Debbie Buckland becomes chair-elect of JAX Chamber next year and rises to chair in 2019, succeeding Gate Petroleum Co. President and former Mayor John Peyton in the role. The market president for Branch Banking & Trust Co. in Jacksonville will be the fifth woman since 2001 to lead the more than 100-year-old, 3,000-member organization.
I saw the press release come out and I thought, ‘Well, that’s just absolute testimony to people who say Jacksonville is a closed community or not friendly to women or hard to break into or a good old boys’ club. I don’t buy that story. You can look at the slate of leadership and investors and see that it’s diverse. I love that about the chamber.
My official responsibilities for 2018 will be to receive any delegation that the chair gives me. John and I have already laughed about that. He said he was a very good delegator. My official responsibilities are to run the board of governors, which is the policymaking group, and to select and execute on the Leadership Trip.
This year our agenda for the Leadership Trip (next week to Toronto) is all focused on downtown. Downtown is a thing of mine. I joined the board of Downtown Vision Inc. in 2009. I loved it. I saw the upside and I saw the passion. There was a big inferiority complex. I feel like that there’s more collaboration than ever before. I’ve been here since 1998.
The business community is stepping up to engage politically. We’ve got our pension problem resolved, thanks to strong leadership from the mayor. We have a City Council focused on the right things. We’re all in for Downtown. We’ve got a great story and we need to start being proud of it and connecting the dots.
I graduated from college in 1979 and got married two weeks later. My first job was as a teller at a bank. It was purely by mistake. I wish I could tell you that it was one of those things I planned. It didn’t happen that way. It was First Federal Savings and Loan in Roanoke, Virginia. I never looked back.
My initial major was philosophy. I had a little wake-up call my junior year when I met my now-husband. He said that’s not going to get you very far in the job market, so I double-majored in business and economics.
My husband, Jamie, is from Roanoke. He’s retired from EverBank. We’re empty nesters. We live in Atlantic Beach with our Portuguese Water Dog named Bos’n. We have two daughters. Both live in New York — Katie in Brooklyn and Aaron on the Lower East Side. They were second grade and sixth grade when we moved here. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time.
Wow, wouldn’t that be awesome (to land the second Amazon.com headquarters). Maybe I should rephrase that and say won’t that be awesome when we do. I can see that happening. When you are down in the sausage factory, sometimes it’s hard to step up to the 80,000-foot level and see what could be. We’ve got a lot to offer.