Lenny Curry and Alvin Brown campaign war of words over Jax PAC mailpiece

The mailpieces keep coming from the Lenny Curry PAC. Yesterday we covered an attack on “liberal” Bill Bishop, and today, the subject is the Democratic incumbent, Mayor Alvin Brown, who according to the Together for a Greater Jacksonville mailing, “sure can tell a good story” but “isn’t telling the whole truth.”

The Jacksonville Campaign is starting to heat up. This latest PAC attack on Mayor Brown led his Deputy Campaign Manager, Fabien Levy, to refer to his Republican opponent as “running the most negative, divisive campaign in Jacksonville history”.

And to think: we have weeks to go before even the March election, never mind the May runoff.

At the heart of the polemic: Alvin Brown’s campaign claim that “as Mayor, I’ll cut my salary by 20%”. While this happened, the mailpiece asserts that Mayor Brown cashed in in different ways, including “racking up lavish trips” by not always choosing “the most cost-efficient travel options”, taking “undisclosed and prohibited gifts from third parties”, “spending taxpayer money for himself”, and “breaking his promise that he wouldn’t take a pension”. The last claim is buttressed by comparing his declaration that he would eschew a pension with a Florida Times-Union account that “it turns out he did” take a pension, with the mailpiece claiming that over “$69,000 has been contributed on his behalf to the Florida Retirement System.”

The latest in a series of anti-Brown mailers concludes with the blunt declaration that “Alvin Brown doesn’t want the truth to get in the way of his good story.”

We asked Curry Spokesman Brian Hughes for comment on the latest PAC mailpiece, and he said that “Brown wants Jacksonville families to believe a salary cut demonstrates austerity. In fact, his record of taxpayer funded travel and his lie about being in the pension system demonstrate that Brown’s words do not match his actions. It’s what career politicians do. Jacksonville deserves better than this.”

The Brown campaign offered a counterclaim. This from Fabien Levy, the Deputy Campaign Manager:

“If it wasn’t obvious before, then there should be no question now that Lenny Curry is running the most negative, divisive campaign in Jacksonville history. It’s sad that party boss Curry is not only a partisan, political attack dog, but now his campaign has resorted to flat out lying about Mayor Brown’s record. Mayor Brown is the only one in this race that we can trust to keep his promise. He said he would cut his salary, and he did. He said he would cut wasteful spending, and he did. He said he would create more jobs for Jacksonville, and he did. The only thing we can trust Lenny Curry to do is say anything to win an election. This latest attack just reverberates the point that Lenny Curry continues to put politics before Jacksonville, while Mayor Brown continues to put Jacksonville first.”

The Brown campaign also contends that the Mayor cut his salary as promised. As well, they maintain that economic development has driven the Mayor’s decisions to travel during his term in office. The Brown campaign also holds that the Mayor and those with him always opted for the most economical travel and lodging options possible in the moment — though the vagaries of the short notice of travel for someone with a schedule as busy as the Mayor’s would sometimes require “choice” seating on planes. Additionally, the Mayor’s campaign holds that the Administration has always relied on the best available legal advice for travel, from both the Office of the General Counsel and the Florida Commission on Ethics. When travel expenditures were out of compliance, the city has made appropriate reimbursements, as part of the Mayor’s commitment to transparency and compliance on these matters.
”