With three new members joining the Duval County School Board this fall, and eleven candidates vying for those positions, local voters have lots to digest before the August 24 primary election.
Some recent forums helped distill the positions of candidates for School Board Districts 2, and 4: a series hosted by The Jacksonville Public Education Fund, in conjunction with two charter schools and other community partners, as well as one forum sponsored by the NAACP.
Seeking to fill the seat vacated by Nancy Broner in District 2 are Neptune Beach Vice-mayor, Fred “Fel” Lee, veteran educator John King, Realtor and psychologist Theresa Graham, and author and former principal G.W. “Billy” Reynolds. Three others are seeking the District 4 seat, which is being vacated by Brenda Priestly Jackson (who plans to run for City Council): veteran educator Paula D. Wright, community activist Alzic Upton, and New Town Success Zone project director Irwin “Pedro” Cohen.

The DISTRICT 4 Race
Cohen told the 100-member audience at the NAACP forum that the county “cannot and should not continue to blame parents” for troubled students who populate failing schools, because it isn’t helpful. District 4 contains two of the county’s five “F” high schools *from 2009 —Jean Ribault and Andrew Jackson. Cohen, a doctoral student whose dissertation explores the connections between specific practices in African American churches with positive outcomes for youth, directs the New Town Success Zone for the Jacksonville Children’s commission, which seeks to put at-risk children on a path to college. In response to a question about resource disparities between district 4’s Raines and District 2’s Fletcher, Cohen said that good policy and fiscal management would have prevented the disparities found in the Florida Times-Union’s “City of Hope” series. Cohen supports charter schools, he says, as long as new ones are adequately capitalized with solid business plans.
Alzic Upton also favors charter schools, saying they are an economically viable means for delivering intense teaching services to children who need them —something the public schools can’t always do. Upton, whose three children have all graduated college, began volunteering in the public schools before her children were born. She has chaired the School Advisory Committees at Hendricks Avenue Elementary and Darnell Cookman Middle-High School, worked with the PTA, and volunteered for nonprofit organizations like the Bridge of Northeast Florida. A former guidance counselor, Upton has also conducted workshops for middle and high school students to help them navigate the college and financial aid application processes. Upton, like Cohen, is a doctoral candidate at Nova Southeastern University.

