Editorial: A time for leadership on Lot J
Our view
This past week has been a study in leadership, character and transparency.
On Monday, the report of the City Council’s investigation of the attempted sale of JEA was released. The 300-page report reminded us that Jacksonville has a leadership crisis, a character crisis, a transparency crisis.
City Council Member Brenda Priestly Jackson, chair of the council’s investigative committee, said the privatization effort was “pursued by advancing a false narrative of JEA’s financial soundness and conducted with less-than-appropriate transparency, in many instances purposefully, and were further encumbered with an egregious plan by JEA’s senior management to personally profit from the sale.”
Managing Director and CEO, JEA
Jay Stowe, the new CEO of Jacksonville’s municipal water and electric utility since Nov. 30, inherited an organization cooperating in a federal grand jury probe and preparing a five-year, $2.5 billion capital investment plan.
His hiring ended a 1½-year period that saw an attempt to sell JEA to a private company, resulting in U.S. Department of Justice and City Council investigations and the firing of former CEO Aaron Zahn and his senior leadership team.
Stowe plans to repair trust within JEA while moving on plans to invest $1.6 million to modernize its its water and wastewater system.
COMMENTARY | The finger wagging by long-suffering and ever-vexed Jaguars President Mark Lamping has gotten old. City Council members seemed to have stopped paying attention to Mayor Lenny Curry s fevered Twitter rants. Even Paul Harden, the Jaguars smooth-talking lobbyist with legendary repute, has stepped in it recently.
All three have taken their best shots at selling City Council members on the nearly $250 million taxpayer incentive package they hope will prop up an entertainment district the Jaguars want to build on Lot J next to TIAA Bank Field, a proposal that has hit procedural roadblocks and attracted political backlash. The deal is still almost certain to pass, but the path has been far rockier, more contentious and at times even more uncertain than the Jaguars brain trust had hoped earlier in the year.