The Section 8 Interview: John Delaney

by Shelton Hull

(John Delaney was Mayor of Jacksonville, FL from 1995-2001, and now serves as President of the University of North Florida. He spoke with SDH on January 13, 2004.)

SDH: What kind of challenges have you had to face as UNF President?

JD: Well, the first thing you always look at is the budget. You always follow the money first, because to a great extent resources are what are going to allow you to make things happen. I feel good about it now, but the state, because of the last recession, has had to literally roll back funding, and higher education was hit harder than anything else in the state’s budget. The Governor [Jeb Bush] will tell you that– it was the area that he had to squeeze the most. What happens, the shorthand is that the state basically pays for three-quarters of the cost of educating a student; the last quarter is tuition. They have reduced the amount of money they pay per student, and they’ve given no money for any new students that you add above the previous year’s enrollment. So you’ve got this gap, ever-widening gap, and the only remedy is really larger classes. That’s not a positive, either; at some point you really start to impact the learning experience. So, the budgetary issues are always the first thing that you look at, and that’s not particularly pretty in higher education in the state.

SDH: Will it possible for Osprey Radio in the future to broadcast to an area outside the UNF campus?

JD: Well, I think some of the leaders of student government would love to have a “real” radio station. Right now it’s really just over the web and in the resident halls. We’re going to see if there’s some grants and things like that that we can do. It’s arguably a multi-million-dollar sort of investment. Very often the public radio station is run out of the university, for example, WUFT in Gainesville. The radio and television is really done by the journalism college down there. So yes, we’d like to see that happen.

SDH: Does the bulk of the expense come from machinery, or permits and licenses?

JD: It’s mostly machinery. The tower, or lease of the tower, depending on how many watts you have, uses an awful lot of electricity to transmit. Not that I’ve started one, but I know that you don’t do it on the back of an envelope.

SDH: When you made the jump into politics, who supported you? My impression of the business is that it’s pretty cut-throat, and that people who you think are your friends will just turn on you at any given moment. Who have you known over the years that you would say have really been loyal and on your side?

JD: I had been Mayor [Ed] Austin’s Chief of Staff, and he’d decided not to run for reelection. Within a few days, Don Brewer, who was then chair of the local Republican party, called me and said that I should consider running. At the time I told him I didn’t have any interest; that was in the spring of 1994. That fall I got a call from Bobby Stein, who was with Herb Peyton, Walter McCray and Don Brewer. (Bobby’s of the Stein family [owns Stein Mart] that just gave a rather large donation to this university; Herb Peyton, of course, the current Mayor’s father; and Walter McCray, who is [the owner of] Duval Ford, Duval Honda and other dealerships.) They said they wanted me to run. So we took about a month or so, debated it, prayed about it, and I woke up and decided no, I can’t win it. I wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do. So I went to each of them, got up that morning and went to tell them no. Walter McCray got on the phone and called Herb Peyton up and said “He said no, but he didn’t say hell no– we’re not done talking him into it!” So they came back, and it’s really but for those four people, I wouldn’t have run in the first place. Don died in 1999, but the other three are still good friends and good supporters.

Years ago I worked as a car-hop, washing cars at a car dealership that no longer exists, and the general manager was this real popular guy in his late 30s, a real hustler. The owner, who owned a number of dealerships throughout the state, came in and fired him, and I can remember saying to my dad that night, “He knows all these people, he’s got all these friends and all these business connections, he’s gonna land on his feet.” And my dad said, “He’s gonna find out he has a lot fewer friends tomorrow than he had today.” I was 16, and that’s a lesson I’ve remembered for 31 years, especially as it relates to politics: very often your friends are friends because of your position. In saying that, there’s only one person that doesn’t call anymore, now that I’m out, that I considered to be a pretty close friend.

Fortunately, the people who backed me early on, number one, a whole lot of people had already been lined up with Mayor Godbold and Mayor Hazouri in that race. The people that were backing me really had nothing to do with City Hall; they just wanted something good for Jacksonville. Herb, Don, Walter, Bobby, they never once asked for anything in the eight years I was at City Hall. Nothing, not a permit or a contract or anything like that. They just weren’t doing business with the city. So I was really blessed that way, really blessed. And when I was able to win, the people I owed, so to speak, didn’t want anything out of City Hall, so I could tell everyone else, “The heck with with ya!” I could do what I thought was right, and that made it a much more pleasant eight years.

