The Days and Nights of Catherine Evermore

Dear Diary,

Woke up, checked the crime stats, closed the tab. If I don’t look at them, they can’t hurt me.

Spent the morning explaining that “equity” is a public-safety strategy and that the real emergency is whoever still uses the phrase “law and order.”

The press conference went well. I smiled, said “community,” and no one asked about the open positions in the police department.

Lunch with the consultants. They love the new slogan: “Jacksonville, but softer.”

We workshopped ways to rebrand the budget hole as an investment in vibes.

One of them suggested we stop calling 911 response times “response times” and start calling them “arrival journeys.”

Genius. I wrote it down.

Afternoon: another meeting about the homeless encampments. I proposed more studies, a task force, and a mural.

Someone mentioned enforcement. I told them enforcement is a colonial framework and changed the subject to shade structures. The room nodded. Nodding is how you know you’re leading.

Evening email from the city attorney. Something about contracts, deadlines, and “material noncompliance.” I forwarded it to staff with the note “pls handle, thx.”

Leadership is delegation.

Before bed I scrolled the comments. Half the city thinks I’m incompetent. The other half thinks I’m brave for being incompetent in the correct direction. I screenshotted the second half for the campaign folder.

Tomorrow: ribbon-cutting for a pilot program that pilots other pilot programs. If it fails, we’ll call it a learning experience and fund phase two.

Sleep well, Jacksonville. I’ve got this. Or someone on staff does. Probably.

The DCSB just handed a building over to a buyer that has no plan, no timeline, and a contractual escape hatch if they change their mind.

That is not a sale. That is a maybe, dressed up in paperwork.

Meanwhile the board has nowhere to go. No backup site. No ready alternative.

Just the comforting knowledge that they are allowed to take as long as three years to figure out what happens next.

Three years of limbo for a public asset, while the other side can walk whenever the numbers stop looking friendly.

A school board is supposed to protect capacity and continuity. Instead it has locked itself into a deal where the buyer holds the option and the public holds the risk.

If the company stays, fine. If it does not, the board is the one scrambling, late, and still free to deliberate at its own leisure.

That is not prudence. That is an exit clause for one party and a three-year shrug for everyone else.

They’re doing it again. On October 6 the Duval County School Board is set to vote, once more, on selling the Southbank headquarters at 1701 Prudential Drive—this time to Ashco for about $15.1 million, with three years to get out and still no locked-in place to go.

Last fall they rejected a $20 million Fleet Landing deal over the payment structure, then flipped 4–3 and approved a $17.2 million sale to Chase Properties paired with a Baymeadows buy.

Chase walked in February after the community development district bond mess on the parking-lot parcel—roughly $6–8 million a private buyer would inherit—became a fight over what was disclosed.

Now the price is lower, the replacement site is still “to be determined,” and the board is being asked to sign the deed anyway.

That is not a strategy. It is a fire sale of prime riverfront land after the district already botched the last transaction.

Midtown is more central to the county’s population and closer to the communities the district actually serves; Baymeadows and the other Southside options are bigger and cheaper on paper and farther from the urban core.

The NAACP already called the earlier move a threat to alienate the people the board is supposed to represent. Board members who voted no last time compared it to the transportation outsourcing decision that later looked expensive and hard to undo.

Sell first, figure out the new office later, and hope the net proceeds survive appraisals, CDD baggage, moving costs, and whatever building they eventually overpay for. The headquarters has been there for decades.

Trading it for a smaller check and an open-ended relocation, after one deal already collapsed, is how you end up in a conference room five years from now asking what they were thinking.

 

So now Donna Deegan wants the people she parks on city boards to sit through a finance class.

Not because the public suddenly demanded literacy in bond covenants. Because JTA is cutting service over a deficit, JEA keeps hiking rates, and someone in the mayor’s office decided the fix is a free slideshow on how to read a balance sheet.

New appointees are “encouraged” to finish it within 90 days. Current ones get 180. Ethics, Sunshine Law, public records, pensions, credit ratings — the whole civics packet.

It isn’t mandatory yet. The order just nudges them, then she goes to City Council and asks to make the standards stick.

Encouraged today, required as soon as the votes line up.

That’s the tell. These are her appointees, confirmed to oversee real money at independent agencies, and the operating assumption is that they might not know a pension liability from a parking meter.

If the mayor can’t find people who already understand budgets and audits, the problem isn’t the training calendar. It’s the appointment process.

A 90-day class after confirmation is a press release dressed up as governance.

Taxpayers don’t get competence because a volunteer watched a webinar. They get it when the people handed the keys already had it.

Donna Deegan’s incompetence has gotten on my last good nerve.

JTA is circling the drain and Jacksonville is paying the tab. Nearly $40 million in the hole, almost 200 people getting pink slips, Skyway parked, NAVI mothballed, buses cut back to Saturday schedules, and a stack of delinquent bills stretching back years.

The outgoing CEO still collects a fat paycheck while the agency he left behind begs City Hall for a $30 million gas-tax lifeline.

That is not a rough patch. That is a wreck.

Meanwhile the mayor’s orbit keeps drawing subpoenas like a magnet.

State prosecutors and the AG have already gone fishing through city and utility records over board games, lobbying contracts, immigration livestreams, and more.

Whether the latest paper lands on JTA letterhead or the next authority over, the pattern is the same: sloppy oversight, political score-settling, and an administration that treats independent agencies like personal chess pieces until the money runs out and riders get stranded.

Donna Deegan promised to clean up the “toxic culture.”

Instead Jacksonville got grant money left on the table, service cuts for working people who actually use the bus, and another round of lawyers reading emails.

The city needed a mayor who could run the trains and the books. It got press conferences and investigations.

That’s the failure.