JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Action News Jax has learned more about the major shakeup happening in the Jacksonville Transportation Authority.
Monday night, we told you about two new appointments to the board. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t just appoint two new people -- multiple sources tell Action News Jax’s Emily Turner he essentially fired the current chair.
>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<
Debbie Buckland, Ari Jolly, and Ray Driver have already been taken off the JTA website.
Buckland wasn’t termed out, she’d resubmitted her application for another term and was right in the middle of her leadership role as board chair when the governor made the move. He will be replacing all his appointees, putting fresh eyes on what’s happening at JTA.
Action News Jax has spent more than a year exposing excessive spending of public money, gross operational failures, and a questionable multi-million-dollar autonomous vehicles project. The governor’s office is aware of that coverage.
RELATED: Florida governor appoints 2 people to JTA Board of Directors
The JTA board has seven seats. Three are appointed by the mayor, three by the governor, and the seventh is held by the Florida Department of Transportation district secretary.
Ari Jolly has been termed out for more than a year and a half and Ray Driver resigned last year, leaving two gubernatorial spots open. But rather than simply replacing the two, the governor left one vacancy and created another when he removed Buckland. He did not have to; he chose to.
Jolly and Buckland were the biggest supporters of JTA CEO Nat Ford. Now, they’re gone and there’s still one more seat to fill.
[DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks]
According to Steve Page with the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, these new members have a big job after everything Action News Jax has uncovered.
“What you’ve done,” Page says of Action News Jax coverage, “is you pulled together this kind of aggregate portrait of what sounds like an organization that’s not performing particularly well. And so, figuring out how do we improve it would seem to be job number one.”
The new members are Max Glober and Donald “Donny” Horner. Glober is the Vice President of Marketing for First Coast Energy, the company that owns Daily’s. He didn’t respond to our request for comment.
[SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter]
Horner is the Vice President of Investor Relations at Intrepid Capital Management and said, “I’m honored and humbled to have been appointed to the JTA board and am grateful to Governor Desantis, affording me the opportunity to serve the great city of Jacksonville.”
JTA sent a statement calling both appointees “highly qualified Jacksonville community leaders” and welcoming both Glober and Horner.
Action News Jax reached out to the governor’s office asking what its plan is for that third vacancy and didn’t get a response, but sources say these changes are just the beginning of the push for accountability at JTA.
Click here to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Action News Jax live.