SDH: What would you consider your major accomplishments as Mayor?

JD: There sort of a handful– it depends on my mood of the day, I guess, which one I’d say was number one. Typically, the thing I’m most proud of is the people we brought in. There’s just a really talented pool, and from the looks of it, Mayor Peyton kept about 85%-95% of the people that were running the departments. (Of course you change your staff, that’s natural.) Those are the ones that did the innovations, the ones that enabled some of the other good things to happen.

You know, when you’re Mayor, you’re running about 55 different businesses; you’re kind of a holding company. You collect garbage, deal with concerns of consumers and do public health, pull people out of burning cars, you build bridges. There’s all sorts of things you do to serve the people out there.

And then, obviously, the Better Jacksonville Plan [hence abbreviated as BJP], which involved passing a tax increase in a pretty anti-tax, conservative community. The preservation project and the park acquisition program. That’s what I grow very fond of, as you drive around you see some of the tracts of land reserved that you know are going to be parkland and preserves forever. I feel good about that.

I thought I made pretty good improvements in race relations. We have not solved that problem in the country, much less in Jacksonville. But out high-level appointments of minorities were really sharp, wonderful people that helped the city. My relationship with Nat Glover is one of my fond memories there, too. Very lucky times to be Mayor.

SDH: I get the impression that a lot of these places, like Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, have kind of peaked. They didn’t handle expansion as effectively as they could have, and now they’re kind of stuck in that position. You’ve talked about that a lot with Atlanta’s road system. I’ve been nurturing a theory that Jacksonville is maybe the strategic center of the nation over the next 20 years, that population is likely to expand at a faster rate that in the previous 20 years because of what’s happening in the northeast. How would you compare Jacksonville’s development over the past ten years or so with other cities in Florida, and generally the area south of Atlanta, and what do you think Jacksonville needs to do to make the most of its opportunities in the next generation?

JD: Your observations, I think, are correct. “Growth” very often has two meanings: one is the raw numbers, the other is like a person growing, maturing. In terms of our national perception and view, I used to talk about “cachet cities.” Every couple of years Newsweek or Time magazine would put a city on the front, and that’s the “hot city,” that’s the place that everybody talks about, as with Charlotte, Seattle, Portland, Orlando, Atlanta. Over the course of the last 15-20 years, those were the cachet cities; Austin, TX kind of is now.

Jacksonville’s now one of those cachet cities. People are going, “What’s going on down there?” . . . The Provost here, his wife is a librarian; she works now with the Duval Country Library. He’s been talked to about some other jobs across the country, and his wife doesn’t want to leave. She says, “There’s no place in the country that’s doing more with its library system that Jacksonville– nobody!”

You know, what you get consistently from people that are looking to expand businesses, Jacksonville is at the top of the list to take a look at those, when you can go anywhere in the world, much less the country. It’s obvious that the last decade or so has really seen a significant change, and a lot of that is the foundational work that was done by a lot of people over the last 40 years or so. Jacksonville really collapsed in the 1960s, prior to consolidation.

In terms of, say, traffic and the downsides of sprawl and growth, there isn’t any question that Orlando and Atlanta, and to a great extent Tampa and Miami, have passed a point of really being able to fix it, and that was really the genesis of the BJP. The idea is, try to revitalize your urban core, encourage housing, etc. In that urban core, revitalize the neighborhoods near that area so that you don’t have to continue to have that sprawl, buy the land. You want everybody living in the hole of the donut, buy the donut. That was part of the preservation project, let’s buy that land, so that people don’t move out into the Timuquana area and don’t move to some of the other areas. Encourage the growth where you want it using economic development tools to try to lure growth to the parts of the community that haven’t gotten the economic prosperity, almost exclusively northwest of the river. . . .