Their opponent, Paula D. Wright, is a 29-year veteran language arts teacher from Northwestern Middle School. Wright has secured several heavyweight endorsements: Duval Teachers’ United, the Northeast Florida Builders’ Association, The Northeast Florida Association of Realtors, and state Representative Audrey Gibson, among others. Wright says she wants for students as young as middle school age to begin to connect to the possibility of a chosen career so that they will “go to high school … stay in high school.” Wright was the only candidate at the NAACP forum who, when pressed for a quick yes or no answer due to time constraints, said “no” to charter schools. Wright points to Jacksonville’s unsuccessful history with charter programs, which district records corroborate. Ten of the 17 charter schools that have opened since 1997 have been shut down by the county, according to Duval’s School Choice Officer Dr. Sally Hague. Six more are set to open this fall.
Wright points to Patterson Academy of the Arts, which opened in August 2009 and was closed by the district three months later. “It didn’t last a year — but we’ve already given the money away,” she notes. She adds that the board’s process for scrutinizing future charter schools needs tweaking. “We need all the help we can get, but we need to make certain every dollar … is spent effectively,” she told Folio.
The District 2 Race
The issue of charter schools got more air time at the JPEF forum for School Board District 2, where Fred “Fel” Lee emerged as a strong proponent. “I think you take the best practices [from charter schools] and expand them to neighborhood schools,” Lee told a crowd of about 90 at the Twin Lakes forum. “I don’t know whether they [charter schools] are scalable [to district-wide implementation] or not,” Lee added. Lee favors continuing the district’s intense investment in low-performing “turnaround” schools, he said, but was the only candidate on the panel to unequivocally agree that closing failing schools was a good option for improving the system. Lee also joined his three opponents in calling on the legislature to give a higher priority to public education, adding that he “understand[s] advocacy” and that advocacy efforts that focus only on the legislative session are “too late.” The former engineer and business executive cites his experience with improving “large organizations” as key to his ability to help run the Duval schools, which he calls, “a $1.6 billion organization.”
Realtor and certified pre-school director, Theresa Graham, does not agree that closing schools is the “bottom-line best solution” for failing schools. She advocates “finding out what successful schools are doing and rolling out those programs” at less successful schools. Graham said that failing schools don’t always equate with poor-performing principals, and said it’s important to look at all factors, including differences in the ways in which children learn. She said that more magnet school programs should be added to the county’s repertoire.
Graham, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, touts her experience in crisis management as useful for helping individual families whose dysfunction interferes with student success. When asked by one audience member, who is expecting his first child, why he should not move to St. Johns County for that child’s schooling, she replied that since his home was in District 2, the child would be assigned to “excellent schools.” Graham added that she wanted children within the entire county to have the same opportunities as his child.
But former principal G.W. “Billy” Reynolds said that the county must take more action on providing safety and discipline in the schools to keep from losing students to private schools and neighboring counties. “Everything else follows,” he told the crowd at Twin Lakes. Reynolds supports the idea of funding turnaround schools, with the caveat that the schools need to reach out to “the mamas and the daddies” in the community. Schools need to get creative with community outreach, he said, and bring in “the Krispy Kreme truck if need be.” He advocates making failing schools “super-duper better” and likes the idea of bringing elements of the successful Stanton College Preparatory High School to schools like Ribault.
Reynolds has secured the endorsement of the School Maintenance and Employees & Associates Union, despite allegations of sexual misconduct that ultimately led to his early retirement and certificate surrender in 2006 (see “Principal Offense,” Folio Weekly, August 3). “We need an educator on that School Board and I want to be that educator,” Reynolds said at the forum.
John King, a former P.E. student of “Coach Reynolds’”, is another educator who is vying for the District 2 seat. The 17-year veteran math teacher told listeners at both forums that he began his career teaching inmates at the Duval County Juvenile Detention Center. “Never have I seen defeated young people as I see now,” King told the audience. “We’ve got to have an educator … [who] understands what defeat looks like and what it feels like when you turn a kid around.” King bemoans the emphasis on high-stakes testing, quipping that “we’ve turned it from rigor to rigor mortis.” King supports extra funding for low-performing schools, and different pathways to graduation for different students.
Like each of his three opponents, King disagreed with various aspects of the ill-fated Senate Bill 6, Senator John Thrasher’s bill which would have linked teacher pay to student performance on high-stakes tests. “It was another unfunded mandate,” he said of the bill, which included a requirement for end-of-course exams that have not yet been fully developed. Instead, King says, teaching “will always be about the relationships.” Those relationships might flourish in some charter school situations, he added, where classes are smaller and teachers have more autonomy. But making the school day longer, as many charter schools do, King says, “only works if you keep students motivated.”
All candidates in all three races face off in the Aug. 24 primary. (See “Getting Schooled,” Folio Weekly, July 20, for information about candidates for District 6.) If nobody wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote getters in each race will compete in a run-off election on November 2.

