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Dear Neighbor,

In the August edition of Arlington Monthly, I made you aware of what I knew about the proposal by Jacksonville Kennel Club (JKC) to convert the Garden Ridge at 201 Monument Road into a Poker Room. I also shared that the matter did not require approval by the City Council, though there has been a new development.

On August 22, Mr. Paul Harden, an attorney/agent for JKC, notified me that he was filing a re-zoning request with the City to change the zoning on a portion of the property in order to make it more compatible with JKC’s preferred gambling operation. Surprised by this, I conveyed to Mr. Harden that I met with Mr. Howard Korman (President of JKC) on August 1 and was told no significant City-level approvals were needed. Mr. Harden then acknowledged Mr. Korman thought that was the case.

The proposed Poker Room site has two zoning districts assigned to it. The eastern half, on which the building is located, is zoned CCG-1. The western half, mostly parking lot and frontage along Monument Road, is zoned CCG-2. The acronyms stand for Commercial Community, General 1 and 2, respectively, and are the broadest commercial districts in the city. Among other uses, the CCG-1 district allows for indoor facilities operated by a licensed pari-mutuel permit holder; however, without special approval of a CCG-1 “exception,” a pari-mutuel may not sell or serve every type of alcoholic beverage, which JKC would like to do. Under CCG-2, no exception is required for the sale and service of all alcoholic beverages as long as they are sold and served in conjunction with food ordered from a menu. In short, JKC is seeking to make the entire property CCG-2 so that it may operate with little restriction.

Although it is still unknown whether the facility might operate 14-18 hours per day during the week and 24 hours per day on the weekend, it is well-known that there is a grade school, public library, and residential apartments all within 1,000 feet of the building, and a nursing home (The Atrium) down the next block, not to mention other businesses and Regency Mall in close proximity.
All re-zonings require City Council approval. The Poker Room re-zoning legislation (Ordinance 2011-585) is scheduled to be added to the Council’s agenda on September 13.

It will then have a public hearing (no vote) at the October 11 Council meeting, be heard by and receive a recommendation from the City’s Planning Commission on October 13, and have a public hearing in front of the Council’s Land Use & Zoning Committee on October 18 (with recommendation vote to full Council). It is then set to be before the full Council for a final vote on October 25, if there are no delays.

I will be hosting a Town Hall meeting on Tuesday, October 4, at 6:30pm at Terry Parker High School to hear input from the community regarding the Poker Room and re-zoning request. Please plan to attend and bring a neighbor. Also, below is a list of all other Council Members and their contact information.

When 2011-585 comes to the full Council, every Member is expected to cast a vote. Email or call them in advance of the public hearings and meetings to let them know what is best for the Regency area and Arlington.

On a concluding note, the Council is preparing to vote on the City’s annual budget at the end of September.

A public meeting will be held on Monday, September 19, at 6:30pm at Regency Library regarding the budget and general District 1 issues (not including Poker Room).
I look forward to seeing you.

Clay Yarborough
City Councilman, District 1

Four days before he’ll be sworn in as our city’s seventh mayor since consolidation, the citizens of Jacksonville still know relatively little about the man who will preside as chief executive of the River City for the next four years.

Brown Oversaw Controversial Katrina Fund

Partly because of a somnolent media and, to some degree, owing to his own low-key style in which he rarely speaks about himself, Mayor-elect Brown is still something of an unknown quantity — a man shrouded in mystery.

Unlike Jacksonville’s previous mayors, men who were fairly well-known on the local level by the time they ran for the city’s highest office, Brown hasn’t been subjected to the sort of scrutiny other big city mayors regularly endure.

Many questions remain.

One such question involves his role with the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

Though he rarely, if ever, spoke about it during the recent mayoral campaign, Brown claims to have served as executive director of the Fund’s Interfaith Advisory Committee, a program that granted charitable funds to congregations of all faiths across the Gulf region in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The grants, doled out in amounts up to $35,000, were intended to help religious institutions rebuild their houses of worship. According to the fund’s eligibility criteria, all of the repairs and rebuilding had to be performed in the three affected states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

A number of churches outside those three states eventually received funding.

The grant money was initially limited to capital repair and reconstruction of damaged churches, but allowed each congregation to use as much as $4,000 to cover rental costs for the temporary relocation of houses of worship damaged or destroyed in the hurricane. Clergy members were also entitled to use $5,000 of the total grant to oversee any repairs and construction.

