Mayoral candidate John Peyton was born in Jacksonville in 1964 in Baptist Hospital and raised in Gainesville. His parents divorced and he was raised by his mother, who was a public school teacher in Gainesville for 30 years. He spent summers and weekends in Jacksonville because his father was here and the family business was here. He attended Mercer University in Macon, Ga. and spent four years as student body president. He later went to Washington, D.C. and worked for Sen. Bob Graham. He returned to Jacksonville and joined the family business in 1989, starting, literally, at the bottom of the business, pumping gas and cleaning bathrooms. He went through Gate’s management training program, managed a store, supervised five stores and eventually became the division manager for Florida. He’s spent the last 10 years running the retail division in Florida, which is about a $100 million business with 1,000 employees. Peyton sat down Wednesday morning with the Daily Record’s editorial staff to talk about the campaign, issues and why he wants to go from vice president of Gate Petroleum to mayor of Jacksonville.
Question: Do you ever talk with any of the other candidates?
Answer: There haven’t been any formal discussions, but I’ve got a good rapport with my fellow Republicans. I talk with Mike Weinstein regularly.
Q: Any thoughts you’d like to share?
A: Mike and I spend time together regularly. We really just share observations about how this thing is playing out. I think we both recognize there are forces at work we can’t control and how that plays out, I don’t know.
Q: What’s your interest in running for mayor?
A: My interest was sparked primarily from being chairman of the JTA and two things that happened there. One, I saw what a tremendous, positive impact you can have on your community. If you’re interested in community service you realize the public sector is a phenomenal place to do good work. At JTA, we spend about $50 million a year on a bus system that connects people to jobs. But we’re also building roads that build communities that connect people to jobs and really determine the future of where we grow and how we grow. That was really rewarding for me. The second observation was, from what I can tell from working in different parts of government — I interned for [former mayor] Jake Godbold during college — I think there is a real need for people leading government that have significant management experience. There are a lot of good people in government, don’t get me wrong, but I think the nature of the environment is so different from the private sector to the public sector that it doesn’t lend itself to best practices. Government doesn’t lend itself to best practices and the reason is government does not have a competitor, per se. My feeling is, government can benefit from someone with my tool box, my skill set, which is very, very different from anyone else in this race. I am the most different candidate in this race and I think at the end of the day that differentiation, we know from our research, is a positive thing. But it’s probably going to be the most compelling thing that will enable me to win because at the end of the day, campaigns are about contrast and we have the greatest contrast.
Q: Why are you qualified to be mayor?
A: Frankly, I think my management experience and being exposed to an organization that works as effectively as Gate does is what makes me qualified to run this city. While I was division manager for 10 years and vice president, I was still following my interest in public service. I served on [Mayor John] Delaney’s transition team, was later appointed to the JTA [Board], served on it for six years, chaired it for two. Also, during that time, I was on Leadership Jacksonville, Leadership Florida, chaired the Symphony, chaired Greenscape. I had a lot of community activities going on and I’ve always had an interest in public service and that’s how I satiated that appetite, by doing these kinds of things, leading these kind of organizations.
Q: You mentioned several civic things you’ve been doing for years. Some are government-related, some are purely voluntary. Have you been grooming yourself to be mayor?
A: I’m been grooming myself to lead and there was never a master plan to be mayor. I always knew I had an interest in public service, but I haven’t been following a master plan. My interest really developed at the JTA, which is pretty recent history.
Q: You started at the ground floor and worked up at Gate. Today, you are going after the highest political seat in Jacksonville without running for City Council or School Board. That goes against what you learned from the business world.
A: I’ve been around government. I worked for Godbold. I worked for Graham. Being on the JTA, I’ve walked two budgets through City Council. I’m not naive to government. The challenge I had was this: if I had run for Council would I have been using my skills to the highest and best use? I don’t think my skills lie in legislative work; my skills lie in management work. I could never justify foregoing a good management opportunity for a good legislative opportunity. There are two different ways you can contribute to government: the legislative branch or the executive branch. They are two different roles and two different job requirements and skill sets. I would argue that serving on City Council is not a training ground for CEO. We’re talking about running an $800 million business with 7,000 employees. It’s a big business and legislative work is very different from leadership work. I don’t buy into the notion that City Council is a training ground.
Q: Which issue is most important?
