2016 Politician of the Year Lenny Curry says, ‘If you want to do big things, you’ve got to play big ball.’ BY AG GANCARSKI 128 | INFLUENCE WINTER 2016 PHOTO: Mark Dennis Ho WHEN JACKSONVILLE MAYOR LENNY CURRY, former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, was exploring running for office two years ago, many in the Jacksonville political establishment told him he couldn’t win. There were others ahead of the 46-year-old Key West native in line, they said, who deserved their time. Undaunted, Curry ran anyway. And he won, one of many mayors of the consolidated city of Jacksonville who seemed unlikely choices — until their election. Because of consolidation in the late 1960s, Jacksonville is the last of the major Florida cities that traditionally has had a GOP mayor. Having incorporated the entirety of Duval under a combined city/county structure, Jacksonville contains areas that would have been Republican suburbs if consolidation had never happened. Curry, an accountant by trade, was represented by his campaign as being “not a politician.” That was then. This is now. And now, he is our Politician of the Year. In a conversation with INFLUENCE Magazine, Curry noted the “not a politician” phrase was subject to some misinterpretation. “The term ‘politician’,” Curry said, “used in the campaign by others who were close to me … was used in the sense of the bureaucratic — all flash, no substance; all ribbon cutting, no accountability.” “I still reject,” Curry added, “that I’m a politician in that sense of the term. “Politics in the sense of negotiating and navigating. … You have to be able to do it — that includes business and any endeavor. I knew that coming into office,” Curry said. Coming into office when and how Curry did, there was a pronounced need for “negotiating and navigating.” One such issue requiring that was Jacksonville’s public pension funding shortfall, which was crippling the city’s general fund with spiraling obligations and no relief in sight. Mayors had come and gone without solving the problem. However, the Curry administration found one, via an unprecedented referendum to extend a ½-cent infrastructure surtax past its sunset in 2030 to offer a stable funding source for the obligation. Curry noted he’d “heard the initial idea” during the period between his election and inauguration. “It intrigued me,” the mayor said. “There was great and significant political risk pursuing this in the first term, specifically within the first year, but if you want to do big things, you’ve got to play big ball. “Before I moved into a discussion with the City Council and the Legislature, I did my homework. Even though that initial homework said it was unlikely. I rejected the idea that just because it was unlikely it’s not possible. >>
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