Unexplained Checks and Mass Resignations

A heavily damaged New Orleans church in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (2005)

Almost immediately the Interfaith Fund was embroiled in a controversy when seven of its nine board members — including the Rev. William H. Gray III, former president of the United Negro College Fund, and Bishop T. D. Jakes, the prominent pastor of Potter’s House in Dallas, a nondenominational mega-church — resigned from the Interfaith Fund’s advisory committee.

Gray and Jakes had served as the committee’s co-chairs.

Mary Ann Wyrsch, president of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, also quit following the multiple resignations of the faith leaders.

Wyrsch, a former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees and ex-acting commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, declined a request for an interview with the Jacksonville Observer.

While the religious leaders already had numerous concerns about the way the Interfaith Fund had been operating, the final straw, they said, occurred when the fund disbursed checks of $35,000 each to 38 houses of worship — more than $1.2 million in all — without first investigating whether or not the churches even existed.

That embarrassing controversy took place in July 2006, shortly after the fund — created by former Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — had already raised more than $125 million, of which approximately $20 million had been earmarked for rebuilding faith-based institutions along the Gulf Coast.

Rev. William H. Gray III, former president of the United Negro College Fund

Departing members of the Bush-Katrina ministerial advisory committee said that the fund’s Washington staff disregarded their advice, cutting checks for Gulf Coast churches without properly investigating the institutions.

“I've been in ministry for 30 years and I don't think I've ever resigned from anything. I'm a loyalist to a fault. But what's happened is unacceptable,” said Jakes.

Gray echoed the same thing. It was agreed beforehand, he told reporters at the time, that each of the churches or religious institutions receiving the charity’s money would first be inspected.

“I’ve learned in life that if people say they want your advice and then they change it, ignore it, or undermine it, then they really don’t want it,” said a disappointed Gray.

A few years later, the Interfaith Fund unwittingly found itself in the news again when a minister with the Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, which had been devastated by flood water during Hurricane Katrina, was sentenced to 17 months in prison for defrauding the church of the $35,000 Bush-Clinton grant for his personal benefit by having the check mailed to his home address and depositing it into an account that he created. He also devised a similar scheme to defraud the church of some of its $252,000 grant from the Small Business Administration.

According to court documents, he spent nearly $10,000 of the relief funds on a new Dodge Durango for himself.

By March 2007, the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund had distributed $25 million to more than 1,100 local faith-based groups throughout the region.

The Brown Connection

It remains unclear precisely what Alvin Brown’s role in the 2006 controversy that led to the mass exodus might have been, if any.

We may never know.

There’s little question, however, that he was involved with the fund during that period.

The Jacksonville Observer was able to ascertain that the Mayor-elect was one of the two contact persons for the Interfaith Fund’s application process, which makes sense since — as he claims — he was the fund’s executive director. In fact, his name and phone number were listed on the charity’s original press release announcing the grants.

“As part of its work to help rebuild the Gulf after Hurricane Katrina, the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund focused a portion of its funding on faith based institutions,” William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, told the Observer on Friday.

“Mr. Brown was involved in that work for a period of time in conjunction with the activities of the Interfaith Advisory Committee. When that committee’s service ended, Mr. Brown's did as well,” said Pierce, who did pro-bono public affairs and media work for the Fund.

Curiously, nobody in the media bothered to ask the new mayor about his experience with the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund during the campaign, and he rarely, if ever, brought it up himself — a fact that should have raised some red flags.

A Unique Lack of Experience

Jacksonville's new mayor-elect Alvin Brown

The soft-spoken Hans Tanzler, a reformer initially elected prior to consolidation in 1968 and who eventually served as mayor for 11 ½ years, had been a criminal court judge before running for mayor.

Jake Godbold, Tanzler’s successor, served on the Jacksonville city council for a dozen years, including seven years as council president, before becoming mayor in 1979, while 42-year-old Tommy Hazouri, who served as mayor from 1987-1991, had spent a dozen years in the Florida legislature where he chaired the House Committee on Education. Prior to that, Hazouri — the son of Syrian-Lebanese parents — had worked briefly as a research assistant for pre-consolidation Mayor Louis Ritter and later served on the Jacksonville Community Relations Commission.

Ed Austin, likewise, was a known quantity when he was elected mayor in 1991. Having practiced law in the 1960s, including serving as assistant county solicitor and as a public defender, Austin was elected state attorney in 1969 — serving four terms as the region’s lead prosecutor in the criminal justice system representing Clay, Duval and Nassau counties. During that period, he also served as general counsel for Mayor Tanzler for three years shortly after consolidation.

