Not much cash, but lots of choices in race for At-Large, Group 1 Jacksonville City Council seat

Feb. 27-- Feb. 27--A Republican councilman and a former Duval County Democratic chair are on the ballot for the open At-Large, Group 1 seat on Jacksonville's City Council -- but voters have other choices.

A candidate who wants to restore police pensions, a political novice from the Westside and a deaf activist arrested at a Hemming Park protest are also seeking the seat Councilwoman Anna Lopez Brosche is giving up.

"We might surprise some people," said Gary Barrett, a first-time candidate who said he already knows he made campaign mistakes but hopes to survive the March 19 first election, where voters of all parties choose between the same candidates.

The top two finishers next month will advance to the May 14 general election -- but those names are far from certain.

Councilman Terrance Freeman, who former Gov. Rick Scott appointed to the District 10 seat last year, wants to move to the at-large seat. But Freeman only tied Barrett for third place in a University of North Florida poll this month of likely voters.

Lisa King, a former Democratic chair who served on city planning and housing commissions, had the largest share of support, 32 percent, although even more voters said they didn't know who they'd pick.

Jack Daniels, a retired business owner with a long history as a candidate, had 10 percent of the poll, while Barrett and Freeman had 5 percent each. Connell Crooms, a working-class activist, had 4 percent.

Freeman describes his candidacy as one of building bridges between neighborhoods and groups.

"Serving is a part of my DNA," Freeman says in a campaign video that sketches his background as a baseball player, coach and school principal.

Freeman, 44, was a community college baseball player who played for minor league teams from 1994 to 2000. He helped coach softball at the University of North Florida while he earned a 2003 bachelor's degree there, and later received a master's in exercise science and health promotion from California University of Pennsylvania.

He was hired in 2003 as athletic director at Eagle's View Academy, a Christian K-12 school, and became its principal from 2009 to 2014.

He left the school to become political affairs manager at the JaxChamber and oversee its PAC, JAXBIZ, then in 2015 he became an aide to Councilman Aaron Bowman.

He ran unsuccessfully for Florida's Legislature in 2016 and took a job in 2017 as a regional director at Ygrene Energy, a business that finances clean energy home improvements.

That job ended last summer, and Freeman was looking for work -- and seeking unemployment -- before Scott chose him to replace suspended Councilman Reggie Brown, who had been indicted on fraud charges. A lawsuit challenging the appointment was dismissed in September.

Freeman, a Republican, said he has spent time since last year building connections to people in District 10, a heavily Democratic district where he hadn't lived before. Bridging divides has become a theme of his campaign, with his Twitter posts adding #BuildingBridges on election messages and a campaign mailer featuring a stick-figure sketch of a bridge.

A member of the Jacksonville Journey's oversight committee from 2008 to 2015, Freeman talks about youth sports and mentorship as tools to curb crime. He said Mayor Lenny Curry's Kids Hope Alliance "is the start of stopping crimes long before they start."

Freeman has been endorsed by JAXBIZ, the First Coast Manufacturing Association and the Northeast Florida Builders Association.

The $64,600 in campaign donations he had raised by mid-February outperformed his competitors, but the $5,200 he gathered in the latest week trailed King's $6,155 during the same time.

King talks in her campaign about people who feel their parts of town are missing out on benefits reaching others from Jacksonville's development.

"Too many of our neighborhoods suffer from decades-old promises that have not been kept, contributing to cycles of poverty and lack of opportunity," her website tells visitors. "Our people are part of our infrastructure too!"

King tells audiences at campaign events about her childhood in the Gator Lodge, the Philips Highway hotel her parents built and operated in the 1960s. She says the hotel was fine then, and its later decline, like the surrounding neighborhood, mirrored struggles other areas faced as the city grew outward.

"What I learned on the Planning Commission was that there were a lot of neighborhoods that felt the city had left them behind," she said.

King was a planning commissioner from 2012 to late 2015, when Mayor Lenny Curry asked her and another Democrat to resign ahead of schedule so he could pick new members. King chaired the commission in 2015, and was also a member of the Jacksonville Housing and Community Development Commission from 2013 to 2016.

She said curbing poverty is the long-term answer to violent crime, and the city could take an early step by improving wages for its lowest-paid employees to at least $12 an hour.

To cut crime involving young people and help youngsters develop, she said the city should have a children's services agency with a stable funding source that's not tied to any politician's short-term aims.

King, 56, has a bachelor's degree from Stetson University and is vice president of Langton Associates, a company that helps local governments pursue state and federal grants.

The Fraternal Order of Police and the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters have endorsed King.

