Jax Councilor Katrina Brown town hall: a ‘dog and pony show’?

Though it’s the summer of 2017, things are heating up already in the 2019 race for Jacksonville City Council District 8.

And reaction to a town hall event held by incumbent Councilwoman Katrina Brown won’t cool the temperature.

Diallo Sekou, who filed this week to take on the embattled first-term Democrat, posted to Facebook last night his irritation.

“I just left a so called town hall meeting, the citizens never got a chance to speak!  An audience full of elders … elders and never let them speak,” Sekou posted.

Other attendees, albeit privately, raised their concerns about a Councilor’s town hall where said Councilor wouldn’t deign to take questions from the people who showed up to ask them.

Hardworking taxpayers and loyal Democrats wanted to ask Brown about her recurrent ethical challenges, but “no Q and A was allowed,” with an agenda packed with speakers that took the event to its end time, where Brown wrapped it with “many hands raised” and “lots of grumbling” from those who wanted answers.

One attendee said the event was more like “pecha kucha” than a town hall, which seemed to be a design element to insulate Brown from dialogue with taxpayers and voters.

“A couple of times people stood up and asked if they could ask a question and they got ignored and then [Councilwoman Brown] shut down the last one pretty sharply which elicited grumbles in the room. And of course the aide had to go over there and smooth it over.”

Of course, FloridaPolitics.com readers know full well what was on attendees’ minds — and why Brown apparently structured a two-hour event so that she wouldn’t have to face questions about glaring financial irregularities that have led to the sorry impasse of her companies being sued by the city of Jacksonville.

On Monday, Brown ducked questions about the city of Jacksonville suing two family businesses for which she is title manager. The city’s grievance: the two LLCs received almost $600,000 of city grants and loans to create 56 jobs for a BBQ sauce plant.

Alas, the companies fell 56 jobs short of that goal, and the city seeks a $210K clawback via a default judgement.

Brown, minutes after getting out of her Porsche SUV that is newer in vintage than that 2011 economic development deal, was in no mood to address such quotidian concerns on Monday.

“I continue to tell you no comment. You can ask me a thousand times and I would still say no comment,” Brown said.

When asked if she was worried about the questions coming up from taxpayers at her town hall, Brown said no.

“That’s not going to be the focus,” Brown said of the town hall attendees. “They won’t be able to bring it up.”

Brown and her family businesses may not have been as good as their word when it came to honoring an economic development deal with the city and other parties: CoWealth originally borrowed $2.65 million via an SBA loan from Biz Capital, in addition to $380,000 from the city of Jacksonville and $220,000 of grants, for the sauce plant.

However, she was successful in what seemed to be a primary goal of the town hall: to shut down audience reaction, and to create an impression that the people in her district don’t care about ethical lapses among their representatives.

For Katrina Brown, it’s been an interesting two years. One need only go back to May 2015, in which she ran a radio ad as her campaign ended, to see how her messaging has been compromised by the ethical and legal sinkholes in which her family businesses are stuck.

At that point, Brown pledged to “serve the people” … an ironic phrase, given that she didn’t want to take questions from the people at Thursday’s town hall.

“My daughter Katrina Brown took a small business and turned it into a million dollar entity … that’s why the Congresswoman Corrine Brown endorses her,” Councilwoman Brown’s father said in that ad.

Ironic. And here’s another irony from the same ad.

Brown also referred to the BBQ sauce business as a “Jacksonville success story” … hilarious, given that the company is dealing with legal actions on every front, and given that the BBQ sauce plant was subject to an FBI raid last year — all of which seems to indicate something less than success.

“Agents from the IRS criminal investigation division, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of the Inspector General and the FBI Small Business Administration division were on scene for more than three hours,” reported WJXT at the time.