Mayor John Delaney was elected in 1995 and ran unopposed in 1999. During his two terms, he has consistently lowered property taxes and passed the Better Jacksonville Plan — one of the most aggressive tax-based community development projects in the country. Delaney met recently with Daily Record editorial director Fred Seely and staff writer Mike Sharkey to talk about the past eight years, the race for his job and what his own future may hold.
Question: When does a politician became a lame duck?
Answer: I think when you are a month away from the election and you’re down to your last three or four months. I think that probably would be as good an official definition as you could get.
Q: So, we are there.
A: We’re there. But, saying that, we are still a duck with some teeth. We can still bite. It’s a mean duck [laughing]. And we’ve still got some pretty big things we’ve got to get through the Council. We’re fighting to the end.
Q: How do you assess the past seven and three-quarter years? Did you enjoy it?
A: Oh yes. Oh yes. I can remember [former mayor] Ed Austin saying during his four years as mayor he felt he did more than during his 20-plus years as state attorney. I didn’t really believe he felt that way until you get in here. You’ve got to enjoy feeling like the community has moved while you’ve had the honor to sit in that chair.
Q: Is there anything you didn’t get to?
A: Oh yes. Always more of the same. You would love to have done it bigger, quicker, faster, cheaper. Not too many losses when you get down to it. We lost a privatization of garbage that we wanted to do that would have saved a couple of million a year. We didn’t get the amphitheater through as we tripped up on some federal permits.
Q: Could that come back?
A: Since I’m a lame duck, I’m allowed to talk about that now [laughing].
Q: But there’s no money left.
A: There’s plenty of money. There’s always money. I remember [former Chief Administrative Officer] Lex Hester saying when I came in with Mayor Austin — we were petrified of the budget, it was about $35 million out of whack then and we said, ‘How are we going to pull this together?’ — and Lex said, ‘You can’t shut this government down.’ In reality, when you take a look at it, we’ve really grown. The budget has grown an average of about five percent a year, which is roughly inflation and the population growth. And, we’ve had a 10 percent tax cut. The new mayor could aways, if he wanted, go back to where the taxes were when we came in. The JEA contract is up this year. They contribute roughly 10 percent of the budget and that increases every five years as a contribution to the City as a stockholder. We’re going to roll over — I may as well say it to you; I haven’t formally announced it — from last year’s budget, we’ve got about $6 million left over where expenses were less than we budgeted or revenues more. What typically happens this time of year, roughly March and April, is that the mayor proposes that money, usually one-time money, for capital projects. We’re going to propose to the Council that go in the City’s rainy day fund so that the next mayor has that money to work with his first quarter and then for the next budget.
Q: Is $6 million a lot of money?
A: To give you an example. When Mayor Austin came into office, the City’s rainy day fund was $5 million, total. He raised it to $7.5 million. We’ve raised it to $25.5 million. It will now be $31 million to $32 million. If you wanted to, you could spend it all the way back down to $5 million. That’s historically how much the City has had through the [former mayors] [Jake] Godbold, [Hans] Tanzler, [Tommy] Hazouri years. There’s still some demands.
Q: That’s a pretty good legacy.
A: It’s a lot of money. Again, we did it while cutting taxes and, I believe, we did it while lifting the level of service at the same time. The City alone, for example, if we simply kept the property tax rate the same, that would be another $30 million or $35 million in the City’s budget — cash to spend. I think the thing I’m most proud of are those tax cuts and the Sterling [Award], things that most people don’t give much credit for.
Q: About a year ago, you broached the subject of public education. What would you have liked to do? Would you have concentrated on it during your first term because your second term was about Better Jacksonville?
A: No. I think for those kinds of initiatives, when you are really talking about taking the city in a very, very dramatic fashion, you first have to build some confidence. For example, Better Jax was a second term proposal. And when you’re talking about raising a tax or taking away someone’s right to vote for an office, where historically the state has always voted for that position — I didn’t quite roll it [the proposal to have an appointed School Board instead of an elected one] out the right way. I still think, and I’ve got to add a footnote to this, having an appointed Board would probably be a better Board for the school system. And, my footnote is, this Board is looking pretty good right now and that may prove me wrong. There’s always been seven good people, but the fact they were elected made them have to be so concerned with the electorate it made it hard to make the political decisions you have to make. In our government, we have the Council, mayors and School Board you have to elect. On the other end of the continuum, you move to the independent authorities. The advantage of an independent authority is it’s politically independent. It doesn’t have to worry about the public pressures or emotional pressures. The disadvantage is, they are completely independent and not as responsive to the electorate. So, you look for a balance. I felt we had such a rough time with the School Board for a period of time that it really needed to be changed. I couldn’t get the public there and clearly that’s not where the public wanted to go.
Q: In hindsight, did you get that subject to be one of the leading subjects in the mayor’s race? They all put education at or near the top of their priority list.
A: We did it in 1995, too. Back then, education and crime were the top two. Crime’s the one thing that has disappeared off the radar screen, not totally. But that is no longer the number one item people are concerned with.
Q: Where was crime when you took over?