Austin’s successor, John Delaney, had also established deep local roots before winning the mayoralty in 1995. Regarded by many as one of the most popular mayors in Jacksonville history, Delaney had served as a chief assistant state’s attorney under Ed Austin and later as the mayor’s general counsel and chief of staff.

Even Mayor Peyton, the youthful scion of Gate Petroleum whose mayoral opponents in 2003 decried his lack of government experience, had served on the board of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority for nearly seven years, including a two-year stint as JTA chairman from 1999-2001. Unlike Brown, Peyton, who served as vice president of Gate Petroleum — one of the region’s largest employers — also brought considerable experience in the private sector to the mayor’s office.

Those who preceded Brown as mayor had firmly established themselves in local government or industry. Their experience and qualifications weren’t some sort of closely-guarded secret.

One would think a candidate for public office would be immensely proud of being involved in a humanitarian relief effort such as the one established by the former presidents, particularly after a disaster of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina.

Most candidates would wear it as a badge of honor and probably talk about it endlessly.

Not Alvin Brown.

Maybe he’s just modest.

It’s a common refrain, repeated often by Jacksonville’s newly-elected mayor.

Brown went on to explain that his faith is “a testament to how I’ve lived my life, that I’ve always prayed about it, and everything that I set out to achieve has mostly come to pass.”

Praise the Lord.

That, and a little help from his politically-connected friends in high places — an impressive list of benefactors that includes, among others, former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, and flamboyant lawyer Willie Gary, a multimillionaire philanthropist who took Brown under his wings.

There’s also U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown and wealthy businessman Peter Rummell, a prominent Republican fundraiser and chairman of the Jacksonville Civic Council whose decisive support proved to be a turning point in the May 17 mayoral election.

Curiously, they’ve all been mere mortals.

The former Winn-Dixie meat-cutter, to be sure, has had no shortage of guardian angels in his seemingly rags-to-riches climb. On closer scrutiny, Brown also seems to have been blessed when it comes to even the most basic things in his life, including something as simple as selling a house.

That appears to have been the case in the spring of 2005 when Brown and his wife, Santhea Hicks, sold a property on W. 16th Street in Jacksonville for $89,000 — more than twice what they had paid for it in September 2001, only 43 months earlier.

Brown had purchased the three-bedroom property for $43,000 on September 25, 2001. It was financed with a $63,500 mortgage through the Oklahoma National Bank in Tulsa, a de novo bank founded a year earlier. It was a curious loan for a start-up community bank with seemingly no ties to Jacksonville, a city more than a thousand miles away.

God acts in mysterious ways.

While housing prices in northeast Florida jumped significantly in the period 2001 to 2005 — shortly before the nationwide housing bubble, fueled by relaxed lending standards and relatively low mortgage interest rates, began to burst so spectacularly in early 2006 — in most cases, they didn’t double in value.

According to the House Price Index, a weighted repeat sales index covering 380 metropolitan areas and published annually by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the median price for single homes in Jacksonville — and that percentage fluctuates considerably depending on the particular neighborhood involved — appreciated by 38.8 percent during the relatively brief period in which Brown and his wife owned the property on W. 16th Street.

The fact that Brown was able to turn a handsome profit on his property really isn’t the issue. Buyers and sellers set the price in a free market.

On the other hand, the buyer of that property could turn out to be somewhat embarrassing for the mayor whose background was never seriously scrutinized during the recent mayoral campaign.

It turns out that Brown’s property at 1518 W. 16th Street was purchased by the Community Rehabilitation Center, a federally-funded entity with more than its fair share of critics.

Brown’s property was one of five or six single family dwellings purchased by the rehab center, which offers programs for mental health, drug abuse, HIV/AIDS prevention and job training.

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The Mayor-Elect Sold His Home to the Federally-Funded Community Rehab Center for a Significant Profit in 2005

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According to its website, Brown — who takes office on July 1 — currently serves as an adviser to the non-profit organization, a post he shares with U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown and several other local luminaries.

The controversial community rehab center has been in the news frequently in recent years, largely because of its ties to Rep. Brown, whose daughter, Shantrel, works as a lobbyist for the non-profit agency. The center had paid Alcalde and Fay, the Arlington, Virginia-based law firm that employs the congresswoman’s daughter, at least $185,000 since 2005.

Rep. Brown herself has requested more than $3 million in earmarks for the center since 2008.