Known as the “ball cap” district because it stretches like a hat across the top of Duval County, District 6 hugs the northern border from Mayport to Baldwin. Current district rep, Vicki Drake, decided not to seek re-election, and the race to replace her is bustling with candidates and campaign contributions. The nonpartisan contest has four contenders: businessman Steve Berrey, teacher Becki Couch, school resource Officer Gary Oliveras, and attorney and political veteran Eric Smith. (Two other declared candidates have already dropped out.)
Becki Couch and Eric Smith have raised the lion’s share of contributions to date: $16,000 and $19,000 respectively. Couch’s contributors include former School Board Chair Cheryl Grymes and City Councilmember Daniel Davis. Smith, a former Council president and state Representative, lists big-name bipartisan support: Jags owner Wayne Weaver, Councilman John Crescimbeni, former Council President Ginger Soud, and Property Appraiser Jim Overton. Oliveras, who serves on the Police and Fire Pension fund and the board of directors of the Fraternal Order of Police, has raised nearly $6,000 in small contributions, while Berrey has reported no campaign contributions to date. The next reporting deadline is July 23.
Berrey, whose wife teaches at Lone Star Elementary, says he jumped into the local race in response to the state’s Senate Bill 6 controversy, which sought to tie teacher pay more directly to student performance on high-stakes tests. “[Senator Thrasher] told my wife she was not a professional,” Berrey says. “Who the hell was he to say that?”
Berrey says he would put more money into professional development scholarships for teachers, money he says he’ll derive from cost-saving ideas like using internet technology for meetings instead of fleet cars, selling the riverfront school board building, and requiring JEA to pay not only the city in lieu of property taxes, but the school taxing authority as well. He’s also a fan of year round schools, “if zoned properly,” and block scheduling for students, which was largely phased out from Duval County high schools due to budget cuts.
Couch, who is lead teacher at the Teaching Academy for high schoolers at Baldwin Middle School/High School, echoes Berrey’s sentiments on Thrasher’s Senate Bill 6. “It was out of touch,” she says. “[There is] already a system in place to allow principals to get rid of poor performing teachers but they don’t follow through.”
Couch points to the publicly- and privately-funded, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school as a potential model for Duval. “They [KIPP] have all the things the public schools want but can’t afford,” she says, including the ability to offer Saturday school and afternoon tutoring. Businesses, churches and civic organizations could offer supports like these through contributions of time as well as money, Couch says. “The burden is on educators to teach morals and character education,” she says, adding that the School Board needs to hold the superintendent accountable for backing principals and teachers who discipline their students.
Oliveras, who works in the world of student discipline, agrees with Couch, but goes further. He says the district’s focus on reducing out-of-school suspensions, may have inadvertently discouraged teachers and principals from disciplining students who need to be removed from the classroom. He cites the case of a 17-year-old student (unnamed) who remained in school despite seven felony arrests, and a 21-year-old exceptional education student at an Arlington high school who bit a teacher. “When do we get to say, ‘You need to leave?’” Oliveras wonders. “How were [these individuals] in any way appropriately placed in the public school system?”
Oliveras advocates getting the few students who truly don’t belong in the schools out, so he can concentrate on “getting buy-in for saving kids’ lives.” “Officer O,” as he’s known, speaks with admiration of a coach, a teacher and a custodian at Stanton who recently conspired to help re-direct a child who got mixed up with the criminal justice system for the first time last summer. “This is a community where you still have high school graduations as a family first,” says Oliveras, who served on the Charter Revision Commission and voted against the idea of a school board appointed by the mayor. “The city has a very checkered history on being faithful to prioritizing public education,” Oliveras told Folio Weekly.
Smith agrees that children have gotten short shrift in Jacksonville. He acknowledges that it’s the state’s duty to fund the public schools, but he doesn’t let the city of Jacksonville off the hook for a promise it took on three mayors ago, when it created the Jacksonville Children’s Commission,a legacy for which he’d like to see more funding. Smith, who has taught everything from seventh grade geography to law school, told Folio Weekly that he’s got the “backbone and institutional memory” to “school our legislative delegation” on Duval’s needs. “Don’t be a rubber stamp,” he says, “be Mike Weinstein,” referring Weinstein’s refusal to vote for the heavily partisan—and unfunded—Senate Bill 6. Smith says he wants to leverage his political experience to change a culture where “It’s never the time for kids.”
The candidates square off in the August 24 primary election.
Watch here for more on this race and the other two School Board seats up for grabs.

Callahan's official filing for candidacy caps a yearlong campaign-exploration effort, in which he discussed Jacksonville’s future with its current leaders and listened to a host of resident concerns. According to Mr. Callahan, “the next four years will bring challenges of historic proportion to Jacksonville, and real leadership is needed if the City is to remain the great place I love calling home.”  Nick Callahan now begins actively campaigning and looks forward to listening to what troubles his neighbors most, so he can hit the ground running on behalf of his constituents after the election.  For more information on Nick’s campaign, visit his website at www.jaxdistrict3.com or follow him via Twitter at http://twitter.com/NickCallahanJax.

