A.G. GancarskiThe monthly meeting of the Jacksonville Tiger Bay Club included an At Large Council candidate forum. Three races have runoffs, and five of the six candidates were on hand. Ju’Coby Pittman, of Group 5, was without her challenger, and therefore did not have much to say much. Both candidates in Groups 1 and 3 were on hand, though, and lively debates ensued.
The Human Rights Ordinance sparked the most interesting discussion. Republican Anna Brosche seems to be walking back her previous support for an inclusive HRO, which caused GOP diehards to consider switch to her opponent, incumbent Democrat Kim Daniels.
Calling the 2012 bill “flawed” and that “words do matter,” Brosche moved her rhetoric to the Duval GOP mainstream. She cited the need to “make sure not one person is discriminated against” while protecting the interests of “religious institutions, the faith-based community, and small businesses.”
Of course, compared with Daniels on this issue, she still sounds enlightened.
“I’m a black female preacher,” Daniels said as she described herself as a child of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Her said her status gives her a unique perspective on the HRO, which she called a “very bad bill.”
“Most of the people who talk about the HRO don’t know what that would entail,” Daniels said. “You can’t give one group rights at the expense of others.”
Saying her “best friends are homosexuals,” Daniels said, “I don’t take the hoopla that people need rights for businesses” to come to Jacksonville. Later on, she said, regarding same-sex marriage, that “my position is that I will not legislate sex.”
Of course, Daniels wasn’t alone in her opposition to the HRO. Geoff Youngblood, running against Tommy Hazouri in Group 3, amused some when he posited that “I’m pleased that we live in a town that is not bigoted” and therefore can resist the lures of HRO legislation such as in 2012, which was “gerrymandered and twisted for special rights.”
Hazouri got the line of the day in response: “He must be living in a shoebox.”
For Hazouri, the HRO expansion is about “human rights.” He wondered how “we can fight for human rights abroad” but stay silent on this issue. He said we can “walk together or perish together,” and that economic development will stall out if corporations considering relocation are “fearful” of how their employees might be treated.
Beyond the HRO pyrotechnics, another interesting discussion point involved Daniels being questioned for her recent opposition to Councilman Bill Gulliford. She described him as “always trying to squeeze everything he can out of the city of Jacksonville for the Beaches.” She then said she would vote for an amendment affecting Atlantic Beach “because Gulliford was against it.”
The questioner said that Daniels made a “very unwise comment against Bill Gulliford.” Her response was interesting.
“I said exactly what I meant. I will not take my words back,” she said. She said it was an issue because it’s “political season,” that Gulliford “always delays things and is sucking the life out of the city,” and there was something in there about “robbery and thievery” related to police and fire services as well that was below the threshold of coherence.
Another shining Daniels moment was when she applied an algebraic metaphor when answering a question about whether the city’s budget should be cut.
“Without a common denominator, we can’t solve the problem,” Daniels said. “Given variables, I can’t address specifically what should be cut.”
She’s on the Finance Committee.
Beyond the HRO and budget issues, river dredging for Jacksonville’s port expansion was also discussed. Most was was well-reasoned, and within Jacksonville’s accepted spectrum. The Daniels comments, however, were an outlier that obscured the rest of the program.
One comment
anony
April 20, 2015 at 10:20 am
You are a junky wannabe journalist with no real audience. Have several seats you reporter reject.
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