From Jacksonville Today:
Slow-the-growth candidates win big in St. Johns County
From the School Board to the County Commission, this month’s primary elections scored wins for St. Johns County candidates running on a common platform: Stop the county’s rapid growth.
It’s a message that resonated with voters in one of Florida’s fastest-growing counties.
Martin Pyszczymuka handily defeated three other candidates to earn his seat on the Board of County Commissioners. His opponents included Heather Brofford, who received a late-in-the-game endorsement from Gov. Ron DeSantis and campaign support from the state Republican Party of Florida.
Speaking with Jacksonville Today on election night, standard bearer of the local slow-the-growth movement, County Commissioner Krista Joseph — who won her reelection bid by more than 6,000 votes — said the goal is to put a stop to the destruction of St. Johns’ environment and way of life.
“We’re gonna take back St. Johns County,” she said. “We’re finally going to make things happen.”
Growth pains in the school system
Winning a school board seat outright on primary night, political newcomer and slow-growth candidate Kevin Allen narrowly unseated Beverly Slough. With more than 20 years of experience on the School Board alone, Slough was first elected when Allen was just a teenager.
New-Yorker-turned-Floridian Allen does not have the typical resume of a school board member. The 35-year-old has spent no time leading a classroom or a school. Instead, he campaigned on his experience in the financial world.
Allen believes his background as a salesman and a stockbroker on Wall Street is what the district needs right now. Going into this school year, the district laid off employees and increased class sizes to help fend off a multimillion-dollar deficit, exacerbated by the state’s universal voucher program.
“I think it’s been proven that we have some of the best teachers in the entire state, but we have a financial crisis problem going on with the debt and the budget deficit that we saw last year,” Allen says. “I think that just coming from a different background than the education space is something that is really needed at this point in time, because we’re seeing a lot of growth and we need to be able to have someone on the board that knows how to manage that and work to help us to get out of it.”
Once appointed to the board, Allen says one of his key priorities is finding money that would not have to be approved by voters to make teacher salary increases permanent. He also wants to see a more concerted lobbying effort in Tallahassee to increase public school funding.
“I think if all the governmental entities within the county work together, then we can actually make some change happen. We can take a stand,” Allen says. “We are the No. 1 school district, and we should have a lot of influence in how it gets managed throughout the state. If we can make a model for all the other counties, I’d really like to take that on.”
County Commission shake-up
The two County Commission races were also decided last week without any need for a November runoff election.
Winners Pyszczymuka and Joseph ran a joint campaign arguing that, if elected, they would form a three-person voting bloc with County Commissioner Ann Taylor on the five-person commission to slow down the county’s growth.
Pyszczymuka and his family moved to St. Johns from Hawaii four years ago. He first made a local name for himself addressing elected officials about his wife’s firing from her job with the county. She is suing the county, alleging she was wrongfully terminated.
After his decisive victory for the seat currently held by County Commissioner Sarah Arnold, Pyszczymuka says voters spoke loud and clear in wanting Joseph and him to “rein in this reckless development that’s been going on in the county for far too long.”
Less than 24 hours after last week’s election, the County Commission approved more than 1,000 acres of agricultural land for future residential development.
During that discussion, County Commissioner Clay Murphy — who similarly campaigned on slowing the growth two years ago — said he did not like the proposals in front of him, but that a new state law tied his hands.
“… what I discovered is that when you get into this position is, whether I’m happy or not is not the deciding issue,” Murphy said. “The deciding issue is ‘What does the law say?’”
Pyszczymuka says that kind of thinking is hurting St. Johns County.
“If it’s all predetermined, why do we even vote as county commissioners? Let’s just have the state ram things through, and there’s nothing we can even do about it,” he says. “As far as what’s going on at the state level, we need to have people with a backbone that are willing to fight for what’s gonna affect our county.”
Will that result in lawsuits from developers and other private property owners? Maybe, Pyszczymuka says, but that’s just part of the process.
“They [the residents] don’t want somebody who’s going to roll over,” he says. “If a lawsuit comes, that’s fine. We’ll deal with it.”
Whether he is sworn in in December or sooner (pending the governor’s potential removal of two commissioners charged with fraud), Pyszczymuka says his top priority is to bring transparency and accountability to a board that has been rocked by controversy.
“I will assure you that transparency will be coming to our government,” he says, “and we’re definitely going to do everything we can to limit the outside influences on our elected officials and on everybody else within the county government.”
Looking ahead
One more St. Johns County School Board race remains up for grabs. None of the three candidates in that race managed to earn more than 50% support from voters on Aug. 18, so two candidates, Tammie McClafferty and Jillian Tozer, will move on to a runoff vote in November.
Voters will also have a say in a number of other races, including a seat on the St. Augustine City Commission — Ashleigh Barnes won one of the two seats up for grabs last week — and for their representatives in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.
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