Richard Clark - Council President

To many who practice their professions outside the walls of a courtroom or a landfill, this week’s filing of a lawsuit to invalidate Waste Management’s recent contract settlement with the City may seem mundane.  However, in actuality it’s the most important legal action Jacksonville has seen since a Grand Jury was convened to examine City Council’s evasion of Florida’s Sunshine Laws.  The suit goes beyond the legal challenges and differing auditor reports; it raises serious questions on how special interest lobbyists influence Council Members and exposes the lengths some Councilmen go to hide that fact.

Looking back; a year ago City Council rejected the same contract they just agreed to, but this time around it will cost Duval County taxpayers $37 million more. City Council and the General Counsel’s office caved to the threat of continued litigation by Waste Management and their chief lobbyist, Paul Harden.  While doing so, they left gaping holes in the public record and fought multiple requests to provide an unfettered view into the negotiations that brought Jacksonville residents doubled garbage-fees and their most expensive no-bid contract in City history.

City Council’s pattern of behavior to ignore competitive bidding and shun procurement rules was consistent and almost predictable.  Days before the recent contract settlement vote, it was revealed Councilman Ray Holt’s 2010 campaign coffers were stuffed with Waste Management money.  Last April, Holt voted against the same contract he now supports, but only with a larger price tag.  Under the guise of Sunshine Law exceptions for pending litigation, City Council and The Office of General Counsel hid behind so called “shade meetings” and attorney client privilege to conjure up reasons why settling would make sense for the taxpayers of Duval County.

Weeks after the Trail Ridge vote, a Paul Harden led coup of Council leadership almost succeeded in putting Stephen Joost in charge of Council, after outgoing Council President Richard Clark mysteriously yanked his support for Jack Webb, literally overnight.  Jack Webb stayed the course and saw the disadvantages of Waste Management’s contract through both votes, making his unwavering sensibility a huge threat to Waste Management and their special interest lobby.  Instead of receiving accolades for his fiscal prudence, Jack Webb was greeted by the cold reality of a powerfully invisible hand sent to punish him for his misdeeds of not toeing-the-line for Waste Management.

When the complex legal pleadings of the latest chapter in the Trail Ridge saga are boiled down, the suit isn’t necessarily about the waste of taxpayer dollars; instead it’s about how City Council really operates.  It exposes an old pattern that City Hall observers are all too familiar with.  Special interests dictate the bending of procurement rules and Sunshine Laws are tossed out the window in a vain attempt to portray transparent government.  If City Council is to do its job as effectively as voters hope, serious sanctions need to be implemented for ignoring these laws and strong regulations need to be placed on Hemming Plaza lobbyists.  Open and sensible government is really what is at stake as this suit plays out.

A summary of the complaint filed earlier this week is available for download.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., June 1, 2010 -

Specifically, they have amended the complaint filed last year against the City of Jacksonville and the City Council to request that the Court declare the passage of Ordinance 2010-217 to be both illegal and void.  The several grounds asserted include multiple City and Council violations of Florida’s open government meeting (“Sunshine”) law.

The lawsuit further seeks to protect the public interest by asking the Court to force the City to correct violations of the public records law, which require government and officials to make records available to every citizen for review and copying.  The City has failed to create and provide minutes of a public meeting (related to Trail Ridge), and refused to make a Council member’s records of the official business use of his cell phone available to the public.

A press conference will be held at 12:00 noon on Thursday, June 3, 2010, in front of the Jacksonville City Hall, 117 West Duval Street, Jacksonville, Florida, by Victor Wilhelm, President of the CTDC, and John Winkler, lead attorney for the Plaintiffs.

The Concerned Taxpayers of Duval County Incorporated (CTDC), is a not for profit corporation and nonpartisan political committee dedicated to serving the community as a watchdog group, using public information to oppose corruption, waste, and “Sunshine Law” violations in government. Additional information is available at www.jaxtaxpayers.org as well from the author of this press release, immediate past President John Winkler, 904 384 9918.