In 2008, Brown secured $147,000 for Pearl Plaza that was earmarked for the Community Rehabilitation Center, whose top officials, coincidentally, owned three profit-making businesses that lease space at a reduced rate in the plaza.

The center is totally dependent on taxpayer subsidies. Last year, for example, more than $2.3 million in government grants and another $2.4 million in Medicaid payments accounted for the vast majority of the center’s revenues.

It’s unclear precisely what Alvin Brown’s relationship with the Jacksonville Community Rehabilitation Center might have been in 2005 when, according to records in the Duval County Property Appraiser’s office, the non-profit purchased his home, but by the time he sold his property that spring he had completely mended fences with Congresswoman Corrine Brown, a onetime adversary whom he had challenged unsuccessfully in the 1994 Democratic primary.

It’s hard to determine what caused the new mayor’s good fortune that spring, but divine intervention certainly wasn’t the reason.

By 2005, the mayor-elect had contributed at least $2,750 to three of Brown’s reelection campaigns, twice giving the maximum individual amount allowed. According to the Federal Election Commission, he has donated another $4,000 to Brown’s congressional campaigns since then.

Then again, it could turn out to be just a weird coincidence, one of those inexplicable things where of the more than 21,600 homes sold in Jacksonville that year, the rehab center just happened to have its eyes on the property owned by Alvin Brown.

And pigs fly.

Jacksonville’s new mayor can continue to speak endlessly — and piously — about prayer and the “vision” that God supposedly provided him, but his political success is largely attributable to his willingness to exploit his political connections, both personally and professionally, to a degree that would probably embarrass even the most shameless practitioners of “politics as usual.”

Former President Clinton and attorney Willie Gary at the 2003 Gary Football Classic

Early in the campaign, several local reporters commented on the elusive nature of his work history, lamenting that it was difficult to accurately assess Mayor-elect Alvin Brown’s performance in  a seemingly endless series of over-lapping jobs held since leaving the Clinton Administration more than a decade earlier.   It seems that Brown’s role as president and executive director of the once-promising Willie E. Gary Football Classic, a scholarship program featuring an annual match-up of historically black colleges, might provide the most important clue as to his leadership abilities.

Founded by flamboyant trial attorney Willie Gary in 2002, the annual football game started out as something of a smashing success.  In its early years, the classic was played at Alltel Stadium and drew relatively decent crowds — averaging about 15,000 per game between 2002 and 2004.  Not bad for an annual match-up between two smaller schools.

The early contests featured Jacksonville’s Edward Waters College — a school that revived its football program a year earlier after discontinuing it in 1967 — and Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the co-founding schools in the NCAA Division II’s Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA), the oldest African-American athletic association in the nation.  Shaw, which dropped its football program in 1979 after fielding a team since 1912, re-instituted its program in 2002.

Gary, who had generously provided hundreds of thousands of dollars for both schools to return to the gridiron, was excited about his annual football game.  “ We are going to make this the preeminent Classic in the country,” he said.  “We're going to build this into [one of] the most anticipated Classics of the college football season.”

And at first it looked like he might.

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Brown and his wife collected more than $500,000 from the Willie Gary Football Classic between 2005-2009, even as the game suffered huge declines in attendance.

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The first game of the Willie Gray Football Classic, played on Oct. 12, 2002, drew 15,040 at Alltel Stadium.

The 2003 game even featured a special half-time appearance by former President Bill Clinton, an old friend of Gary’s who told the announced crowd of 17,410 that he loved Willie and deeply admired his work in promoting historically black colleges.  The game also drew several other celebrities, including former baseball great Cecil Fielder.

The football classic foundation prospered in its early years, generating income of $1,159,973 in 2003 and more than $716,000 in 2004, a year it attracted 11,402 fans to the annual Edward Waters-Shaw University game.

There was also some significant taxpayer money involved; in 2003 the city of Jacksonville, for example, paid $100,000 for Alltel Stadium to be used as the site of the game and put up an additional $25,000 for advertising.  The Jacksonville Economic Development Commission (JEDC) also budgeted a substantial amount in event contributions for the football classic during that period.

Despite its auspicious beginning, the Willie Gary Classic unwittingly found itself in the center of a little-publicized liquor heist in September 2003, when two South Florida men — one of them cleverly posing as Alvin Brown’s son — convinced three local companies that they represented businesses that were holding a party for the Willie Gary Football Classic.