We have seen the future, and it’s Orlando and Miami. They’re great places to live and to raise a family, but you just don’t have to spend that much time in traffic and have that much pollution in your water and your land. It’s something you can’t give up on. There’s good sides to growth, but the downsides are that infrastructure doesn’t keep up, the environment gets impacted, and the older neighborhoods get left behind. . . . It [the BJP] wasn’t designed to accelerate growth or add to growth. There’s really no new roads in the BJP. It’s just we don’t have to sit in traffic, we’re adding a lane, building an overpass, those kinds of things, building bike paths so there’s an alternative to using the car. $100 million of the BJP is to buy corridors for a rapid transit system that we won’t build for 30 years. Atlanta is spending billions to tear down buildings to build its MARTA system, that if they’d just planned, they wouldn’t have to do. Orlando can’t even build one, because there’s no place to put it! They’re having a heck of a time figuring out what to do. And then where you want to put it, of course, is where the people live and work and have their businesses, which means you’ve got to destroy some of that to build it. But we’re going to have those corridors purchased, and then try to encourage the growth along those corridors. Obviously we’re trying to clean up contaminated land, phasing out septic tanks is part of the BJP, and then trying to draw growth into the urban core, downtown and the northwest quadrant, and then kind of a pod out near Cecil [Field]. You can’t give up on managing growth. Sometimes people think that all you can do is say “You can’t build there.” Well, government can’t stop you from using your land; we fought a revolution for that. But we can regulate the density of the use of that land: how many cars are going to be there, how many houses per acre. Those are the tools we have. The only way we can stop you is to buy it from you, and that, again, was what the preservation project was about.

SDH: What I’ve heard from talking to younger people around here, especially the circles that have formed around the musician community, is that as the city develops, their interests are not being addressed, particularly as it relates to the FCC rules restricting “pirate” radio. By my estimation, [those rules] have cost local musicians over $10 million in the past five, six years, the so-called “Clear Channel Era.” It’s one thing to complain about it, as I have at length, but it’s another to take effective action, so what steps should interest groups take make sure their interests are addressed by city government?

JD: I don’t know anything about this issue you’ve just described, pirate radio. Of course, the FCC would be Federal–

SDH: Yeah–

JD: But what I always tell people is, it begins with who you elect, you know, and you’ve got to be involved in that process, one way or another. Either working on a campaign, running for office, and even if you’re not, just talking to those elected people who are the policy-makers, trying to get their attention and persuade them. There’s no other way. You’ve got to elect people who think the way you want, or you’ve got to convince the ones that are in there that your views need some attention.

SDH: What are your thoughts about Bob Graham’s decision not to run for reelection to the US Senate? From what I’ve read, it seems that the White House and Tallahassee are having a little dispute over who’s going to get that push.

JD: I have a lot of respect for Bob Graham. I was surprised when he decided to run for President, on a couple of different fronts. What it did remind me of, and I think most of us Floridians had forgotten, [was] he’s not a particularly good public speaker. It reminded me of when Bruce Babbitt ran; this was ‘92, maybe ‘88. He used to be Governor of Arizona, very well-thought of, [but] when they got him up on the stage he had kind of a stammer, or stutter, a very hesitant, jerky way of speaking, and I remember the first time I saw him, “This guy can’t be President.” Graham just isn’t a compelling person from a podium. He’s obviously bright, funny, self-deprecating, but he just didn’t have a command presence. It looked to me like his campaign was so poorly-run that he may have talked himself out of even being considered for Vice President. Personally, I thought he was very shrill on the campaign trail, and that gives the Bush administration an in, and it was not a way I’d seen him in 25 years of knowing him.

SDH: It looked to me like he knew stuff, but couldn’t say it–

JD: Yeah–

SDH: Little allusions to things, the redacted portions of the 9/11 report and all that stuff. [Note: Bob Graham and fellow Floridian Porter Goss (R), the co-chairs of the Independent 9/11 Commission, reportedly had breakfast in Washington with the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) on the morning of 9/11/2001. Graham has never spoken about this, and he has never been asked.] I think a lot of people who are now going for Howard Dean would have liked to see Graham run his campaign a little better. The whole Dean phenomenon was built on the quality of his organization; it has very little to do with his ideas, because he changes them. What kind of relationship do you think Florida has to cultivate with the federal government in the future?

JD: Let me go back to Graham for a second. I think you’re right that Dean is very flexible in terms of his positions, but other than his having a full-throated opposition to the war, took that [issue] from Graham early on. Republicans hope it’s Dean because they think his shrillness, bitterness and anger isn’t going to play well across the country. You just don’t elect people like that; I don’t think we ever have. I just can’t see him as ever being President, but I’ve been wrong on a lot of these elections in the last three years. [Laughs.] I haven’t picked many of them right. I always voted Republican, so when Republicans won I’ve been right there, but I was never really sure who was going to come out of those things. There used to be a lawyer in town with a practice, and he was just a brilliant, brilliant lawyer. People said that he would win every one- and two-day trial, but he’d lose every three- and four-day trial because the jury would get sick of him, and I think the country is going to get sick of Howard Dean by November.