A coalition of hundreds of thousands of voters —teachers, parents, advocates -- were able to tell the difference, for example, between the palatable elements of education reform and the clamor for teacher union-busting. Not only could voters distinguish between the two, they cracked them apart, lobbied for a veto of Senate Bill 6, and won. The grassroots—the teachers, the parents, the advocates—got us this far. Will they get Crist to the U.S. Senate? Will they be able to foreclose the next version of SB 6, which, along with the gubernatorial poltergeist, Bill McCollum, looms on the Republican horizon?
Whether the Jeb Bush-weary voters of Florida are worn to the point that they’ll mobilize to shut out Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate race remains to be seen—and depends, in part, on what Governor Crist decides to do next.
Voters are still waiting to see whether Crist will veto House Bill 1143. If signed, HB 1143 would require women who seek abortions to view and pay for ultrasounds prior to their procedures. Crist has hundreds of thousands of reasons to veto HB 1143: hundreds of thousands of walking, breathing adult female Floridians whose party affiliations don’t enter into the calculus of their private reproductive decisions. Retired columnist Ellen Goodman has written that one in three American women between the ages of 18 and 40 have made the difficult decision to have an abortion. I’ll venture to say that they didn’t pull out their voter registration cards to do so; but they’ll need those cards at the polls this fall to keep their reproductive decisions private.
Florida’s ruling conservatives want to insert their own political opinions into the OB/GYN appointment, in lieu of medical training and physician discretion. It’s as if patients would have 160 mostly male Florida lawmakers right there with them in their own doctor’s offices, not only in the examination rooms, but in the accounting departments as well: HB 1143, if signed, would forbid companies that receive tax credits from offering employee health insurance plans that include abortion coverage.
Legal problems abound with the bill’s insurance requirement alone. Are we really going to violate Florida’s constitutional right to privacy by beginning to take inventory of each and every covered medical procedure within every medical insurance plan? If we crack open that door, employers who want to keep a lid on premiums could conceivably start keeping track of which insurance subscribers receive dermatological services, let’s say, or which ones get coverage for psychotropic medications.
And if we open the door on OB/GYN visits, parity would demand that we create a Viagra bill. If passed and signed by the Governor, the Viagra bill would require any man seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction to view (and pay for!) a video which follows a young sperm cell on its journey to babyhood. Conservatives love to blame the “breakdown of the traditional family” as the root of all societal evils, excepting those evils brought on by having to pay taxes, of course. But over the past few generations we’ve witnessed the meteoric rise of the single-parent family. And notably, by and large, we’re not talking about single father households. Women are already quite aware of the consequences of bringing children into the world, which is why they don’t need to view (and pay for!) state-mandated ultrasounds to help them make their very private decisions. Rooting out the problems that result from ill-conceived sexual acts seems more logically rooted in, well, the root, if you will.
But my Viagra bill would also include a stipulation analogous to the ill-fated Stupak amendment to the national health care plan. Under Stupak, women who want abortion coverage as part of their medical insurance, whether subsidized by the federal government or not, would have had to write an additional check for a separate abortion-coverage policy. Similarly, with my Viagra bill, those gentlemen who want to ensure continued function in their root delivery systems would simply write an additional check for the “Viagra rider.” Sure, their employers would know about it. Privacy, schmivacy.
“What does Viagra have to do with the pressing issues facing Florida voters?” you might ask. “Not a damn thing,” I’ll readily admit. Absolutely nothing: no more and no less than the ultrasound pay-and-view bill does. But much like the oil spurting uncontrollably from beneath the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico, political pandering on reproductive issues has irretrievably polluted our process, and threatens to creep its slime more broadly, more insidiously, *and more damagingly than ever before. It’s up to the voters to lower the political boom on the spreading slick, to light some activist fires, and to burn, baby, burn, all the way to November. If we’re going to have sensible leadership in the U.S. Senate, and if we want to keep the insidious spread of right-wing pandering out of the Governor’s mansion, we’d better get cracking.

Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL)

Leon County’s courthouse recently became the latest battleground in Florida’s Fair Districts fight, when competing lawsuits were filed, each designed to keep two fair district amendments (6 &7) off of this year’s ballot.  Congresswoman Corrine Brown filed suit to keep Amendment 6 out of voters’ hands, because it would prevent incumbents from carving out districts for their own benefit.  The NAACP, Democracia Ahora and The League of Women Voters jointly filed a suit of their own to block Amendment 7, a legislatively introduced effort allowing incumbent politicians to dictate the makeup of their district.

