Jacksonville City Council President-designate Kevin Carrico, left, and Vice President-designate Nick Howland celebrate after their elections in 2025. | Mike Mendenhall, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 21, 2026 at 12:51 pm
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Whatever histories of Jacksonville are written (if any) won’t focus too much on whoever leads the City Council in a given year, and that’s likely a good thing for outgoing President Kevin Carrico after 12 months best forgotten.
Carrico has spent the last year undercutting the authority of the office, in what was a prolonged in-kind contribution to the Donna Deegan re-election campaign.
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His recently released texts around his attempt to put his boss at the Boys and Girls Club on the JEA board are basically the cellophane wrap on the pungent, unpalatable sandwich that was his year atop the legislative branch.
It wasn’t so much what he said in the texts – politics is full of morally ambiguous people who wear their corruption like a second skin.
It was the fact that knowing that these would be public record, he committed to these statements anyway.
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From saying that he needed a board member to jump off because he owed a “big favor” to “a friend,” to talking about how he wasted Deegan ally Jimmy Peluso’s last year by removing him from his “one committee,” Carrico managed to expose the business of the legislative branch.
He also revealed that the fathers of consolidation were wise to envision a strong mayor, in part because incidents like this show that when people advance beyond their natural ability, their learning curve comes at the expense of the city itself.
Beyond that, Carrico’s questionable choice to lead the Finance Committee, Raul Arias, shouldn’t be forgotten.
It’s unclear what Arias’ qualification for that was beyond being willing to get in the “foxhole” with the council president, but between his family’s company getting $35,000 to cater Carrico’s installation and trying to steer a media contract to a company he once owned in correlation with a city grant, the red flags abounded.
This week, Nick Howland gets sworn into the president role.
His work is cut out for him.
Because of the way Carrico squandered the moral authority of the office, Howland isn’t going to be able to hold council up as a bulwark against the mayor’s office in this election year the way some Republicans – particularly candidates and consultants – might have hoped.
Scrutiny will also surround committee assignments.
Howland will be compelled to shake things up some and give some other people a chance to serve in prominent roles. At-large member Matt Carlucci, who is on his last year on the council, has been wasted in recent years and, like Peluso, had one committee also.
The reality of politics in this city, one closely divided in terms of registration between Republicans and Democrats, is that coalitions form here across party lines.
That’s different from Tallahassee, where a conservative Democrat like Kim Daniels has often been attacked by her caucus for ideological divergence.
And it’s certainly different from D.C., where it takes a lot for Rs and Ds to deviate from their caucus.
The pretense that has prevailed locally more and more of late has been that, like Carrico tried to, it’s important to shore up the party from the dais, because that’s the way to ensure a perpetual political career of increasing prominence.
As spotlighted by the Florida Trib, this damning Carrico text: “Let’s go man … gotta hold down the school board, super majority including at large and then push hard for the mayor’s office!”
It’s like they think Gov. Ron DeSantis will parachute in and appoint them to be the next education commissioner or something if they just do what’s necessary to make things partisan enough.
A party chair can and should be thinking along these lines.
A city council president, who was elected to represent a district, maybe not so much.
The dirty little not-so-secret about the GOP council supermajority is that purity tests abound even within that caucus.
Republican consensus builders like Ken Amaro, Michael Boylan and Matt Carlucci are often excoriated in comment threads for not being willing to play the partisan game.
Ultimately though, the partisan game only goes so far in a city like this.
Our issues are well-documented: massive pockets of poverty and infrastructural neglect amid a belief among those in the new-construction or historically redlined areas that their position in life is more determined by personal merit or virtue than luck of the draw.
Jacksonville’s government only works when it is driven by compassion, equity and forward thinking.
In that regard, the presidency of the city council can be the most meaningful job in town besides being mayor, if done well.
Let’s hope that Howland and his likely successor, VP-designate Joe Carlucci, keep that in mind.
