Has Jax's Monument-Hating Lawyer's Replacement Gone Too Far for City to Stomach? (FL)
Jacksonville City Council finds its 'prosecutor.' Has he gone too far?
Jacksonville City Council finds its ‘prosecutor.’ Has he gone too far?
(Molly Farrar, Florida Tribune) - A top JEA official had been fielding questions for nearly two hours – sometimes refusing to answer on advice of her city-appointed lawyer sitting beside her – before Matt Carlucci, the senior member of the Jacksonville City Council, had to get something off his chest.
“We’re treating (JEA) like prosecutors up here,” he said with rising frustration, adding that the public hearing struck him as “disturbing and toxic” and “directionless.”
“I’m glad we’re not getting prosecuted.”
The chief prosecutor that day was Jason Teal, a longtime city lawyer who has become an unusual – and unusually influential – fixer for the City Council’s Republican leadership, which has repeatedly clashed with city agencies and the city’s Democratic mayor.
Teal, a former city general counsel, is now the City Council’s secretary and its in-house lawyer, an obscure position that has provided him a wide range of roles that some former and current city officials believe have stretched the limits of city law.
That day, June 8, Teal was leading the questioning of…
