Politics
Jacksonville Bold for 8.26.26: Presidential pushback
House Speaker-designate Sam Garrison has some concerns about the presidential selection process at the University of North Florida.
The university’s Search Committee recommended Michael Shannon, the current president of the University of North Georgia, this week.
Shannon, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, emerged from a pool of 152 applicants. While it’s not official yet — the Board of Trustees must sign off, as does the Board of Governors — he’s in decent shape from what we can see as of now.
But the process to this point has been shielded from public disclosure, and for the incoming leader of the House, that’s a problem.
“Two things can simultaneously be true. First, UNF Board Chair Steve Moore and Search Committee Chair Jack Boyle did amazing work navigating the Presidential Search Process and deserve a huge thank you,” Garrison told Jacksonville Bold.
For Garrison, Shannon’s emergence as the sole finalist suggests an unintended consequence in state law.
“Second, the fact that UNF’s Board is committed to competition, yet still ended up with a sole finalist tells me the current system is broken,” he added. “I ran the legislation that created this public records exemption for presidential applicants in 2022. It sunsets next year and candidly, the law can’t go away fast enough for me.”
The legislation has created several problems.
The law was passed when the University of Florida, University of South Florida, University of North Florida, Florida International University and Florida Gulf Coast University were all searching for new presidents.
It exempted applicants’ personal information for state university and college presidential positions from public records laws. A list of final candidates had to be released at least 21 days before the interview.
When only one candidate makes the final round, as was the case with UNF’s search, visibility into the process is scotched.
The issue has been most visible at the state’s flagship university, where the rule has clouded the process for years.
The most notable hire under this law was UF’s Ben Sasse, who was billed as the school’s only presidential candidate.
Shortly after Sasse resigned, the UF student newspaper broke the story about Sasse’s overspending. Sasse spent money on lavish parties, hired employees who lived out of state and gave consulting contracts to GOP allies.
After Sasse resigned, University of Michigan President Santa Ono emerged as the sole finalist. A new set of problems emerged. While the university’s trustees were on board, the state university system’s Board of Governors balked at what was perceived as a left-leaning, DEI-dependent leadership philosophy.
Beyond problematic outside hires, the law greased the skids for allies of Gov. Ron DeSantis to glide into positions without any competition.
At the university level, this category includes Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez (Florida International University), former Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. (University of West Florida), and Marva Johnson (Florida A&M University).
Yet another former Education Commissioner — Anastasios “Stasi” Kamoutsas — now leads Polk State College.
Two other DeSantis allies, Adam Hasner of Florida Atlantic and Richard Corcoran of New College, were also hired since the law passed. Both had competition in the final round, however.
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Poll position
Jacksonville Republicans are still auditioning challengers for 2027. A new poll suggests it may not matter who gets the part.
Mayor Donna Deegan takes 53% in head-to-head tests against both Rep. Wyman Duggan and former Mayor Lenny Curry in a new St. Pete Polls survey of the city’s likely voters conducted for Florida Politics.
Deegan wins independents in both scenarios, taking 51% against Duggan and 47% against Curry, while neither Republican tops 27% with that bloc. She peels off 18% of Republicans against Duggan and 21% against Curry and holds 86% or more of Democrats in each matchup.
Black voters, more than a quarter of the sample, break for the Mayor by more than 75 points in both tests. Duggan carries White voters 46% to 38%, the only major demographic where either Republican leads. The closest age bracket is voters 70 and older, who still favor Deegan by 6 points over Duggan and 8 over Curry.
The race itself is still mostly hypothetical. Deegan, the former First Coast News anchor who in 2023 became the first woman elected Mayor of Jacksonville, filed for re-election in April. No major Republican has joined her on the ballot yet.
The St. Pete Polls survey questioned 618 likely Jacksonville voters Aug. 19-20 through a combination of automated phone calls (56%) and text messages (44%), with results weighted by party, race, age and gender to match the city’s active voter population. It carries a margin of error of about 4 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.