Although each lawsuit seeks to disqualify its respective amendment on grounds that each one’s language is misleading to voters, the real reasons for the legal challenges are worlds apart.  The NAACP and League of Women Voters’ suit hopes to eliminate Amendment 7 because it was designed by lawmakers to confuse voters into voting for an amendment that supposedly enhances minority access to the polls, when in reality it dilutes all Floridians’ recourse if district lines are unfairly drawn.  Conversely, the suit filed by Congressperson Corrine Brown attempts to eliminate Amendment 6 - which was placed on the ballot by 1.7 million voter signatures - because it expressly disallows incumbents from drawing a district that will ensure their re-election.   The legal pleadings of Brown’s suit are artfully nuanced and strike at Amendment 6’s language, prohibiting incumbents from designing districts to ensure their re-election and alludes to possible Voter Rights Act violations if it were enacted.

Ironically, Brown’s District has become the poster child for why Amendments 5 &6 are needed; she has steadily occupied a district that stretches through 9 counties, from Jacksonville to Gainesville to Orlando.  Amoebic and sprawling districts, such as hers, are those that FairDistrictsFlorida.org had in mind when they carefully cultivated and petitioned to have Amendments 5 & 6 on the ballot.  Brown’s suit to sunder their efforts is a true testament that gerrymandering is alive and well in Florida and is no longer about racial bias; it is now about the addiction of political power and keeping it at all costs.

Although Brown insists that minority access to the polls would be better served by Amendment 7; keeping her from happily divvying up voters for her own electoral-benefit seems to be the only discrimination she hopes to abate by blocking Amendment 6.  The voters took their ballot initiatives (Amendments 5 &6) through due process, while legislators bullied their amendment (7) onto the ballot using a veto proof joint resolution.  These lawsuits now put the judiciary in control of whether or not voters will get their say on which fair district amendments are deemed legally sound.  Regardless of the outcome, politicians’ actions in the capital and the courthouse have incensed voters and drawn new attention to the deceptive game of gerrymandering they still play.

Copies of each lawsuit are available via these links: (BROWN, CORRINE et al v. ROBERTS, DAWN K) and (NAACP et al v. FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF STATE)

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., May 31, 2010

• Honorable Mia Jones - State House Representative
• Roslyn Phillips - City of Jacksonville, Mayor's Chief Community Officer
• Matt Shirk- Public Defender
• Melina Buncome-Williams - Public Defender’s Office
• Sheriff John Rutherford - Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office
• Assistant Chief David Coffman - Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office
• Councilman Reggie Brown - Jacksonville City Council District 10
• Shorty Robbins- City of Jacksonville, Recreation and Community Services
• Selinda Keyes - Duval County School Board, Cluster Chief

The June 2010 forum will build upon the success of the group’s first event and will be moderated by Dr. Henry B. Thomas, Professor UNF and President of Jacksonville’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), attorney John Winkler and local professor Katie Ross. The event’s chairperson, Eunice Barnum, hopes that this forum will “build upon our previous event in January and continue to enrich the community by keeping the lines of communication open between Jacksonville’s leaders and its voters.”  For more information on the scheduled event, or to learn how to participate in the forum, visit www.neflaf.org.

About COPOCA: The Coalition of Presidents of Community Associations represents 16 neighborhoods throughout the City of Jacksonville and tracks issues impacting the citizens of their communities. COPOCA successfully lobbies for initiatives that provide the best quality of life for their constituents and works closely with elected officials to ensure its residents enjoy the best Jacksonville has to offer.

About SFPPCA Inc: The Sherwood Forest/Paradise Park Community Association Incorporated, proudly represents two Jacksonville districts steeped in history.  Supported by thousands of residents; SFPPCA works throughout its neighborhoods to ensure that local officials strive for the betterment of area residents and businesses in all public matters.

What kind of city do I want to live in?  That was the question Mayor Peyton posed during budget discussions in 2009.  I knew that I was no longer sure Jacksonville was a place I wanted to call home.  But why not?  As I began pondering the answer to that question, I also began a journey – unintentionally.