A: Crime was one and education was two. Education is now number one and crime is probably out of the top five. Of course, that’s a national thing. Nationally, the crime rate dropped. In Jacksonville, the first few years the drop wasn’t as quick. The past few, it’s actually been better. We’ve put an awful lot of officers on the street. The sheriff [Nat Glover] took care of a good hunk of them by reorganizing and putting a lot of desk people out on the street. We civilianized. We hired a less expensive civilian for the [desk] job and put the officer on the street. [State Attorney] Harry [Shorstein] has done some great things with juveniles. You reap that benefit later when the juveniles grow up into their crime committing years.
Q: You’re a lot smarter about government now than eight years ago. How can you use that in the future? You can be a lawyer, you can be a university president, you could be another elected official. Without going into specifics, what venue would best suit you?
A: I don’t know that. My wife will say, ‘People ask me at the beach what is John going to do next? She says, ‘We don’t know,’ and they don’t quite believe me. I don’t quite know yet. As long as I’ve been in government, I don’t know how people transition into that government consulting spot. John Thrasher has done it very, very successfully. Every month I’ve waited to decide what to do next, some new opportunity gets thrown on the desk. I fully expected by now to have that sewed up and don’t yet. The University of North Florida [presidency] is still very tempting to see if that’s a possibility. My heart kind of wants to do some private sector business things. Part of me misses the courtroom. The governor, of course, threw a real big stone in the wheel, talking about the lieutenant governor job for a while.
Q: Is there any part of you that would like to be governor?
A: I think everybody that gets in this position, governor, senate — those sorts of things — if you’re ambitious and competitive, it gets there. I wonder about the timing on all of those. I have two [children] in college, a 14-year-old and a six-year-old. Even Washington [D.C.] had some inquiries from the [Gov. Jeb] Bush administration for a mid-level appointment up there. I just don’t want to raise my kids up there. I don’t want to spend four or five nights away from them, either.
Q: Is Neptune Beach what keeps you in Jacksonville?
A: It’s not just the beach, it’s the whole place. It’s home.
Q: July 1, you’ve got no health insurance, no salary, no more invitations. You better get a job.
A: I forget what event I was at last — I think it was the Chamber’s Martin Luther King breakfast — and I was moving to the end of the podium. I was at a Rotary Club and I was at the end of the head table. Christmas this year, I got about half the number of fruit baskets that you normally get. Clearly, it’s lame duck time.
Q: You get a lot of letters and e-mails thanking you for the job you’ve done. Many wish you could run again. Is eight years enough?
A: Down the years, I’ve been ambivalent on term limits. There’s some days I say it’s a great idea, other times, no. I will say this: when it’s an executive position like governor or mayor, clearly you ought to have some term limits. I think some fresh blood in here would be really positive and very, very healthy. There are some things politically I couldn’t do and maybe the next guy could do. I hope this doesn’t sound like a line, but it’s not an easy job. It’s a lot of pressure and I’ve had about as good an eight years as you can have.
Q: It’s not always flattering.
A: No, it’s not. My skin has gotten much thicker. Almost all that stuff really doesn’t bother me anymore. If you feel it’s personal or there’s an attack on ethics, that still gets me. There are some nasty letters that come in, but most are nice. The [T-U columnist Ron] Littlepage column or letter to the editor, most of that rolls off the back. But you pay a little price. I’m saying that, and I’ve had it about as easy as you can get. The national economy was great and Jacksonville’s was better than the rest of the country and the state. It’s been the perfect time to be sitting in here. It’s been a very lucky time.
Q: Did you enjoy it though.
A: Oh yes. The timing in the mid-1990s to become mayor in Jacksonville; the Jaguars were coming and ultimately the Super Bowl is coming; the economy has done well; the city was feeling good about itself. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, there’s no question about that. I understand now why Ed [Austin] felt better about his four years as mayor than he did about the decades as state attorney, and he was kind of legendary in that office. You feel good about it. Driving through the sports complex, seeing those things going up. Reading reports from the Children’s Commission. Seeing how the arts community has changed. Those may seem like little things to some, but it’s all part of really the community making a big change.
Q: Now, the next mayor goes into a bad economy, if something goes wrong in the sports complex it’s going to be his fault, not yours.
A: I don’t know, I bet I get blamed for that [laughing].
Q: What’s he or she going to walk into?
A: I think a pretty good time. That courthouse was going to have to be built out of general fund money, anyway. We had to do water and sewer work. Some of the things that Better Jax did was take an awful lot of stress off a budget long term. The sports complex will essentially be done. Both projects have got enough budget room that if there’s a hiccup, there will be enough money. I learned this, I ended up cutting an awful lot of ribbons on projects Mayor Austin began and that goodwill rubs off on you.
Q: What do you want your legacy to be?
A: I’ve tried to think less about that than being a building block for whoever comes next. But for Hans Tanzler being willing to back consolidation, but for Jake kind of saving downtown and giving an energy to this community, but for Tommy eliminating the odors, but for Ed, I think, modernizing the government, doing the Renaissance and bringing in the Jaguars you wouldn’t have what went on here. Who knows what’s the next great thing for Jacksonville? Is it a computer chip factory? Is it some national experiment in education that the feds and the state want to fund? Is it that we expand the health program we are working on, the Communities in Charge, and it finds a way to efficiently deliver health care? Who knows? That’s for the mayoral candidates and Council candidates to focus on. I always said I wanted to do two things: I wanted to make it the best managed city in the country and, second, the best place to raise a family. As exciting as Washington is and as beautiful as Tallahassee is, I’d still rather be here.