A: I think there are several issues that are key. Clearly, education is one of those, economic development is huge and quality of life is huge. Those are the three biggies. The education component is critically important for a lot of reasons. We know if the system is not performing to its highest and best use, it costs us. When students are not coming up through the system — that’s where you have the dropouts, the teen pregnancies, the unemployment, the crime, the unprepared work force — that’s the social side. The economic side is just as paralyzing. Your work force is critical to economic development and if you’re not producing qualified students with basic skills, you’re unable to fuel the economic engine. It makes it difficult to not only retain the jobs you have, but to be competitive in attracting jobs. Thirdly, there’s a moral obligation to give every student an equal chance. That’s got to be the focus because of all the implications it has. It’s a challenging issue. No city in America has solved it. The way our government is structured, there’s no jurisdictional responsibility for the mayor and the School Board. It’s almost as if they were designed to be completely separate. There’s no budget or policy control. We elect our School Board members. By the way, the School Board budget is $1.3 billion. The operating budget of the City is only $700 million. It’s a big organization. It’s a monolithic bureaucracy. The question is, what can a mayor do? My answer is this: you’ve got pick something that’s measurable; you’ve got to pick something that you know will be helpful to the system and critical to the community. That, to me, is literacy. I think we’ve got a huge literacy challenge here. According to a JCCI [Jacksonville Community Council Inc.] study, 47 percent of our community is functionally illiterate. That means they can’t fill out a job application without assistance.
Q: Why is illiteracy so widespread here?
A: I think it’s poverty, number one. Poverty is very real here. Our per capita income is $16,000 a year. That’s very, very low. It’s unacceptable. It’s a reflection of poverty. I think it’s a reflection of the deterioration of the family unit. There needs to be more economic opportunity. Breaking that poverty cycle is done through economic means. But let me get back to education. Literacy is something we need to focus on and something the entire community can focus on. It can be helpful in making sure the school system has students that are more prepared once they reach the classroom. My vision is this: one, I think reading should be a core value in Jacksonville. Two, my goal is every child is able to read by third grade. That should be our goal. This is something the non-profits can embrace, the faith-based community can embrace, the School Board can embrace and anyone who wants to help can embrace. There are ways to do it: getting students into our libraries more often, making sure students are read to by a parent, a mentor, anyone. I think the mayor’s office needs to be the convener of people that want to be a part of the solution.
Q: All of the candidates talk about education. They have been here their whole lives. This problem has going on for at least 30 years. Why hasn’t anything been done?
A: That’s a good question. My sense is there is no silver bullet. No one has found the answer. We’ve all been looking for it. We’ve looked at other communities. We’ve looked within ourselves. I think the biggest risk we can run as candidates is to make outlandish promises because I think it adds to the cynicism of the public and that’s not a good thing. That’s how you keep good people from running; that’s how you lose confidence in the voters. You need someone who’s committed to focus on something that will be good and measurable.
Q: Of the five major candidates, you probably have the least name and face recognition. How is that going to change in the next 60 days?
A: I did a pretty exhaustive feasibility study before I got into this thing. We knew going in, because I had not held office, my name recognition would be low, if not lower than anyone else in the race. The system is designed to benefit those who have served, which is not necessarily a good thing, but it is because their name is out there. We knew going in I would have to have what we call ‘resource dominance’ because the only way I’d be on a level playing field is if I was able to communicate my message more frequently and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve gone out and found more contributors than anyone else. We will have resource dominance, we have it today, we will it through the end of the campaign. We knew if I could not do that, I would not stand a chance. I’m announcing my campaign on Saturday and that has really frustrated a lot of folks, but the truth is I wanted to make sure I could build the team that I knew would win. It has taken a year for me to determine that by a finance committee that functions, endorsements that are meaningful and contributions that add up. All those things had to come together.
Q: Is the immediate objective to get through the primary?
A: We are only focused on the primary. Anyone who talks about anything beyond the primary is punished in our organization.
Q: How do you punish them?
A: [laughing] Mike Tolbert has threatened them. We are focused on the primary and our goal is to be number one or two and we do not think beyond that.
Q: Is Sheriff Nat Glover going to enter the race tomorrow [Thursday] and how does that affect you?
A: I don’t know. It doesn’t affect me. I’m not going to work any less hard. I’ve worked hard for a year and I will continue to work hard. It doesn’t impact my campaign. I don’t know if he’s going to run and I don’t spend much time focusing on things I can’t control. My answer to Nat is: come on in, the water’s warm.
Q: You mentioned economics earlier, low per capita income, the upper class growing, the lower classes staying the same. How do you change that?
A: I think education and economic development are closely related. We have to be careful not talk of the issues in silos, they are inter-connected. The economic development issue is critically important, second only to education. My feeling is, my legacy, the legacy of the next mayor, should be economic development and job growth. I think the fundamentals are here to attract businesses for all the reasons we all know — the port, the crosshairs of I-10 and 95, we’ve got land, we’ve got a great quality of life and the traffic moves for the most part. I think we need a mayor that serves as the chief. You do not delegate, in my opinion, economic development. You work with and lead the efforts of the JEDC and the Chamber. I think the mayor should be on the tarmac when Chrysler lands their plane here. I think it’s the mayor who takes responsibility and is accountable for permitting if a company wants to come here. When you talk about attracting business here, I think someone who has been in business is better at that than someone who is not. Almost more important than an incentive is how fast you can mobilize to accommodate them. At the end of the day, you can save them more. Government should be a facilitator of business, not a barrier. Anything we can do to grow our economic base will be critical and that’s why it should be my legacy.
