The hot-button issues in St. Johns County are no secret. In fact, they are widely debated among residents and officials alike. But with two County Commission seats to be decided in the Aug. 18 primary election, voters want to know: Who would best address the challenges we face?
Residents recently had an opportunity to hear from County Commission candidates for Districts 2 and 4 during a forum conducted at Christ Episcopal Church in Ponte Vedra Beach. For many, this served as an introduction to the seven people seeking election, though a similar forum had been held June 25, that one sponsored by the St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce.
The Tuesday, July 14, forum was presented by the Ponte Vedra and Palm Valley Community Associations. Over the course of two hours, candidates were asked 10 questions. Their answers revealed their positions on the issues and will help voters make a more informed choice when they go to the polls.
All of the candidates are Republicans, though that point is moot as the Aug. 18 primary will be open to all registered voters. That’s because the candidates who prevail would be unopposed in the general election.
Candidates for District 2 are Heather Brofford, Timothy Burres, Will McMullan and Martin Pyszczymuka. Candidates for District 4 are James Galloway, Krista Keating-Joseph and Sam Williams. Keating-Joseph is the only incumbent.
As most of the candidates were unknown to attendees, they were first asked about their qualifications and reasons for seeking office.
Brofford emphasized her experience as chair for the Six Mile Creek Community Development District, where, among other things, she worked for the installation of a traffic signal at the intersection of Trailmark Drive and Pacetti Road, the site of several accidents. An executive at Citibank, she touted her financial background as an asset during discussion of the county’s fiscal issues.
Burres has resided in St. Johns County for 54 years, is a Desert Storm veteran and was employed for 25 years with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. This is his first time seeking political office.
“I think the county needs a leader,” he said. “It needs a leader who has vision. It needs a leader who has seen where we were and also has a vision of where we need to go in the future. I believe I hold those qualifications.”
McMullan was raised in Ponte Vedra Beach, earned a master’s degree in business management and environmental science and another in international finance. He worked on Wall Street before returning to St. Johns County, where he has since worked in multiple industries.
“I got involved in politics because I saw that we have a commission that’s asleep at the wheel,” he explained.
Pyszczymuka is a former air marshal and retired FBI agent who has investigated fraud and public corruption. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in business administration. He has been critical of the actions of past commission boards, particularly with regard to residential development.
“The radical, reckless overdevelopment is destroying the fabric of this county,” he said.
Galloway is a fifth generation Floridian and attorney who has been a St. Johns County resident since 2019. His practice is located in Ponte Vedra Beach.
“I decided to run because I love St. Johns County,” he said.
Keating-Joseph listed a number of things she has done while on the board. As chair, she moved the public comment portion of the board meetings to the beginning so that people wanting to speak wouldn’t have to wait until the end of hours-long meetings. Among other things, she advanced 14 ideas to protect trees from clear cutting (three were approved), presided over the county’s comprehensive plan and supported a new ramp at I-95 near World Golf Village to improve safety.
Williams, who has lived in his district for 36 years, served more than three decades with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, where he rose in the ranks from deputy to sergeant to commander to chief of patrol and then chief of corrections. In this last position, he was prudent with money and was able to return nearly $1 million each year to the sheriff’s general fund.
“If we didn’t have to spend it, we didn’t,” he said.
A major theme that arose at several points throughout the night was the county’s need to diversify its tax base.
McMullan pointed out that the county’s budget is financed by developer dollars and housing units. He said 87% of the tax revenue comes from residential sources and that all other sources account for the remaining 13%.
“The state average is 35%,” he said. “They say that developers have too much power and control in our county. Well, that’s because we depend upon them for our tax revenue.”
He described what he called a “perpetuating cycle,” where more homes are approved in order to generate tax revenue for infrastructure and schools while the resulting increase in population puts additional strain on the same infrastructure and schools.
“I believe we need to stop developing more houses and develop more business and industry,” he said.
That strategy had near universal support from the candidates, not just to diversify the tax base, but also to provide a desirable level of income.
The candidates were asked what types of jobs they’d like to see come to the county.
“We need to attract the right businesses and have salaries that obviously can sustain (workers) to live here,” said Brofford. She mentioned office jobs, as well as jobs in finance and small technology, and pointed out that those people who commute to surrounding counties to work also spend their money there.
McMullan suggested high-tech industry, precision and advanced manufacturing, health care technology and professional services.
Galloway emphasized a need to create a pipeline for local graduates to find work in St. Johns County.
“We should target professional services, which would be engineers, architects, CPAs, physicians,” he said. “I’d like to see more of an emphasis on promoting clean local agriculture.”
He added that he would also like to see light health care-related industry brought in.
Of course, it’s one thing to want new business and industry. It’s another to find a way to bring it here.
“Attracting local businesses or more businesses is an art, and I believe I can bring that to the table,” Galloway said.
Both Burres and Williams suggested sitting down with experts in the local business sector to solicit ideas.
