by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Jacksonville has gone from a backward community to being the envy of the state because residents and some influential leaders had the courage to try a grand experiment that succeeded against all expectations.
That experiment was consolidation, General Counsel Rick Mullaney told The Jacksonville Bar Association at its luncheon Thursday at the Omni.
Many of those in his audience are familiar with the General Counsel’s Office and its staff of 37 lawyers, Mullaney said.
“The public tends to see us as a high-profile office,” he added, springing from cases as varied as school prayer, desegregation, the location of a Wal-Mart and the Better Jacksonville Plan.
The everyday business of the General Counsel’s Office, however, gets less attention but is more significant in helping guide a community “still in transition,” Mullaney said.
From 1964, when Jacksonville was first told it could abolish its old government and replace it with consolidation, critics insisted that vested interests and corrupt political structures would doom the experiment, Mullaney told an audience of about 250.
But “extraordinary civic-minded people” made it happen, Mullaney said.
In August 1967, “the people of Jacksonville said they’d had enough” and abolished the City and County governments. On Oct. 1, 1968, consolidation took effect.
“That charter (of consolidation) is our Constitution,” Mullaney said, and his office is the counsel for all government agencies and authorities.
Mullaney said Thursday was “a great day” for him, since it was five years ago next month when he was last asked to be the guest speaker at the Bar lunch. His daughter, Katie, had just been born. She was more than 13 weeks early and weighed 1 pound, 11 ounces ... “and she starts kindergarten this fall.”
Katie and her mother, Lynn, were in the audience.
Mullaney said his is “the most unique law office” in Florida, perhaps in the nation, as the City’s consolidated government gives it “an inherent structural advantage” over the other 66 governments in the state.
Those other communities, with their “fragmented, piecemeal” forms of government, accomplish little because of continual bickering — and frequent lawsuits — among each other.
Mullaney’s office, however, has the authority to issue binding legal opinions, which short circuits intragovernment squabbles.
Officials in other communities that still miss opportunities to cooperate among themselves “marvel” about the city’s accomplishments — from the Better Jacksonville Plan, to the landing of a National Football League team; from the Preservation Project to a Super Bowl game in 2005, Mullaney said.
Starting as a backward community marked by corruption, waste and an “inferiority complex,” Jacksonville “has become, amazingly, the envy of the state of Florida.”
Thursday’s luncheon was also the annual occasion for the Bar to recognize the accomplishments, and needs, of Jacksonville Area Legal Aid.
U.S. District Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger, from the Middle District of Florida, told his audience that the attorneys with Jacksonville Area Legal Aid have “no perks, no bonus” and a retirement plan “equated with advanced senility.”
The staff handled 7,356 cases in 2002, he said, working “long hours for short pay.”
“Some lawyers work the system, but the system will not work” without Legal Aid, Schlesinger said, encouraging attorneys to do “your fair share.”
In contributing their “professional guidance, professional education and professional help,” he said, they would “carry on the great tradition” of local support for Legal Aid.
Small donations would add up to a record-breaking year if each lawyer in the Jacksonville Bar would contribute $10 a week to Legal Aid, said Executive Director Michael Figgins.
With nearly 2,000 members of the Bar, he said, that level of giving would result in a $1 million campaign.
“You all get it,” he said. “You know what it means to be a lawyer. You are our natural constituency.”
Jacksonville has a “strong Bar association and a strong Legal Aid . . . which go hand in hand,” said Figgins. “I suggest we strengthen our Bar association by strengthening Legal Aid.”
Those who want to help should also sign up for Legal Aid’s 2004 Breakfast of Champions, being held April 28 at the Radisson, he said.
The Champions, those who have donated their time and expertise to Legal Aid, will speak of experiences that “will make you laugh and maybe make you cringe.”
Those who want tickets should call the JALA Development office at 356-8371, Ext. 316.