In terms of the City Hall, and it’s similarly true here, the action is in Washington, the money is in Washington. Rob a bank, ‘cause that’s where the money is, and the money’s in Washington. Jacksonville never really got a great shake out of Washington. Connie Mack and Bob Graham were not “bring home the bacon” kind of legislators, they were more active on national issues, that was more of their concern. Quite frankly, Bill Nelson is pretty big on that. He’s one of the most responsive Senators I’ve seen to local issues. Corrine Brown and Ander Crenshaw are terrific at that. Of course Ander’s new, and Corrine’s not in the same party as either the majority or the White House, but times have changed, and you’ve got to have an advocate there like West Virginia has with Byrd. Every nickel, he takes a percentage of it and puts it somewhere in West Virginia.

SDH: Is there any truth to the rumors of a quid pro quo concerning Corrine Brown’s seat, that Republicans have not run hard against her in exchange for Democrats doing the same with another seat down south?

JD: Well, Corrine’s had a race every time, except for this past fall. Marc Little, Bill Randall, she’s had Jennifer Carroll twice. They were all good candidates; each one was even better than the last one, with more money. Republicans spent a ton of money in 2000. Corrine’s not going to get beat. It’s just not going to happen. Neither is Ander Crenshaw.

SDH: I get the impression that Porter Goss will be around for a while, too.

JD: Yeah.

SDH: In some ways, Corrine Brown sort of fits into the mold of an old-school Florida politicians, like a Chiles or Claude Pepper, or even Bob Graham. How were your dealings with her during your tenure?

JD: I’ve had this conversation with an awful lot of Republicans because I really like Jennifer [Carroll], she’s a great person, but I just wasn’t going to endorse her against Corrine. Most mayors have that problem with Congressmen of opposing parties: you just can’t go against somebody that you’re working with. When you’re mayor, you’re mayor of everybody. You’re not mayor of a gerrymandered district that’s going to be 90% your party. But if I called Corrine at nine in the morning, if she wasn’t there she’d call back at ten. If I hadn’t called her back, she’d call at 11, she’d call at 12. She’s called from airplanes, she’s called from Russia, she’s called from Africa to return my phone call. Never, ever have I not talked to Corrine the same day that I called her. Every break when Congress is out, she’d come by my office.

One time I went up there, I was up with a Chamber [of Commerce, not music] group, and I had an appointment with her at, say, one o’clock. I went a little early, because my cell phone had gone out and I was trying to call back to the office. I was at the desk outside her office. She walked in at, like, one minute to one, and she had a plate with tin-foil over it, and she said “How come you’re out here?” I said, “My cell phone went dead on me; I was using your phone.” She said, “Just go on into my office. If I’m not here, just feel free to go on in.” She said, “What kind of phone do you have?” I showed her, and she said, “Oh, I’ve got one of those,” and she reached into the desk drawer and she gave me a charger. She said, “I’ve got a bunch of those, you just take that one. By the way, I saw from your schedule that you weren’t going to have time to eat lunch, so I brought this back from the luncheon I was just at.” I mean, she sat down, had a staffer bring in a Coke, she said, “Go ahead and eat while we talk.” We had something like 14 legislative items; [laughs] 12 of them she knew better than me.

One time she called up, and she had $100,000-$200,000 that she would be able to spend on some project, “but I need to know by four this afternoon.” This was about two. I called back at three and said “Corrine, we’re scrambling, I can’t tell you” – they had to be of a certain kind category, roads or something. I said, “There’s one we’ve got that we know we need, but it’s outside of your district,” and she said, “Oh, that’s okay, that’s close enough. If you say it’s good for Jacksonville, I’ll do it.” Every Republican mayor from here to Orlando has either endorsed her or gave her money, because she’s that way. Your analogy of the old style: she remembers, she follows through, she pays attention to the local needs. (She and I, we’d stay up late into the night debating Bill Clinton, because she hung with him and I felt the country lost a year to Lewinsky. Whether or not it should have happened, Bill Clinton brought it about, Bill Clinton delayed it, and the country just shut down for a year. We’re only a couple hundred years old; that’s a lot of time to just give away.)