As I thought about all the things I liked and disliked about Jacksonville, weighing them carefully against each other, I came to realize that in the time I’ve spent observing the Jacksonville scene, one thing had become readily apparent:  Jacksonville seems to be controlled by a small group of people. Many of the same names are repeated over and over again in city politics, city appointments, and city social circles..  And I’ve often wondered exactly how a city the size of Jacksonville could be run by such a small circle.  Is it their power, position or prestige in the community alone?  Or are other factors at play? 

As I watched closely, I also began to see how voter apathy played a large role in this group gaining power and control.  And as my conversations turned to the politics of the day, I also noticed that many of the average voters I came in contact with appeared to be either half-informed or uninformed on some of the issues of the day.  As I began trying figure out what caused the apathy and the lack of information, I also began researching, using google to search for city information, cross-checking city public records, and reading newspaper articles to become more informed myself and to educate others.  What I discovered probably isn’t anything earth-shattering, but I noticed that the media in Jacksonville probably is not playing their important role of keeping Jacksonville’s citizens informed as well as they could.

So I set out to see what would happen if bits of news, already publicly available in various places, were to be put out in the public eye in one place – much like what the established media should be doing.  With the advent of social media, and the Mayor’s Office announcement of a Facebook page, as well as Twitter accounts, last May, I began my foray of following city officials, doing research, and ultimately decided touse Twitter to start posting my finds. My online persona of coj_tweeters was born soon after.  The name was chosen because of the numerous city employees I found on Twitter and my original intent to focus on city issues.

I didn’t have many followers in the beginning, but probably my biggest moment in the beginning was a tit-for-tat exchange with a JEDC official, over incentives for SAFT as claimed by a competing town in NC newspaper. http://www2.morganton.com/content/2009/may/05/valdese-learns-when-money-talks-industry-walks/news-local/.  The article was easily found just using a Google search. The tweets back and forth ended with my snarky comment that the JEDC official was paid $89,000+ a year to post on Metrojacksonville and Twitter while they were at work and a statement that perhaps the city’s PR folks were the ones who should be handling the city’s forays into social media.  The JEDC official blocked me from following their tweets soon thereafter.  That’s certainly an interesting way for the Mayor’s Office to deal with public input and response to the information they put out.

I probably drew the most followers with a series of tweets using First Coast News and Times Union databases to compare salaries and raises for city employees – most of them AMIOs - with employees who seemingly had more substantive positions with the City.  Once again this was readily available information that anyone could have googled and found out for themselves.  I was hooked on Twitter and my research. 

I started finding a lot of information from on the web.  Much of it wasn’t being reported in the newspaper.  There were Council Auditor reports, Inspector General reports, Ethics Officer reports – all of them on the city website, but few reported in the paper.  Then every two weeks there was City Council legislation and MBRC information to look at.  Those were on the city’s website as well, but rarely was any of it reported in any sort of depth by the media.  It became like shooting fish in a barrel for me.  Sometimes I would just pick something that looked interesting to me and google it and would accidentally come across a boatload of information.  And that’s when I began wondering why didn’t the news media – and more specifically the newspaper report on more of this stuff. 

Yes, I freely admit that the Times-Union has stepped up their coverage, but I also have noticed instances where only a portion of the story is being told.  I’ll use a recent example: The Times Union this past week ran an editorial about an elections bill recently passed by the Legislature that was supposedly just a “housekeeping” bill with nothing controversial.  What the editorial totally failed to mention was that the bill was going to allow 63 counties (including Baker, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns) to delay the purchase of voting equipment for the disabled until 2016.  Here’s the St. Pete Times article on the subject: http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/legislature/despite-law-some-elections-officials-want-to-keep-touch-screen-voting-for/1077763. The counties had already been allowed in 2007 to defer the purchase until 2012, so this was not a new mandate for them. Nor should the issue have been considered “housekeeping” or non-controversial for the City of Jacksonville either.  Disabled voters had sued the city in 2001 for discrimination because the city failed to provide voting machines for certain disabled people and the city still had not paid a $1.4 million judgment against them in that lawsuit as late as September 2008, but instead continued to litigate. (http://www.aapd.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=pvI1IkNWJqE&b=5657799&ct=7673897&notoc=1).  But not one mention of any of that was in the editorial.  