“St. Johns County Commissioners, they don’t have all the answers,” said Williams. “We’ve got to bring people to the table that can help us with those answers.”
Joseph listed a few initiatives already under way in the county to attract industry, including a defense contractor. She reminded the other candidates of the construction of a new campus for First Coast Technical College that is underway in Hastings.
Pyszczymuka, however, had a different perspective on the issue.
“A lot of people sit up here and say, ‘We’ll just bring these businesses in,’” he said. “Businesses are going to come to this county.”
Business and industry options aside, rapid growth facilitated by rapid development has impacted the quality of life for many residents of St. Johns County.
One such impact has been the blossoming of traffic congestion.
“When I first moved here with my business, established in 2017, there weren’t as many commercial vehicles on the road at all hours of the day,” said Galloway. “It’s a little depressing to see so much traffic on a road that we know used to be under capacity but is now overcapacity.”
He suggested the possibility of adding a business route.
“The traffic problem in St. Johns County has been going on for 15 years,” said Williams, “and it’s been building. Most people can probably remember 10 years ago that the time the traffic was the worst in Ponte Vedra was the week of TPC.”
He said the congestion around The PLAYERS Championship even encouraged some residents to leave town on vacation. But traffic experts, working out of a sheriff’s office command trailer, began monitoring and adjusting signal lights to better meet the demand of the influx of vehicles.
“Well, it used to be one week a year was a bad week for traffic in Ponte Vedra; now, that’s the only good week,” Williams said. “Because they managed that light and traffic flows. Now, we have 51 bad weeks a year, and we have one good week.”
Burres built on that, suggesting a need for better solutions.
“The traffic flow they’ve recently designed as far as 16 and 95 is some of the worst I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It took them three years to come up with that. I guarantee a handful of 16-year-olds on E-bikes could have fixed that a lot sooner.”
The growth impacts more than traffic. It also stresses the availability of housing, in particular, housing that is affordable to the average worker.
The default argument has become: essential workers such as first responders, health care workers and teachers cannot afford to live in St. Johns County, where the median price of a home is about half a million dollars. As stated, it’s absolutely true on two counts: first responders, health care workers and teachers are essential workers, and they cannot afford these homes.
What makes that a straw-man argument is that not every home in St. Johns County is priced at the median figure.
Joseph said she went to Zillow, a real-estate website, and checked to see whether there were any affordable homes available.
She said she found 530 homes in the $95,000 to $300,000 range, and 309 in the $95,000 to $250,000 range. She found 169 rental properties ranging from $475 to $1,500 per month.
Pyszczymuka called the workforce housing problem “a Trojan horse by developers to pull on people’s heartstrings to make it look like people can’t afford to live in this county.”
He pointed out that the percentage of homes in a development deemed “workforce housing” will after a time, according to the deed, revert to housing at the market price. The “workforce housing” status is not permanent.
Joseph elaborated: “The developer can come in and say, ‘I’m going to build workforce housing; 20% of my project is going to be workforce housing.’ That’s going to be more dense, bring more people into a small place, add more traffic, add more kids to the school room.”
Williams differed.
“A single educator here is making, say, $50,000; they can’t afford to buy a house,” he said. “If a deputy’s making $62,000 starting out, he either has to have a … spouse with a really good job, or he’s got to do two or three extra day’s jobs. He’s got to work overtime.”
He said he doesn’t want people in these jobs moving out of the county.
“I want them invested in our community,” he said. “When they live here, they’re more invested. So, we’ve just got to get with it and figure it out.”
“People are leaving,” said Brofford. “They’re not coming back. They’re not going to come back to buy these high expensive homes just because they love the area. They’re not going to come back because they’ve made their lives somewhere else.”
Of course, all of this is academic to the multitude of St. Johns County residents who are not considered essential workers, particularly those who cannot command the aforementioned salaries. There are hardworking people in the county who reside in decaying mobile homes, manufactured homes and, yes, even campers. Their wages won’t give them the mobility to leave but won’t provide enough to buy a home here.
Some will say, however, that these are not essential workers, so their plight is not the responsibility of a body elected to oversee the common weal.
But many of these workers staff small businesses and are essential to employers for whom their businesses are essential. Others wait on us in restaurants, pick up our trash, care for our lawns, fix flat tires and a lot of other tasks that we want or need.
And then, there are some retirees who scratch out an existence on little more than a Social Security check after a lifetime of hard work.
McMullan voiced concern for this latter group.
“Their taxes have gone up, their insurance has gone up, they can’t afford to keep their house anymore,” he said. “What are they going to do? They don’t want to move to some other county. They want to stay where their families, their friends and their community are. We have to have housing options for everybody.”
One issue the next Board of County Commissioners will have to face is the possible reduction in tax revenue if voters approve Amendment 3.
If passed, the homestead tax exemption for non-school taxes would increase to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028. After that, it would be indexed to inflation. The amendment would also reduce the cap on the assessed value of non-homesteaded properties and place limitations on how counties and municipalities can spend property tax revenue.