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Pool party
Duval County Property Appraiser Joyce Morgan, a former television journalist who served two terms on the Jacksonville City Council before being elected to her current role three years ago, has a challenger.
Scott Pool is running as a Republican. He is, among other things, a “retired U.S. Army aviator, mortgage broker, small business owner, and longtime resident of Jacksonville.”
Morgan hasn’t been an aggressive fundraiser yet, having put in $5,000 of her own money and received less than $7,000 in external contributions. But with a challenger having opened an account, she presumably will pick up the pace.
Speaking of loans …
It seems unlikely anyone wants to take on political perennial Jerry Holland, who is fully committed to running for another term as Duval County Supervisor of Elections.
If someone does, Holland has bet on himself, seeding his campaign account with $250,000 of his own money.
He has more than $260,000 on hand.
Holland has been in office for decades, serving stints on the Jacksonville City Council (including as President), as Duval County Property Appraiser, and for three terms as Supervisor of Elections.
He had considered running for Mayor but decided against it.
School daze
Duval County has emerged as a major battleground in Florida’s partisan proxy wars over School Boards, and this cycle is shaping up to be no different.
All three School Board contests on Tuesday went to runoff, with no candidate reaching the 50% needed to win outright. Each officially nonpartisan race has partisan undertones.
Those divides are clearest in District 2, which encompasses Jacksonville’s beaches. Moms for Liberty-backed School Board Member April Carney did not seek a second term, endorsing 26-year-old Donovan Bradley to succeed her.
Bradley is a former House legislative aide who served as executive director of the Duval GOP. He received 49% of the vote Tuesday in a three-candidate race, just shy of what he needed to win outright.
Donna Westrich, a public-school teacher and registered Democrat, took 38.6% of the vote and advanced to a runoff. She will now need to either boost turnout or win over virtually all those who voted for Terence Myers, a teacher who received 12.3% of the vote.
District 6 attracted the most spending, with five candidates running to succeed term-limited School Board Member Charlotte Joyce.
Joyce’s election to the Board in 2018 predates the founding of Moms for Liberty, the conservative parents’ group that has worked to reshape School Boards across Florida. But she kicked off a trend of more overtly conservative candidates seeking School Board seats. She was joined on the Board in 2022 by Carney and three other Moms for Liberty-backed candidates who won races in 2024.
With Joyce not running this year, Realtor Lindsey Denmark and School Board police sergeant Clarence James lapped the rest of the field in fundraising. Denmark hauled in $89,000 and spent $79,000, while James collected $100,700 (including $62,000 in his own funds) and spent $70,700.
Denmark secured Joyce’s endorsement and finished far ahead of her rivals with 33.5% of the vote Tuesday. Meanwhile, James took second with 20.6% but finished just 200 votes ahead of Tammyette Thomas, who spent just $3,000.
Meanwhile, the three-candidate race for District 4 saw James “Coach” Jacobs finish first with 39.3%, followed by Rhodesia “Rho” Butler at 34.9%. Jacobs bested Butler despite being outspent $19,800 to $3,500.
The ideological picture is more muddled in this race. Jacobs ran for City Council as a Democrat in 2017, but appears to have received multiple campaign contributions in the last several years from Reginald Blount, one of the Moms for Liberty-endorsed Board members elected in 2024.
Butler has been a registered Democrat for decades, as has Alfreda Denson Butler, who finished third Tuesday with 25.8%.
The District includes much of Jacksonville’s urban core and has a significant share of Black and Democratic voters. It is currently represented by term-limited incumbent Darryl Willie.
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Capitol Conversations
More than 300 business and community leaders gathered at the University of North Florida as the JAX Chamber brought Northeast Florida lawmakers together for its Capitol Conversations event.
The panel featured Speaker-designate Sam Garrison, Speaker Pro Tempore Wyman Duggan, Sen. Clay Yarborough and Reps. Jessica Baker, Dean Black, Kim Kendall and Kiyan Michael, who offered their takeaways from the 2026 Legislative Session.