Or sometimes the stories in the Times Union were just plan incorrect such as a recent story about a proposed state bill that would change the decision-making authority in the event of a collective bargaining impasse, wherein the reporter stated supporters told them Duval County wasn’t affected.  http://jacksonville.com/news/florida/2010-01-13/story/new_legislation_would_let_florida_sheriffs_settle_negotiation_issues. Yet just a couple of weeks after the article ran, an amendment was filed by that would work to specifically exempt Duval County from the bill. 

In other instances, entire stories were missed by the local media until I tweeted a short blurb online such as the story in the Orlando Sentinel regarding Gate Precast's involvement with a “ghost contractor” in the construction of the new Magic Arena.  A simple search of the term “Jacksonville” in the larger state papers revealed this story.  http://snipurl.com/vfz5j. 

During the time I anonymously tweeted all of this public information, most people did not seem to care about my identity, but I did have several people politely ask to meet up with me or ask me to reveal my identity (both through public tweets and private messages) – including a high ranking newspaper official.  I was especially surprised by that request – and it bothered me that a newspaper person had asked me to meet and reveal my identity.  I don’t know, but isn’t there some kind of journalism ethics issue with that?  In any case, I just as politely declined.  And my tweeting continued and expanded to include some state issues as well. 

 And then last week it happened.  After 9 months of tweeting, a radio personality declared in a tweet that they would find me out” and the high ranking newspaper official quickly replied with a tweet that just because my identity wasn’t public didn’t mean it was a secret anymore.  I was taken aback by both. Would a member of the media, who thought they might know who I was reveal, my identity online? Now if it had been someone like Michael Munz or Adam Hollingsworth, who both followed me on Twitter, I could have understood.  Heck, I was putting together public information and revealing it to close to 200 followers about numerous situations that were ongoing mostly within the City, but also tweeting some issues at the State level.  Some of those 200 followers were retweeting it to hundreds of their followers, and the Times Union and several bloggers even picked up on some of the tweets and wrote stories or posts. But to have members of the media make those kind of tweets about an anonymous tweeters identity?  Well, I can only sum it up by saying I couldn’t believe it was the media that were the ones actually drawing such a sharp focus on the issue of my identity.  And I wondered: If an anonymous tweeter like me can’t take information that is readily available to the public and tweet about it without having members of the media pursue their identity, should we have any expectation that people who really know where the skeletons are buried will come forward and risk the same?

Coj_tweeters is dead and buried. But my research is ended as well, as I think I have found the answers to my original question.  Without the light of the media glaring fully and in focus on issues, the resulting darkness covers a multitude of “sins” enabling a small group to gain and maintain control over the city.  When the fourth estate’s actions further discourage knowledgeable people from coming forward with information to shed light on those “sins”, the media has only served to further that small circle’s ability to control and direct the city’s decisions on hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of issues, despite the will of the citizens or the few voting public – if only they knew.  Ah yes, the sounds of silence.  They are so loud they can almost be deafening.

People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share, And no one dared, Disturb the sound of silence.       ...Silence like a cancer grows…

Excerpts from: Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel

Thanks to the editors of Jaxpolitics Online for allowing me to post a guest column.

Thinly veiled as “clarifying language”, the legislatively-induced amendment allows for districts to be defined by ambiguous “communities of interest” rather than the logical and reasonable ones voters are hoping to see if Amendments 5 & 6 pass. Many opponents to the resolutions see the additional lawmaker’s amendment as a smokescreen, designed to dupe voters into allowing incumbents and political parties to gerrymander their districts.

Now that lawmakers have put their own interests ahead of their constituents, vigorous voter education efforts are a must to successfully counteract and expose Tallahassee’s sleight of hand.  It is going to take an informed and alert electorate to keep Amendments 5 & 6 from getting lost in the shuffle of last week’s legislative flimflam. Regardless of how cunningly career politicians snuck their own amendment into play, one thing is certain – Amendments 5 & 6 earned their place on November’s Ballot and will be the only ones that can restore unencumbered, representative democracy to Floridians.