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Nate Monroe Profile picture
Nate Monroe
@NateMonroeTU
Florida Times-Union metro columnist (@jaxdotcom) in a city of misrule. "The Syndicate" = Jacksonville donor class. Son of a Cajun. LSU.
Jul 20, 2021 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
One observation about the @lennycurry budget, which is overall strong and encouraging: Council needs to add a direct contribution to @JaxLegalAid on par with our peer cities, which would be about $1 million. We have an eviction/foreclosure crisis on our doorstep. And JALA provides civil legal aid for a lot of other services as well, for which most Jacksonville residents are eligible. It's one of the strongest ROIs possible for the city.
Jul 20, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
You don't need a source for that. It's in the bloody CIP. Again, for the thousandth time, the city had before the gas tax and has after the higher gas tax the borrowing capacity for these projects. The gas tax is an entirely irrelevant part of this discussion. The only thing the gas tax has allowed for is the completion of a lot of road and transit projects faster, plus a commitment to extending water and sewer service, at the same time that it's paying for Jags stuff the city *would be paying for anyway.*
Sep 25, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The public has a right to know Florida's governor has chosen a herd immunity strategy, and he has an obligation to admit it. His politicized, polarizing approach has been confusing to residents and business owners, and it's craven. And more than anything, his response has been wildly incompetent. He pawns off some decisions to local governments, like mask mandates, but then usurps them on issues like whether breweries should be shuttered - and, of course, if schools should re-open. It's a mess.
Sep 23, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
And keep this in mind when some of the folks involved in this scandal cry victim about the scrutiny they are under - they were willing to have a lower-level employee criminally prosecuted (based on extremely flawed understanding of the law) because they got embarrassed. To wit: This is what ousted CEO Aaron Zahn was telling people in a meeting in December shortly before he was put on leave (according to a written recollection of someone at the meeting): Image
Aug 29, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1. It would have been closer to $5 billion because @lennycurry’s preferred CEO created a billion-dollar bonus plan.
2. NextEra or whoever else would have been permitted to increase rates (de facto tax increase).
3. Documents show ratepayers were still going to eat Vogtle costs. Of all the sale talking points, Vogtle is the most misleading. JEA worked out a plan that would have allowed a company to acquire all of JEA minus Vogtle, and the standalone Vogtle “company” was going to bill ratepayers *in addition* to the new utility.
Aug 28, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
“(T)he Mayor only cared about getting JEA sold and didn't care that his self appointed team at JEA and his political consultants were all going to make outlandish sums at the expense of the citizens,” a lawyer at one of JEA’s firms, Foley & Lardner, wrote.
jacksonville.com/story/news/col… The conversations among attorneys at Foley & Lardner, a large and politically connected law firm with offices in Florida and across the country, were part of a recent batch of records JEA provided in response to a records request from the Times-Union.
Aug 27, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I think pretty obvious questions are, given NextEra's bid amount, the bonus plan Zahn wanted would have yielded a payout of $1.1 billion if all of the 100,000 units ("shares") were sold, OR, on the low end, $374 million. When did he realize this, and why didn't he disclose it? (JEA execs had access to NextEra's bid long ago - far in advance of it becoming a public record this week.)
Aug 21, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In case you can't see where this executive privilege hooey is headed, here's the summary of the legal memo (others would be allowed to claim it). And note: There is no discussion in here about how this broad privilege might conflict with the public records law. Image Read on its face, it sure seems to create an entirely new category of potentially exempt records, which a mayor could invoke whenever they wanted.
Aug 19, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
So, the City Council's investigative counsel suggested to @lennycurry's chief admin officer, Brian Hughes, that the reason the JEA bidding timeline was accelerated was to save the whole effort because the public was losing confidence. Here's his (under oath) response to that: 1/ Image Note: "Cynical" and "stupid."

So, which pundits suggested this outrageous claim? Who could possibly have believed the timeline to sell JEA was accelerated to save it? Well, Hughes' deputy admin officer, Stephanie Burch, and the city treasurer - who were on the negotiating team: ImageImage
Aug 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
A confidential February 2018 memo from one of JEA's outside attorneys explicitly framed the coming Plant Vogtle legal fight as an effort to make the agency more attractive to a private buyer, a motivation city and JEA leaders never disclosed.

