Author: Catherine

 

So now Donna Deegan wants the people she parks on city boards to sit through a finance class.

Not because the public suddenly demanded literacy in bond covenants. Because JTA is cutting service over a deficit, JEA keeps hiking rates, and someone in the mayor’s office decided the fix is a free slideshow on how to read a balance sheet.

New appointees are “encouraged” to finish it within 90 days. Current ones get 180. Ethics, Sunshine Law, public records, pensions, credit ratings — the whole civics packet.

It isn’t mandatory yet. The order just nudges them, then she goes to City Council and asks to make the standards stick.

Encouraged today, required as soon as the votes line up.

That’s the tell. These are her appointees, confirmed to oversee real money at independent agencies, and the operating assumption is that they might not know a pension liability from a parking meter.

If the mayor can’t find people who already understand budgets and audits, the problem isn’t the training calendar. It’s the appointment process.

A 90-day class after confirmation is a press release dressed up as governance.

Taxpayers don’t get competence because a volunteer watched a webinar. They get it when the people handed the keys already had it.

Donna Deegan’s incompetence has gotten on my last good nerve.

JTA is circling the drain and Jacksonville is paying the tab. Nearly $40 million in the hole, almost 200 people getting pink slips, Skyway parked, NAVI mothballed, buses cut back to Saturday schedules, and a stack of delinquent bills stretching back years.

The outgoing CEO still collects a fat paycheck while the agency he left behind begs City Hall for a $30 million gas-tax lifeline.

That is not a rough patch. That is a wreck.

Meanwhile the mayor’s orbit keeps drawing subpoenas like a magnet.

State prosecutors and the AG have already gone fishing through city and utility records over board games, lobbying contracts, immigration livestreams, and more.

Whether the latest paper lands on JTA letterhead or the next authority over, the pattern is the same: sloppy oversight, political score-settling, and an administration that treats independent agencies like personal chess pieces until the money runs out and riders get stranded.

Donna Deegan promised to clean up the “toxic culture.”

Instead Jacksonville got grant money left on the table, service cuts for working people who actually use the bus, and another round of lawyers reading emails.

The city needed a mayor who could run the trains and the books. It got press conferences and investigations.

That’s the failure.

In 2024, the Duval County School Board unanimously hired Dr. Christopher Bernier as superintendent after he abruptly resigned from Lee County Schools.

Board members knew of an ongoing whistleblower investigation into allegations of bullying, intimidation, and a “violent temper,” and said they had done due diligence.

A later Lee County report cleared the most serious claims but found he had spoken to a senior staffer with profanity and in ways witnesses called “dehumanizing,” “insulting,” and disrespectful.