Q: It’s been said that a main reason some businesses don’t come to Jacksonville is that it takes too long to get permits and there’s too much red tape.
A: I agree with the observation that permitting is a barrier to business. My feeling is we don’t need to issue permits to everyone, that’s not what I’m advocating, but we owe people an answer in a reasonable time frame. Let’s get people to the table that are on the bureaucratic side and the business side and let’s talk about it.
Q: Talk about quality of life as another major issue.
A: My feeling is this: as we move into a knowledge-based economy, which is what we are doing, we are in transition from the industrial age to the knowledge age, and as we transition into that, incentives are going to be a lot less important. What companies will look for is, number one, quality of life: How do we live there? Number two: what is the work force there? Can they contribute in a meaningful way to my knowledge-based industry? Protecting that becomes critically important and that is our competitive advantage at the end of the day. Northeast Florida offers a better way of living.
Q: Do you support continuing efforts to revitalize downtown?
A: Absolutely. I just came from a meeting where we were talking about downtown. I’m very bullish about downtown. I guess being 38 years old, I have a vision of what downtown should look like and it’s not unlike Baltimore. I lived in D.C. for a while, I watched Baltimore develop and it’s inspiring. I think when a young person moves to Jacksonville, downtown is the first place they should want to be, not I-95 and Baymeadows. I think we’re on the right track. It starts with housing. Housing leads development. That’s how Deerwood started, that’s how Arlington started. It starts with housing, then behind that comes the bread shop, dry cleaners, restaurants and entertainment. I’m concerned about the absorption rate for downtown housing. I’m also a huge proponent of planning and I want us to buy into a plan of what we want downtown to look like.
Q: You are on the record as saying if elected you will evaluate Fire Chief Ray Alfred and possibly replace him. Is that true today? Is that how you got the endorsement of the firefighters?
A: I got the firefighters endorsement because I went to every station, every shift. Let me remind you that every candidate that the firemen interviewed, and this is an important fact that has been lost in the shuffle, said the same thing I did and that is they want their own team. It is not about an indictment of Ray Alfred, it is about an opportunity to pick your own chief like every other mayor has done in Jacksonville’s history since consolidation. That’s what you do. What happened was the endorsement went my way. My opponents tried to diminish the endorsement for political reasons and it seems to have stuck. I think it’s the work ethic. I’m the only candidate in the history of Jacksonville politics that has gone to every station, every shift because I knew I needed them. I wanted them. Now, my position is very clear. I want my own fire chief and I’m going to pick someone from within the ranks of that organization. I come from an organization that promotes from within and I think there’s a lot of benefits from doing that.
Q: How do you see the next three to four weeks shaping up? Is it going to get ugly? There are a lot of candidates fighting for a limited number of votes.
A: I try not to talk much about strategy. I try to talk about issues. It’s more productive for me. We’ve got the resources to communicate effectively and also defend ourselves effectively. I would not trade places with anyone in this race. We’re in the position of acquiring votes, which, in my opinion, is far more enviable than controlling erosion.
Q: Are there too many Republicans in the race?
A: I wish there were fewer. One thing you learn in a campaign, and it’s been a tough lesson, is there are a lot of things you can’t control and it’s not a good use of your time and energy to think about things you can’t control. The good news is there’s a lot of good candidates on the Republican side. We’re moving around town in a pack, kind of like a dysfunctional family, and I’ve grown to really respect my Republican opponents. I think the Republicans have a good slate and it’s a shame there’s so many good ones.
Q: Will any of you join forces for the sake of putting the right Republican in office?
A: I don’t know. I wish I knew.
Q: What does your dad think of you running?
A: My father is not a real fan of politics or politicians and probably wouldn’t run himself and probably questions why I would, but I will tell you I think he’s enjoying the campaign. I think he enjoys observing. He’s an observer. He’s not very active in my campaign. Politics can be a great spectator sport and I think he’s enjoying being a spectator.
Q: Win or lose, do you go back to Gate in June, four years, eight years?
A: I’m not planning on losing, so I don’t think about that. But I’ve said all along I’m going to go back to Gate someday, maybe four years, maybe eight years, maybe in 72 days. That’s my plan. Gate is a fantastic organization I look forward to joining again one day.