The conversation also turned toward what comes next for Northeast Florida as election season approaches. Lawmakers discussed regional priorities, including the proposed property tax referendum and other issues expected to shape the political debate in the months ahead.
Ready for shreddy
The city of Jacksonville is keeping public records for too long, costing taxpayers a lot of money.
That’s the finding of the local Inspector General’s office, which says the city has “spent an estimated $873,982 to retain records that were already eligible for destruction.”
“Contributing factors include missing expiration dates, corrupted metadata, inconsistent departmental practices, and gaps stemming from historical transitions between records storage vendors. Interviews with personnel across multiple departments revealed additional deficiencies, including unclear protocols, limited training, and the assumption that commercial vendors were independently handling destruction,” the OIG announced Tuesday.
Secure shredding of the obsolete documents would cost a little more than $146,000 and would pay for itself in 30 months, the OIG says.
More than 58,000 boxes are eligible for destruction, costing the city more than $56,000 per year.
Part of the burden stems from data entry deficiencies. Some materials have incompatible start and end dates, while others have no expiration dates at all.
The problems are most acute in the Tax Collector’s Office, the Supervisor of Elections, Kids Hope Alliance, Fleet Management, and the Office of General Counsel.
In the SOE, a review found materials dating back to 1942, more than a quarter century before Consolidation.
The city is also on the hook for storing obsolete materials from divisions of state government, including the 4th Circuit State Attorney and Public Defender.
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Housing sales slip
July brought a tough climate for those looking to sell homes across the First Coast.
Single-family home sales dropped substantially last month, according to Northeast Florida Association of Realtors (NEFAR) figures. There were 1,841 closed home sales across the six-county region in July. That’s a 5.4% drop compared to July 2025. Compared to June, it’s a 15.8% decrease.
Median home sale prices were mixed. The median price settled at $405,000 in July, a 2.5% uptick from July 2025. But that was a 3.5% drop compared to June’s median price.
Duval County, the First Coast’s most populous county and home to Jacksonville, had 909 homes sold last month. That’s a substantial drop of 8.7% from July 2025 and a 12.7% decline from June. The median home sale price came in at $335,000, up 3.1% from last year but down 4% from June.
St. Johns County also had mixed figures, with 524 closings in July. That’s a 4.8% increase from a year ago but a 16.6% fall from June. The median sales price was $589,030, a 0.8% drop from a year ago and a 1.8% uptick from June.
Nassau County’s housing market was hit hard by the dog days of Summer, with only 86 sales in July. That’s a bleak 27.7% downturn from a year ago and a 26.5% drop from June. The median sales price also took a hit, coming in at $451,540. It marked a 2.9% slide from July 2025 and an 11.5% drop from June.
Clay County also saw sales slide to 259 closings last month, down 4.1% from a year ago and 20.8% from June. The median sales price was $360,000, a 2.7% drop from a year ago and a 1.4% slide from June.
Bogus voter busted
A 55-year-old Jacksonville man who is a Colombian national has pleaded guilty to federal charges of using someone else’s identification to get a U.S. passport and vote in elections in Florida for several years.
Carlos Felipe Jaramillo Grajales admitted he used false statements, stole someone else’s identity during an application for a passport, falsely claimed a Social Security number and falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen to vote in elections. The office of U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe in the Middle District of Florida said the evidence in the case was clear.
“According to the plea agreement, Jaramillo Grajales is a Colombian citizen who used the name, date of birth, and Social Security number of a U.S. citizen to apply for and obtain a passport. He used those same identifiers and claimed to be a U.S. citizen to apply for and obtain a Florida driver’s license and to register to vote. He then voted in several elections,” a press release said.
According to authorities, Jaramillo Grajales had been using bogus IDs for decades. His first passport application was in 2003, when he used a Puerto Rican birth certificate and driver’s license. Officials say they processed his applications because the identification used was legitimate, but they were unaware that Jaramillo Grajales was not the person the documents identified.
Clay County connection
Gov. Ron DeSantis tapped an old hand at utility management in Clay County.
DeSantis announced this month he’s reappointing Michael Hingst to the Clay County Utility Authority.
