While local politicians are lining up quickly for his job, Mayor John Delaney said this week he expects to leave government in 2003 for a job in the private sector.
“I honestly don’t know,” he said of his future plans. “I just kind of have a personal schedule that it will be a year away, sometime next fall, something will gel. Actually, if I had to lean, the summer of 2003 I’ll go to the private sector. I’ll have some kids in college then and a couple of little ones at home. And I don’t really want to leave Jacksonville. The next most logical moves are Tallahassee and Washington. So, it’s probably the private sector. I don’t envision a public sector job that works right in, but, you never know. I mean, the governor could call tomorrow and say ‘Will you go on the Supreme Court?’ I just have no clue. I imagine I’ll get a few calls over the next year.”
The race for his seat has taken off quite a bit earlier than most expected, much to Delaney’s chagrin.
“It’s closer to two years away than it is less,” he said. “So, it would seem like it’s kind of early.”
That being said, Delaney admitted, “They’ve got to make their own political decisions, and it’s not for me to orchestrate each of those races. But, my gut is that this is too soon, especially for Mike [Weinstein].”
Weinstein, chief of both the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission and the City’s Super Bowl Host Committee, declared his candidacy recently, about a week after former City Council president Alberta Hipps announced she would run.
“It’s easy to understand Alberta because she wants to get her countywide name recognition up,” Delaney said. “But, again, they’ve got their strategies, so it’s none of my business, I guess.
“I only hold it in trust for a period of time,” he said of the office. “You turn into a pumpkin on July 1, 2003. The fear is that every decision becomes a political one for people. You’d like it to be a little cleaner than that. I understand politics. That’s part of the nature of the job. Anyway, it’ll work out. Always has, always will.”
New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, an immensely popular mayor presiding over the darkest time in his city’s history, watched Tuesday as New Yorkers went to the polls to begin picking his successor.
Delaney, possibly the most popular mayor to ever to lead Jacksonville, has watched over the last two weeks as Hipps and Weinstein announced plans to take his place when his second term ends more than one year and nine months from now.
Both have been asked if they wanted to get behind efforts to rescind the term limit laws that are forcing them from office. One has, unequivocally, said no.
Giuliani said it was legislatively possible for him to be granted a third term.
“It’s really a question of whether it should be,” he said. “I have to really think about that.”
Delaney said he had no need for time to think about such a scenario when it came before him last year.
“I said no.”
Delaney spoke glowingly of the leadership and courage the New York City mayor has shown since the Sept. 11 disaster hit that city, but changing the law — one that he personally believes in — to benefit himself is nowhere in his plans.
“Some business leaders, community leaders, political leaders sort of tentatively approached me to see if we would want to put together a referendum to change the term-limits law over the course of last year,” said Delaney. “I wouldn’t call it serious. I said no. Change them if you want, but I’m not running again. I think that it’s good to get a new person in.”
The only scenario Delaney said he could see bending such a law is if the position in question were the Presidency and the nation was at war.
“If you’re in the middle of a war, that would be a problem,” he said. “It would have been difficult to change from Franklin Roosevelt to somebody else in the middle of World War II.”
Despite the slight philosophical difference with the New York mayor, Delaney said he greatly admired the way Giuliani was handling the crisis.
“Those are the kinds of things that scare you to death when you’re the mayor of a city like we are,” he said.