The Days and Nights of Catherine Evermore

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.

In 2024, the Duval County School Board unanimously hired Dr. Christopher Bernier as superintendent after he abruptly resigned from Lee County Schools.

Board members knew of an ongoing whistleblower investigation into allegations of bullying, intimidation, and a “violent temper,” and said they had done due diligence.

A later Lee County report cleared the most serious claims but found he had spoken to a senior staffer with profanity and in ways witnesses called “dehumanizing,” “insulting,” and disrespectful.

Much has been said about Mayor Donna Deegan’s appearance at a pro-Palestine event earlier this year. She stood on the stage with the flag of Palestine and a lectern covered with a keffiyeh that is a kerchief worn by pro-Hamas, anti-Israel terrorists.

Her appearance at this event was posted on social media on the same day as the Holocaust Remembrance Day, and members of the Jacksonville Jewish community, as well as others, were livid.

Deegan made the following statement after receiving backlash:

“It’s disappointing to see partisan actors use people’s rich heritage to divide our community.” (Donna Deegan)

Donna Deegan just doesn’t get it.

She doesn’t understand why people are upset.

She blamed the people who were offended for being offended.

Isn’t that like blaming a victim for being a victim?

Donna Deegan has embarrassed our city many times before; however, this might be the greatest embarrassment of all.

© Catherine Evermore. All rights reserved.