Asked if any of the candidates intended to vote for the amendment themselves, only Pyszczymuka raised his hand. Joseph and Brofford each said they were “not there yet.”
While the measure would provide relief to the aforementioned seniors and people in similar financial straits, it would also result in tough choices for local governments. If expenses cannot be cut, funds will have to be found elsewhere.
“To make up the difference, we have to diversify the tax base,” said Galloway.
“If this occurs, I know we don’t want to see any cuts to our essential services, our law enforcement, our fire rescue, our public works, but that’s the possible reality that we’re facing,” said Burres. “What’s the real good answer? I think we need to audit the county. We need to know where our money’s going for those who receive a budget. We need to make sure they’re spending the money in the way they were intended to spend it.”
McMullan said he believes the measure will pass.
“A lot of people are hurting,” he said. “They can’t afford to pay their bills. And it’s on both ends of the spectrum. It’s the young people. It’s the older people. And it’s a lot of the people in the middle. You think they’re doing great? Sometimes, appearances can be deceiving.”
He added that he is a proponent of eliminating all taxes on homesteaded properties.
“I think if you own your home, you shouldn’t be able to get kicked out because you can’t afford your property tax, because then you don’t necessarily own your home,” he said.
He put the blame for this quandary in part on past decision making — the county didn’t diversify its revenue sources adequately. He proposed cutting waste.
“We need to, at a very minimum, cut every single thing that we possibly can without sacrificing the quality of life that we have,” he said. “At least an annual, if not a biannual, review of all cents and dollars in our budget. And we need to start immediately on diversifying our tax base.”
Brofford emphasized her credentials in addressing the issue.
“I want to make sure that we’re actually able to decrease taxes with my finance background,” she said. “Just let me at those books … I’ll find it. I’ve done it before. I saved my community over $100,000 in developer funds.”
Pyszczymuka estimated that the impact on county funds would be lower than many fear.
“I just did a little math,” he said. “Does anyone know the percent that we would actually lose from our current budget with the homestead tax exemption going up? Any guesses? Three percent. Our budget is $1.9 billion. It was $920 million in 2020. That is unsustainable growth. So, if it passes, that’s fine.”
He also suggested an audit of the county’s finances “starting with the bloated, bureaucratic salaries … going all the way down to how every contract is awarded.”
Asked whether they would recuse themselves from any decision that might create a conflict of interest, the candidates were united, especially with regards to funding from real estate developers, who emerged as a kind of pariah in other portions of the program.
“I can’t imagine anybody up here who’s going to take any donation from a developer,” said Williams, stating unequivocably that he is incorruptible.
“There is no special interest that could sway a vote of mine,” said Brofford. “I hope that the other board members would also do the same.”
“I’m not taking any donations from any developer or builder or anything like that,” said Burres. “If they do donate, it will be returned to them.”
“I’m not for special interests,” said McMullan. “I’m not for big corporations. I’m not for anybody other than people and the residents of St. Johns County. And nothing … can ever change that.”
“As soon as I started to run, I said, ‘I will not take a dime of developer money,’” said Pyszczymuka. “Because they have been heavily subsidized on the backs of you, the taxpayers, for far too long.”
“I’m very careful in who I allow to donate to my campaign,” said Galloway. “And I’ll make sure that there are no conflicts from me.”
Joseph gave examples of her careful attention to even giving the appearance of a conflict of interest. She didn’t have as much confidence in her peers, however.
“I’m sitting here on this, and I see how all these people say they would never do it, and ‘you can trust me,’ and all that,” she said. “I’ve heard this for four years. I’ve seen commissioners break sunshine over and over and over again. I’ve taken pictures. I’ve turned them in. Nothing happened.”
Another issue that drew a near united response was A.I. data centers.
McMullan enumerated some of the most common complaints people have about data centers: their massive use of water and electricity and the sonic effects people living near them have reported.
“I am 100% opposed to a data center,” he said.
“I’ve already said that I’m against data centers. Period,” said Pyszczymuka.
Galloway said that he doesn’t support bringing data centers to St. Johns County. He added that he would not support any industry that negatively impacts the quality of life here.
“I love this place more than anything, and I don’t want it to be destroyed by data centers,” said Joseph.
Brofford, too, ruled out data centers.
“It’s way too dangerous for our water supply, for our environment and for the lovely beaches and the agriculture that we have here,” she said, adding that the county should remain in contact with surrounding counties on the issue. If one of them approved a data center, there is a chance it would impact St. Johns County.
Though he left the door open to a decision based upon residents’ opinions, Williams left little doubt about what he thought of data centers.
“I don’t see where it’s a benefit for our community,” he said. “Like everybody else has said, it draws from the aquifer, it draws from our electric grid and can do damage to our environment. So, why would we want that?”
Burres was, perhaps, the most measured in his response.
“If it’s something (the taxpayers) wanted and it didn’t put a strain on our infrastructure and didn’t hurt our environment, then we would look at it, and if they didn’t want it we’d go from there,” he said.