Click to view attendance chart 2003-2007

The two men, who were later arrested, arranged for $65,000 worth of alcohol to be delivered to tents set up at the Bit and Spur Saddle Club on the Northside, and then handed the unsuspecting distributors bogus checks.  The men then loaded the liquor into an unmarked van and took off.

Brown told First Coast News at the time that he was saddened that anyone would rip off a non-profit charity.

Then there was the embarrassing episode during the 2005 Super Bowl when organizers of the Willie Gary Football Classic Foundation party had to apologize and offer refunds to people who had expected recording artist and actress Janet Jackson to attend the event.  Hoping to capitalize on Super Bowl fever sweeping Jacksonville at the time, event organizers had announced Jackson's appearance to party-goers before she confirmed that she would come.

The Classic's Steep Decline

In 2005, the Willie E. Gary Football Classic added a second game — the Willie E. Gary Triangle Classic — to its annual menu of events, a September 18 match-up between Shaw University and North Carolina Central University played at Wallace-Wade Stadium on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

That year, the foundation took in $367,738, including $116,581 in gifts, grants and contributions.  That was a significant drop from the previous year, when it reported gross receipts of more than $716,000.

Alvin Brown’s annual salary of $150,000 and personal expenses of $16,795 accounted for the foundation’s single largest expenditure in 2005.  How much, if any, of the $197,956 in public relations, advertising, consulting and other miscellaneous fees might also have been paid to the Brown Empowerment, LLC — Brown’s own consulting firm, originally registered with the state of Florida in August of 2005 as The Brown Group, LLC — is unclear from the organization’s IRS filings.

The September 10 game in Jacksonville, again featuring Edward Waters and Shaw, attracted approximately 8,600 fans while the game in North Carolina drew some 10,000 spectators, according to event organizers.

The same thing was essentially true in 2006, when the Willie Gary Football Classic really began its downward spiral.  Brown, who claimed to work 60 hours per week, year-round, promoting the football classic, again drew an annual salary of $150,000 (and a deferred compensation package totaling $11,505).  According to its IRS Form 990, the foundation made two charitable contributions that year — $4,955 to Edward Waters College and a $1,000 donation to Northwest Behavioral Sciences on Edgewood Ave.

The September 16 contest between Edward Waters and Shaw in Jacksonville drew only 5,000 fans, while attendance at the North Carolina Central-Shaw game at Durham’s O’Kelly-Riddick Stadium two weeks earlier — a 21-12 win for NCCU, the reigning CIAA champions — was never publicly announced.

The Mayor-elect's Wife Takes Over

The once-promising football classic continued on its trajectory in 2007.  Brown, as president and director of the Willie E. Gray Football Classic, again received a six-figure compensation package — $92,308 in salary and $9,292 in deferred compensation — while his wife, Santhea Hicks, apparently assumed the role of executive director toward the end of that year and received $13,431 in compensation.

The non-profit reported total expenses of $195,868 for the year while raising only $145,994 in direct public support.

While some might suggest that appointing his wife as executive director might have been a conflict of interest, Hicks appeared to have been uniquely qualified for the position, having once served on the board of directors of the D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission, filling a vacancy created by the resignation of former disgraced D.C. Mayor Marion Barry.

According to the foundation’s financial statements, Brown and his wife spent more than $45,000 on advertising and public relations promoting the 2007 annual classic that — by their own admission — drew a pathetic 600 fans.  The identity of the advertising agencies or PR firms allegedly involved in providing those promotional services remain unknown, but whoever they were, it’s safe to say they were vastly overpaid.

It was one of the lowest turnouts for a college football game in the country that season, far below the attendance at a typical NAIA or NCAA Div. III game.  According to the NCAA, attendance for the average Division II college football game in 2007 was 3,894 per game.

By 2008, the Willie E. Gary Football Classic, a 501(c)(3) exempt private foundation, had become a shell of its former self, with the foundation raising less than $96,000 — almost half of which was paid to Hicks, its executive director.  Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Jacksonville was its biggest donor, giving an aggregate of $86,439 that year, much of which was spent on unidentified “public relations” activities.  Again, the foundation racked up more than $28,000 in public relations expenses and somehow also managed to accumulate telephone charges in excess of $5,600.

The foundation reportedly raised only $2,000 in sponsorships for the annual game that September, a 55-13 blowout won by the Shaw Bears at Raines High School before another sparse crowd.

In 2009, the foundation, according to its official filings, didn’t even bother to sponsor a game and instead simply held its annual Martin Luther King luncheon — a tradition started in 2004 — featuring an essay contest for elementary, middle-school and high school students at the Prime Osborne Center.  The luncheon, of course, cost the dwindling foundation only a small fraction of its annual budget.

