Let’s Get Back to the Basics at JTA

[fsu813]

JEA was a multi-billion dollar scheme. JTA is $40 million in the hole. Not even comparable.

It'll come out with due time, but the NAVI/U2C scheme cost JTA way more than $40M. You also have to consider the sheer opportunity cost that JTA has wasted & how brazen this entire thing has been. The entire department was just set back more than a decade. This whole scheme is nearly a decade running now... I don't think it's crazy to suggest this is a JEA level story at all. How much do you value the lost Emerald Trail contract? Add it all up & the loss here is easily $100M+.

At the end of the day, JEA was/is still mostly functional. JTA will need a complete reset. What value do you put on that?

JTA screwing up the trail funding, while arguably incompetent, is unrelated to anything being alleged.

[CityLife]

One thing to keep in mind is that we still have absolutely zero idea what the final findings are of JTA's scandal.  There are some very specific requests that look like there are one or more whistleblowers pointing to investigators directly to issues, but it is also very possible that more whistleblowers come forward and investigators find our more after receiving materials from the subpoena. There are several red flags in the subpoena that, depending on what the records show, could turn this into a much larger scandal.

That said, I don't think you can really compare it to JEA. The PUP scheme is almost impossible to match in terms of sheer scale, greed, and audacity. The more interesting comparison may ultimately be the condition the two agencies were left in. Nat Ford's tenure could end up leaving JTA in a considerably worse financial position than JEA or COJ would have been in had the JEA sale actually gone through.

I've said this before and still believe it: selling JEA to NextEra/FPL could have been an enormous financial opportunity for Jacksonville. The people running JEA got greedy and blew it with the PUP scheme.

The NextEra offer would have generated approximately $6.45 billion in net proceeds for Jacksonville. Under Curry's proposal, roughly $2.2 billion would have been used to eliminate City debt, leaving approximately $4.25 billion available for investment or other public purposes. At the time, JEA was contributing roughly $120 million annually to the City's general fund. It would take more than 35 years of $120 million annual contributions just to equal $4.25 billion and that ignores the investment earnings that $4.25 billion could have generated. On top of that, eliminating approximately $2.2 billion in City debt was projected to save roughly $240 million annually in debt service.

And it is not just beneficial to the City as an financial windfall. Jax residents probably would have probably received better utility services. FPL is more aggressive at retrofitting existing neighborhoods with undergrounding than JEA is and their utility rates are currently slightly lower than JEA's are.

Even with the PUP, Jax would have been incredibly cash flush with no debts and able to make some major capital investments. MOSH funding? No problem. Larger match to get UF here quicker? No worries. Incentives for corporate relocations? Easy.

JTA on the other hand, post Ford/NAVI/U2C are horrendous shape.

So basically, the JEA scheme is likely worse as a criminal fraud case, but JTA is possibly a worse mismanagement of a public agency.