The organization is a utility service that delivers drinking water, wastewater and reclaimed water to residents of the municipality just west of Jacksonville.
Hingst is not only a returning member of the Utility Authority’s Board of Supervisors but also has extensive experience in the infrastructure industry. He is the director of technology, platforms and implementation for Pioneering Evolution. The business is a software design firm with military contracts that also provides support services for federal acquisition companies.
Beyond that, Hingst was a software engineer for Mediware Information Systems. He also owned his own firm, Computer Troubleshooters of Orange Park.
Hingst is a U.S. Navy veteran who earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the U.S. Naval Academy.
PR proud
The St. Johns County Office of Public Affairs is getting some positive public relations attention.
The Florida Public Relations Association (FPRA) has awarded St. Johns County the “Government Team of the Year Award” for its commitment to informing residents of the First Coast county. It’s the second year in a row St. Johns County snagged the award. St. Johns is also the only county communications team to win the award twice in the 69 years of the FPRA’s Annual Golden Image Awards.
The honor was given to the St. Johns crew for outstanding and unique achievements in the past year, leadership and innovation in communications, and significant impact and results in livestreaming coverage of County Commission meetings. The county also added new podcasts over the past year, including a series on residents and county workers who demonstrate strong community stewardship.
“Effective communication is essential to building trust and ensuring residents have access to the information they need,” said County Administrator Joy Andrews. “This recognition reflects the dedication, creativity, and collaboration of our Office of Public Affairs team and its commitment to finding new and meaningful ways to connect with our community.”
The St. Johns County Office of Public Affairs targets residents to keep them informed through media relations, video production, digital communications, a range of websites, and creative partnerships with other departments and community organizations.
Paying for practice
The Jaguars are scheduled to complete the 2026 preseason schedule on Friday night against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (7:30 p.m. ET, WFOX).
Just don’t expect to see much from the starters. Again.
In the first two preseason games, head coach Liam Coen has opted to hold most starters out of the lineup, preferring to use joint practices to assess them.
That is, of course, his prerogative as head coach. In fact, it is an increasingly common approach around the NFL. Which is a problem. Especially in Jacksonville.
Jaguars season ticket holders will already miss a pair of “home” games when the team plays in London. And this season, when the Jaguars have two preseason home games, it appears that they will not see any of the team’s front-line players. They’re still paying for the tickets.
But back to football. The Jaguars and Bucs are working against each other this week, and Coen is stressing to his team that they treat the joint sessions as they would a game.
“Especially for the joint with Tampa, just getting those guys a ton of reps and just trying to maximize these ops because we won’t be in pads again until game week, you know, after this week,” Coen said. “That’s the reality of just how things fall and where we’re at. We ended up having one more padded day than last year’s training camp. So, you’ve got to maximize these ops and the continued continuity and chemistry is so important that every single time we step out here, there has to be real intentionality and not just, OK, this is another training camp practice.”
There are still decisions to be made for starting jobs and how certain positions will rotate during the early portion of the regular season.
There is still the question of how the Jaguars will utilize the top three running backs, Bhayshul Tuten, Chris Rodriguez and LeQuint Allen. Ameer Abdullah has also performed well in the preseason games, albeit against backups.
Who will comprise the Jaguars’ starting offensive line? We (think we) know Anton Harrison will start at left tackle and Robert Hainsey at center. But there are questions about who starts at the other three positions. Ezra Cleveland is expected to start at one guard spot. But what of Patrick Mekari, rookie Emmanuel Pregnon, and tackles Walker Little and Cole Van Lanen, who was cleared to return to practice this week?
On defense, both Ventrell Miller and undrafted free agent Branson Combs are listed as co-starters. That will have to be sorted out before the season opener on Sept. 13 against the Cleveland Browns.
And the cornerback and defensive tackle rotations are still to be finalized. Fans would love to see the competition play out on the field on Friday. It isn’t likely to happen.
With more than two weeks between the preseason finale and the season opener, competition will continue until, and perhaps beyond, Kickoff Weekend.
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