A.G. Gancarski
Yacht broker Mark Zeigler entered what the GOP primary in House District 15 last month.
Incumbent Jay Fant is currently running for Attorney General. Zeigler will face Joseph Hogan and Wyman Duggan.
Florida Politics talked to Zeigler late last week about why he’s running, what differentiates him from the field and related issues.
Zeigler, alone among the field, is known for his tenure as a drummer in Pretty Boy Freud, the legends of Jacksonville’s club scene decades ago. As a drummer and an entrepreneur, his motivations for running are pretty straightforward and are rooted in unfair taxation.
One of the issues facing businesses like his, Zeigler says, is the estimated tax from the Department of Revenue.
“If you collect $200,000 in sales taxes [in a given year], in January you get a love letter,” Zeigler said.
That epistle contains estimated tax, an added burden for businesses just as they try to navigate the January doldrums. And that tax affects investment in the business, including but not limited to new hiring and new equipment.
“Nothing happens until something’s sold,” Zeigler notes.
The National Federation of Independent Business is “looking hard at this issue,” Zeigler said. “I think I’m the messenger who can carry it.”
Zeigler tends to look at other issues with a similar pragmatism.
The school safety/gun control bill known as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act felt rushed to Zeigler, who believes the issues of school hardening, mental health, and gun restrictions should have been handled separately.
The gun restrictions, which bar those under 21 from buying firearms, Zeigler believes will be addressed ultimately in the courts. The new law also bans bump stocks and mandates a three-day waiting period for all gun purchases.
But the fact that the courts are dealing with this bill, which Zeigler describes as having been passed “in a fever pitch,” informs his read that a special session may have helped in terms of making the bill more sound and less vulnerable to challenge.
Zeigler believes that a state Representative needs to “understand the folks in the district,” and in his role as a yacht broker, he has met a “tremendous amount of different people” in what is a “very diverse district, with industrial and metropolitan areas, and farms.”
The candidate has built a business and family in Jacksonville, and has found time to do community service, including 14 years as an adult leader in the Boy Scouts.
He would ask those around him where they fell on issues; as he said, “it’s hard to be an expert on every issue.”
In a crowded primary field, it will be interesting to see how his approach plays against that of Duggan, a City Hall insider with the Mayor Lenny Curry‘s political operation on his side, and Hogan, the son of the Duval County Supervisor of Elections, a man who himself would have been mayor if his gaffes in 2011 hadn’t alienated the pillars of the donor class.
