a $2.37 billion operating budget.
While the Jacksonville Transportation Authority board has not been quite so beset by scandal and controversy, there is a strong, parallel case to be made for public accountability that doesn’t exist.
For starters, it’s having to furlough employees as tax revenue underperforms projections. But beyond that, there’s an unreliable bus system with a byzantine route system that is somewhat functional in getting people Downtown when the buses actually show up on time but does not effectively connect different parts of the county unless riders have hours to spend in transit.
JTA’s failure to effectively plan for the county’s growth as it has happened has been its greatest shortcoming. While we see gimmicks like the Skyway and the Neighborhood Autonomous Vehicle Innovation to route commuters Downtown, a light rail system implemented as the county grew over the decades would have been a way to train people not to rely on cars as much as they do, taking traffic and congestion off local roads.
The culture issues at JTA aren’t quite as glaring as those at the power and water company. But the structural issues are the same, and indicate the need to allow the people and not politicians to pick the board members who decide on long-term strategy and who ultimately will serve as CEO.
This would require a charter change, and that could be effected by referendum, by legislative action at the state level, or after a recommendation from the once-a-decade Charter Review Commission.
There are ways to make these monoliths accountable, and there are reasons to do so. A smart, ambitious politician looking to make their mark would find a way to lead this effort and make it their own.
