A.G. Gancarski
Of all of his legislative accomplishments, State Rep. Lake Ray takes as much pride in his work for JAXPORT and Florida ports in general as any of them. He is an evangelist for bringing JAXPORT into alignment with the requirements that today’s shipping companies have: It’s important for the port itself, for manufacturing, for jobs, and as part of a larger, regional strategy for using ports as the fulcrum for freight logistics zones.
Ray’s enthusiasm for ports starts from the ground up.
“I knew a lot about the port” before becoming a state legislator, Ray said. “I worked at almost every port facility in Jacksonville in some engineering capacity in the past.”
He has been described as “the Dean of Ports” and describes himself as “the port guy.” And for Ray, the port is part of something larger.
In conversation Monday night, he enthused about how the port is central to his “regional vision,” linking Duval with the other counties in Northeast Florida. That vision will be “one of the biggest game changers in the next 20 to 25 years.” And Ray is a primary architect, having worked closely with the Department of Transportation and Gov. Rick Scott during the past six years to prioritize that strategy.
“I’ve been the one on the ground floor. I wrote the policy,” Ray said. “The things I’m telling you about I put in the DOT bill.”
Has his policy been a success? It depends on whether or not you like port funding. In recent years, $825 million has been dedicated to ports statewide, with $200 million of that coming to JAXPORT. When Ray came into office, JAXPORT was getting $8 million a year.
The secret? “It was about going around the state,” Ray said, “selling” the importance of modernizing ports to allow Florida to compete for trade dollars. His two top priorities in that capacity: deepening the Miami channel and the Mile Point project.
Whether you like Ray’s Dean of Ports nickname or not, he speaks with authority about their importance and the necessity of having a unified strategy.
He also is well positioned to speak about the contributions to port strategy of former Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown.
“Mayor Brown was supportive, yes, but he didn’t have to do anything,” Ray said, describing the former mayor as a “cheerleader” on that front.
The port strategy that now prevails, Ray said, is “not about something Mayor Brown set up. It’s actually the opposite.”
Ray also questioned the effectiveness of Brown’s much ballyhooed port task force, which current mayor Lenny Curry disbanded unceremoniously last month.
“The former mayor set up a commission [for] an assessment of dredging. The commission was set up to where you couldn’t get a solution. It’s reasonable to look at what happened.” Ray said, but “the commission was set up not to succeed.”
“I spoke to that commission. Half were for dredging, half were against. Why would you set it up that way unless you intended not to get an answer?”
That “same scenario,” Ray contended, “was playing out” on the JAXPORT board, where the removal of former Ambassador Nancy Soderberg, a staunch political ally of the Clinton political machine, has stoked controversy among what passes for the left in Jacksonville.
“What you’re really seeing play out is how you’re going to move forward,” Ray said. “The port is so important.”
“We are behind the curve because we haven’t had leadership” on the local level.
That assessment doesn’t jibe with that of many prominent Democrats, including Duval Democrats Chairman Neil Henrichsen, who contended that it was “outrageous [that] a new mayor would come in and try to make this partisan” and “contradictory to the messaging that we’re ‘One City, One Jacksonville’ that we’ve heard from the [Curry] administration.”
Ray, who is chairman of the Duval County Republican Party, rejects that line of reasoning on several grounds.
For one thing, many advocates bring up her D.C. connections from a bygone era.
Soderberg, said Ray, is a “former ambassador to a president who is not in office right now.”
Even though Soderberg, like President Barack Obama and former Mayor Brown, are all Democrats, the effect of the ambassador’s presence on the board has been “a little difficult to assess,” given that the “coalescence has been on the state side, not the federal side.”
Funding for Mile Point and related projects has been from “more of the state side of the equation.”
“If Soderberg’s relationships in D.C. were so strong” there would be more “prioritization from the federal government,” Ray said.
As opposed to U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, whom Ray lauds as a “strong advocate” for the port strategy, Ray found Soderberg uncommunicative when he tried to reach out to her to discuss priorities.
“I extended the opportunity to talk to her about where we were at with the state. I haven’t heard back from her,” Ray said.
Ray contends that the removal of Soderberg from the board, who brought no special expertise on port issues with her, was only as political as her original appointment from Mayor Brown was. Moreover, it’s part of a larger “policy driven” strategy.
“Mayor Curry has a vision and goal in mind with the port in particular. Particularly with some appointments, he’s got some things in mind” related to “the unity of that board.”
Was it a partisan move, though?
“Nothing is in a vacuum. You’re going to be making appointments of people you know,” Ray said, having “developed relationships” during the campaign process, especially “people you know that have a record in a certain area.”
“I have not seen any particular background in ports from Nancy,” Ray said, adding that “the mayor has made appointments of prominent Democrats” to administration and board posts both.