SDH: Would you say, then, that to be an effective politician, especially on the executive level, you have to place the local interests above that of the party?

JD: Yeah. Obviously, you’ve got to remember who took you to the dance, and very often it’s the party. The party is what elected me. I don’t know if all the previous mayors would necessarily say that, because it was always Democrats elected here, going back to the 1870s. So I owe the party a lot. Every time I speak at a Republican event, I say that I would not be mayor if not for them. Don Brewer had a line: “We’ll always support a good Democrat over a bad Republican.” You have an out there. If you have someone who’s crooked or racist or anti-Semitic or something like that who’s Republican, you don’t back them. Politics is about compromises. I got a letter or two from Republicans about my friendship with Corrine, and I said that our government is set up with a series of checks and balances, which force you to dialogue and compromise with people of an opposing view. That’s what it was set up to do!

I’m a Republican in practice, Republican in fact, raise money for Republicans, but what’s going on in Washington now is just sick. It’s just awful how overtly partisan they’ve gotten. A lot of it is the gerrymandering: when you have a patently Democratic or Republican seat, you don’t go to find the compromise. Doesn’t mean you give up on principle. The principles are there, but sometimes you buff the edges off them a bit.

SDH: Folio columnist Anthony Gancarski wrote a piece recently saying that Mark Brunell had mayoral potential, as far as Jacksonville, but I don’t know if the people here would take a jock as Mayor. They tend to go more for thinkers. . . Thoughts?

JD: That’s interesting. I didn’t see that, on Brunell. He actually lives in Ponte Vedra, so he’d have to get a house in Duval. I think the city could go for a jock if he’s a thinking person, and Mark might be that kind of guy. I like his family values and I thought he was just absolute class, but I think you’re right: the public wants substance. You’ve got to have some merits going in.

The city had a pretty good run of mayors, if you really get down to it. We talked early on about the last ten years, but if Hans Tanzler hadn’t led the charge to consolidate the city and county, we’d be like a lot of other small to medium-small cities. Jake Godbold kind of saved downtown and gave a spirit to the community. He was the first to really grapple with that inferiority complex we had. Tommy Hazouri, he got rid of the smell. If we’d [still] had those odors, we wouldn’t have gotten a football team, wouldn’t have the Super Bowl, we wouldn’t be this cachet city; we’d still smell like a paper mill. And Ed Austin brought the Jaguars with the River City Renaissance Plan, which was the first time the city said “We’re going to make a big, big investment in ourselves.” If we didn’t have that stuff done, we wouldn’t be where we are right now, and that goes to Jake and Ed, who had a major focus on bringing economic development and jobs here.

I know that the editorial side of Folio rails against the use of incentives and tax breaks, but thank God we did it, because in this last recession we’d have had another 20,000 people unemployed in this city. I kept telling people, “You’re going to be really glad we’ve done this and added these jobs here.”

SDH: God forbid anything happens to Jake, but whenever he dies I think we should re-name Alltel Stadium after him. It would be fitting.

JD: Yeah, yeah, but one could argue. Of course, it was sort of Jake’s dream: he saw it as a sort of rallying point for the city. But Ed Austin is the one who had to really make the deal. Jake may have been the architect, but the builder was Ed. There were two people who really made you love Jacksonville. One was [late Times-Union columnist] Bill Foley, and the other was Jake. My dad had an office at the old Gulf-Life tower, on the river-side on the 17th floor. I remember talking to him on the phone once, and he was looking out the window, and he said “That goofy damn Mayor is painting the street again over there.” He had some rally going or something. Behind City Hall he always had the street painted, for the game or whatever it happened to be. There was an infectiousness about him.

SDH: How do we capitalize on the attention we’re going to get from the Super Bowl, when the people and the cameras are here? How should we conduct ourselves?

JD: That’s a great question, and I know it’s one the Peyton administration is grappling with. When the Super Bowl group went to Tampa, they came back and said that Tampa has Ybor City, which is this immense entertainment district, restaurants, bars, jazz clubs and these kinds of things, and we don’t have an Ybor City. Every neighborhood has its own neighborhood bar, restaurant, movie theater, whatever happens to be. It’s all scattered, and the downtown really isn’t an entertainment venue. So they’re trying to reconstruct that, because if those sportswriters get bored, they’re going to kick the heck out of the city, so we’ve got to do something about that. I think the city is going to naturally sell itself. My big worry is always the weather. It could be snowing, or we could be wearing shorts and t-shirts– you just don’t know. Bad weather would be a disaster, but I think people are going to like this city.