King had collected just over $40,000 in donations by mid-month, the second-highest total in the low-budget countywide contest.

That's a real contrast to Daniels, a Republican who makes a point of saying he won't accept supporters' campaign money.

"If you take their money, they control you. ... If I get elected, I won't owe anybody," said Daniels, retired owner of a financial services company.

Making his fifth run for the council -- he had two tries at the Duval County School Board, too -- Daniels said he's happier just paying the $3,460 he's shelled out this year without asking for help. (Daniels said one supporter, himself a former candidate, did pay a $96 printing bill for the campaign, but did that without asking him.)

Daniels said he wants a strong police force, but wants ways to set youngsters straight sometimes without locking them up. "Every candidate says, every mayor, says 'this is my plan.' ... It hasn't worked yet," he said.

Daniels said he thinks the city can improve its police force by replacing the 401(k) retirement system that Curry negotiated in 2017 with a traditional pension most communities offer to law enforcement.

Because pensions give officers more certainty, and usually more retirement income, they're preferred by many police.

Daniels said many that if Jacksonville has a second-rate retirement plan, the city will be a perpetual training ground for young officers who move on to other communities, leaving the Sheriff's Office lacking experienced staff.

Daniels, 69, knows something about government employees. In 2001, he led a startup union called the Professional Association of City Employees (PACE) that replaced the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees as the bargaining representative for about 3,000 city employees.

Employees voted to return to AFSCME in 2004.

Daniels has a bachelor's degree from Florida State University and a master's in administration from Eastern Kentucky University.

Like Daniels, Barrett hasn't collected any campaign donations, but that could change if he reaches the general election. He just didn't want to ask people if it didn't look like there was a real chance of winning, he said.

How to run a campaign has been a new subject to Barrett, a Westside native who said the neighborhood off Old Plank Road he's lived in for 20 years is simply absent from the city's thinking.

"I just wanted to give it a voice," said Barrett, a Republican and a sales manager for a water treatment equipment company. His neighborhood of suburbanizing countryside is in Council District 8, which also includes heavily Democratic core city areas like Myrtle Avenue, and Barrett said people in his part of town seem to never hear from council members.

Barrett said he decided to run for the At-Large, Group 1 seat once he understood Brosche wouldn't seek another term. He liked the idea of a short campaign -- he became a candidate in January -- but has begun to see the pitfall that poses too. His job requires a lot of travel, and Barrett said that's cost him time he needed to get campaign signs posted, talk to people and generally make himself known.

He's still learning about subjects the council will face.

"I don't pretend to have all the answers," said Barrett, 61.

He said he's a fan of steps Curry and Sheriff Mike Williams have taken to address crime with better staffing and equipment. But he said there's room for the city -- not the Sheriff's Office -- to be involved in reasons crimes happen in the first place.

Barrett is a high school graduate with some college credit but no degree. As a young man, he competed in stock car races at Jax Raceways off Pecan Park Road, which closed in 2005.

While Barrett only became a candidate last month, Crooms started running in the spring elections last April, first filing to run for mayor and then switching to the council contest.

Running with no party affiliation, the 28-year-old has framed himself as an advocate for working people's interests, saying the city should do more to encourage small businesses to develop while requiring more from big employers who he argues benefit from government support.

Crooms said he'd like to see legislation to require a $15 minimum wage at major employers, arguing taxpayer money already sweetens local development deals for companies like Walmart.

State law bars cities from setting higher local minimum wages in many cases, but allows it at companies that receive direct subsidies or tax abatements from the city.

A 2016 Miami Beach law setting a citywide minimum wage of $13.31 by 2021 was rejected by a Florida appellate court. Florida's Supreme Court initially agreed to hear arguments about that decision next month, but backtracked this month and let the appellate decision stand.

Crooms, who has profound hearing loss but can read lips, was raised in Jacksonville and attended Gallaudet University. He has been active in left-leaning organizations including the Jacksonville Progressive Coalition and Black Lives Matter.

In 2017, he was punched, arrested and hospitalized during a demonstration in Hemming Park against American involvement with bombing in Syria. Crooms was charged with resisting police with violence, a felony, but prosecutors dropped the charge two months later. Crooms has been suing Williams and four officers in federal court since March, saying he was beaten unconscious while exercising his rights.

Crooms has been endorsed by the North Florida Central labor Council, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Equality Florida and the New Florida Majority.

While donors haven't lined up to show support -- he had collected $5,553 by mid-month -- Crooms said he's hopeful about the election.

"Jacksonville is ready for a shakeup at City Hall," he said.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263

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