jacksonville.com/story/news/col… "Jacksonville’s new young Republican mayor is out to shrink government, and wants to privatize JEA — quickly, while the market is 'right.' He says within 3-5 months," a lawyer with the firm Holland & Knight wrote in a memo detailing possible JEA's legal strategies.
Jul 28, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
For all the handwringing by a former JEA CEO, the Plant Vogtle purchase-power agreement the utility holds is completely standard in the industry. Completely. The court/settlement route was always bound to end in failure. Hence why I suspect there's more to it. Vogtle was once held up as a reason JEA needed to privatize, but that became one of the biggest lies of the entire process: JEA was planning to have ratepayers continue to pay for Vogtle separately, even *after* a private company bought JEA out.
Jul 8, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
NEWS: Several downtown Jacksonville residents and business owners have filed a lawsuit against City Hall, the RNC, the Trump campaign and venue operator ASM Global seeking to block the convention from coming. WC Gentry - a well known local attorney - is handling the case. Image WC Gentry (a Republican who donated to @lennycurry, btw) was also one of three lawyers behind a high-profile legal challenge last year to City Hall's decision to block the Duval County School Board from placing a sales-tax referendum on the ballot.
Jun 17, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Add the demand for tests to this: The positive test rate - which the mayor said yesterday has been on a steady decline - is actually up to 4.4 percent, its highest level since April 20. Kudos to @TB_Times for this quick, useful tool. Image No - people shouldn't panic. It's not the end of the world. It could most certainly go back down. But there is clearly some additional spread happening locally and folks should be aware of that.

The mayor and governor keep comparing numbers to their peaks, which is misleading.
Jun 12, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Oh - and people comparing this to Jax hosting the Super Bowl: There was substantial community buy-in far in advance of the actual event (in addition to a myriad of other differences). No such effort was made for the RNC because there would not have been that same buy-in. And that’s why statements about how “honored” the city is to host the RNC are so tone deaf. We had no choice!
Jun 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Last point. It is perfectly conceivable the mayor and RNC folks planned this with no inkling it overlapped with Ax Handle Saturday: The local government does nothing to acknowledge it each year. It’s not taught in local schools. People live here for years w/o this knowledge. That is *not* a defense. It’s just context. It’s most certainly the kind of thing that should change, and what a better time to do that. But, well, here we are.
Jun 5, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Dude Ax Handle Saturday is one of the most significant events in the city's history. It's not obscure - and in fact, failing to recognize it appropriately (as the city did for many years) sowed division and eroded the credibility of local government and local media. To the extent that the RNC overlapping with Ax Handle Saturday may surprise some - even those who are in elected office - that is only the case because the city has nothing of significance planned to observe it. Which should change.
Jun 4, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Wow - @lennycurry says he's "very, very open to and interested in the idea" of using the gas tax to finance infrastructure improvements in neglected neighborhoods.

More of *that* please. A smart friend of mine quipped that getting serious about fulfilling the consolidation promise could truly be Curry's "Nixon to China" moment. I agree. But that window closes more and more every day. Get on it.
Jun 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Some concrete steps Khan can take to actually help folks on the ground in Jacksonville:

- Scale back his requested taxpayer subsidies for Lot J/Shipyards projects, thus reducing the plundering of the public treasury for developments that will mostly cater to the affluent. 1/ - Engage in Jacksonville policy debates.

- Publicly call for specific police reforms in Jacksonville, like the expeditious, regular release of body cam footage in police-involved shootings.

- The creation of an independent police monitor or citizen-oversight board. 2/
May 15, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
NextEra's list of lobbyists on the JEA sale reads like a who's who of Jacksonville consultants - but Sam Mousa (@lennycurry's former chief administrative officer) and BCSP LLC stand out. Mousa also had a contract to advise Curry on special projects during this time. 1/ Image BCSP, meanwhile, is a consulting firm started by Tim Baker, Curry's political consultant, and Brian Hughes, Curry's current chief administrative officer and former campaign consultant. Hughes' name dropped from the company paperwork when he joined City Hall in 2017. 2/ Image
May 6, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Here's another tidbit: Ousted CEO Aaron Zahn has been making records requests of JEA. One of the things he's asked for is a document called Goldenbook - it's an obscure series of financial projections the utility keeps. Here's a snippet of it 1/ Image Goldenbook hassome pretty typical Zahn-esque flourishes, like measuring JEA's earnings before taxes, interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (commonly called EBITDA). In reality, JEA doesn't have an EBITDA measurement. 2/
May 6, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Whoa. The City Council investigative committee uploaded a new document - what appears to be some kind of internal estimates on how many "units" would be allocated to each employee to cash in. Look at the disparity between the high-paid executives and rank and file: Image Unless I'm mistaken, JEA executives all maintained ignorance about any possible distributions of these units, up to and including ousted CEO Aaron Zahn. Also, this document was never before turned over despite past requests for all documentation related to the unit plan.