SDH: I’d suggest that they really throw out incentives and tax breaks, maybe even a one- or two-year tax amnesty, for people wanting to start clubs, record shops, that sort of thing downtown. Forsyth Street is periodically interesting; Adams street was for a while, but things happened. My main concern is that if we have 2,000 people like Marv Albert spending two weeks in Jacksonville, we’ll have to lock up our sisters.

JD: You’re right, in that something needs to get done in that downtown area. Even though we are the biggest city in the state by population, we’re really the equivalent of a 250,000-sized city because if you incorporate the county, it makes us seem bigger than we really are. As a result, we don’t have a lot of downtown to take a look at. It’s turning– that’s one of the reasons why we really emphasized housing, and that why the Riverside/Springfield revitalization is so important. Because it’s kind of a downtown. I don’t know. I’m glad it’s another mayor’s headache.

SDH: In terms of drawing people, drawing money to the Super Bowl, should Jacksonville residents be hoping for a Jaguars-Giants Super Bowl in 2005?

JD: Oh yeah. That would be great. Years ago, Wayne Weaver talked about how that would be the plan, when Coughlin was still here, to build toward the Super Bowl year. It looks as though we’re going to be a year or so off. It would be fun for the city; it’d light the city on fire if they could pull that off!

SDH: I should let you know that you’re my pick for President in 2016. It’s looking now like you versus Madonna.

JD: [Laughs] 2016? I hadn’t really thought of a year on that. Right now I thoroughly enjoy it here. I’ve set an internal goal to set the record for longest-serving president here; that would be about 11 years from now, 2014, so that gives me two years to run. Sounds good; I’ll be the Howard Dean of that race. The gauge would be if I could get Ann Schindler to vote for me.

SDH: I expect at some point for Bush to reshuffle his cabinet. I expect him to dump Cheney and Rumsfeld, move Powell to the Pentagon, bring in James Baker as Secretary of State and his father as Vice President. If he made that move, he could pull 70% in November. Even I–

JD: [Laughing] You’d blink.

SDH: If you were to speak with the President any time soon, based on your experiences in Florida, what would you tell him about securing the state for the Republicans?

JD: His team is pretty scientific on it. I’m a fairly moderate Republican, and I think that’s where the state is. Jeb doesn’t get the credit that he should for his environmental record, but it’s because the environment doesn’t move Jeb like other issues: education, economic development, general government reform. That’s what he wakes up to every day and wants to do, so he doesn’t really trumpet it. He’s really put the Everglades together, he’s extended the Florida Forever plan, which is the major land acquisition/purchasing plan that we kept here in Duval County. He’s with the environmentalists on the Rodman reservoir– I’m not sure if the environmentalists are right on that one. I not sure it’s going to be good for the environment for them to tear down that dam, that’s what my position is. But the general environmental committee wants Rodman dam torn down, and he virtually single-handedly got his brother to eliminate offshore oil drilling out in the Gulf. But for Jeb, that wouldn’t have happened, and actually Chiles and Clinton had signed off on a compromise that was a worse threat to the environment than what George W. Bush proposed; Jeb got it even better.

Obviously, I’d love to see the President really make the environment more of an issue. He’s doing some great things about national parks. He’s pumping an awful lot of money into the national parks, because they’re really been neglected. It’s about a $5 billion problem; $5 billion is hardly anything in that budget. They could really do some good by putting more money into that project.

There were two cases that came out of the University of Michigan related to admissions of students and affirmative action, and the Bush administration weighed in against the University. I thought they were wrong on that, and I think a more moderate stance on that would be helpful for him. Pure politicians would tell you that the majority of African-Americans aren’t going to vote Republican, no matter what he does. I went from a 0% approval rating among African-Americans to 85% over eight years, so it’s certainly doable. I think his two main problems are the environment and race.

I spent about four or five hours with him on September 10, before everything changed the next morning. I have to say that during that time, he was an incredibly likable, nice guy. I’d love to sit down and have a beer with him or something. In fact, he probably was a lot of fun when he drank. I felt good with the leader we had on September 11 after spending time with him on September 10. I think he’s done a noble thing over there in the Middle East. I think of the thousands of Iraqis who are alive who wouldn’t have been if Saddam Hussein was still in control.

SDH: I don’t think the Democrats have any commitment to winning. I think they would rather maintain their present position, with all the comforts that go with that, than risk losing everything by really going after a wartime President.

JD: That’s what tends to happen, and has happened, frankly, with Republicans. A lot of times it’s easier to be on the back-bench throwing bombs at the people who are making the decisions; you’ve got to get in there to govern, it gets tough. We had a lot of overreaching in the Gingrich years that had to be tempered, and as a result the country and the states are so thinly split right now.

It’s interesting. This war issue is interesting.

I lean conservative, so I understood why so many people were disillusioned with Bill Clinton, bitter at him. Apparently there’s a similar bloc that feels the same way about George W. Bush, and I don’t know why; I don’t get it. It may have been because the Clinton issues were so personal, and with Bush it’s more about his policies, but he hasn’t been all that right-wing.

SDH: A lot of his harshest criticism has come from the right.

JD: Yeah.

SDH: What’s your take on the old Fuller Warren?

JD: The study that we had said that when they designed the new Fuller Warren, the size and depth of the pilings depended on the old Fuller Warren coming out. They call it a “scour study,” the way the sand down there would move. They said that the only way to keep the old one would be to add some more pilings under the new one, and that it was just millions and millions and millions of dollars to go back and do it. It was hard to justify the expense. I actually haven’t gone out and walked it, but they tell me that it’s so far off the water, it’s really not a great place necessarily to fish. But a lot of people go fishing down there; bridges and piers are sort of poor man’s fishing boats. So I don’t know, I’m removed from it. It’s up to the new Administration to take a look at it. I like piers, but I don’t think it’s worth tens of millions of dollars.

SDH: When you ran the first time, one of the Democratic candidates claimed on TV to have a plan for turning waste water into drinkable water. The guy didn’t get the nomination, and I can’t remember who you ended up running against–

JD: I had Jake and Tommy, Harry Reagan, there was a guy from the Shipyards, and Steve Irvine; Steve actually registered Republican on the last day of qualifying. I don’t remember that.

Right now we treat all our water, it’s called “secondary level.” If you go to tertiary, you start to remove a lot of the nutrients out of the water. Basically, the water has two types of pollutants: one is the nutrients, which is basically fertilizer by-product, wastes, stuff that goes down the garbage disposal; the other is what I tend to refer to as heavy metals, it’s not the right label, but chemical pollutants. There are two ways it gets into the water: one, out of a treatment plant; the other [. . .], running off the roads and out of our yards. Each of them pick up one of those two types of pollutants. I think you’d have to go to a fourth level of treatment in the plants to make it drinkable, but we’ve got to do better than we do.

SDH: Do you think the St. Johns River will ever be suitable for swimming, for industrial uses like washing clothes?

JD: I wouldn’t have a problem swimming in it now. I wouldn’t want to do it right near an outfall from an industrial plant or something. Because it’s tidal, it kind of washes back and forth really well. We’ve got to still consider, one of the cleanest beaches in the state, so whatever goes into the river is pouring right out there, out by the Jettys. My goal was to get it as clean as it was before the Europeans came here. You want use of the river, but you don’t want pollution in the river, and I think we’re making progress. It’s clearly, clearly better than it was 30 years ago– there’s just no comparison. We had raw sewage running into it, virtually no environmental controls. You want to get it where you don’t worry about eating the fish you pull out of there, although I eat the fish I pull out of that river. As far as “drinkable,” of course ours is brackish, so it’s salt water anyway, at least the bulk of it, probably the whole thing. It ought to be pretty close.

SDH: One final question: what are your thoughts on the Pete Rose situation?

JD: I grew up in Cincinnati, and when I was learning to play baseball, my dad said “Play like Pete Rose.” As a kid, I probably had dozens and dozens of autographs from him, because you’d see him always signing autographs for the kids– I guess he charges now, but back then he didn’t. I like the guy. My son actually gave me that [points to an autographed photo-plaque]; that was when he broke Ty Cobb’s record against Philadelphia. I think he ought to go in the Hall, and I think they ought to let him manage.