The organization’s 2010 filing is not yet publicly available.

VIEW THE IRS DOCUMENTS:  2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

Jacksonville's mayor-elect Alvin Brown

“What’s past is prologue,” wrote William Shakespeare.

As Mayor-elect Alvin Brown assembles his transition team, we thought it would be instructive to learn more about the man who will lead the city of Jacksonville over the course of the next four years.

Everybody knows part of Brown’s personal story, encapsulated in his catchy campaign slogan — “From Winn-Dixie to the White House” — but even his most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to tell you much else about the person entrusted with guiding the River City in what will almost certainly be some rocky periods ahead, particularly given Jacksonville’s continuing recession-ravaged economy and the city’s looming fiscal crisis.

Two weeks after his stunning victory on May 17, the 47-year-old Brown remains something of a mystery to most citizens of Jacksonville.

Part of that is due to his low-key nature, his natural aversion to appearing too boastful about his own accomplishments — he rarely mentioned his role as executive director of the Bush/Clinton Katrina Fund’s Interfaith Fund during the campaign, for example — and part is undoubtedly due to an unwillingness to subject himself to any media scrutiny.

That appeared to be the case early in the mayoral campaign when he failed to return a phone call requesting an interview from the Jacksonville Observer — his wife clearly kept the candidate at an arm’s distance — or when he displayed a similar reluctance to return phone calls from the Times-Union and other media outlets.

If Jacksonville’s newly-elected mayor has developed a reputation for secrecy — as some of his critics charge — much of it is a result of his own actions and unwillingness to be more forthcoming.

Perhaps he became too accustomed to working in a huge federal bureaucracy, far from the media glare, to ever really warm up to reporters.

Meet Your New Mayor

While the voters of Duval County didn’t have an opportunity to learn a whole lot about Brown’s past during the recent campaign, his personal campaign contributions can tell us a lot about his political instincts, for better or worse.

The former senior member of the Clinton Administration, it turns out, has been extremely generous in giving to candidates for federal office, donating nearly $50,000 to candidates — almost all of them Democrats, including quite a few members of the Black Caucus — during the past sixteen years, dating back to his ill-fated primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown in 1994. That’s pretty impressive.

A couple of those contributions speak volumes, however, about Brown’s judgment — or lack thereof — and his ability to read people.

Maybe he’s just a trusting soul.

"Dollar Bill" Jefferson

In 1995, for example, Brown contributed to the now-disgraced William J. Jefferson, the Louisiana congressman who was later convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison on bribery and money laundering charges while serving in Congress.

Congressman William Jefferson's freezer held more than pie crusts.

It’s unclear what Brown’s relationship with Jefferson — who stuffed $90,000 in marked money in the freezer of his Virginia home and later refused to cooperate with federal investigators — was at the time.

Brown, with no seeming connections to politics in “The Big Easy,” nevertheless contributed $500 to Jefferson’s re-election campaign during the 1995-96 election cycle, despite the fact that “Dollar Bill” — a nickname derisively hung on him by late New Orleans Mayor Dutch Morial — faced no opposition.

Meek and McKinney

Jacksonville’s next mayor also contributed a similar amount that year to Cynthia McKinney, the combative and controversial six-term Atlanta congresswoman who made headlines in September 2008 when — as the Green Party’s candidate for President — she accused the Department of Defense of systematically disposing of 5,000 bodies, each with a single bullet wound to the head, in the Louisiana swamps in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Brown’s one-time ally — somebody he was at least willing to part with money for — told the press that most of the victims were prisoners.

In addition to giving generously to Corrine Brown — the same woman who once called him a “carpetbagger” — Jacksonville’s newly-minted mayor also opened his wallet for U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek (D-Fl.) in 1996. He gave her $500, too.

An Escalade, provided to Carrie Meek by Dennis Stackhouse, is parked at his Opa-Locka building, where her foundation had a rent-free office. (Chuck Fadely/Miami Herald)

Meek, the first African-American elected to Congress from Florida since Reconstruction, was another gem.

As recently as last year, the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) cited the former congresswoman for accepting $90,000 in “consulting fees” and the free use of a Cadillac Escalade from a developer for whom her son — who, incidentally, conveniently inherited her congressional seat eight years earlier — had earmarked some $1,072,750 in taxpayer funds for a development project. The developer also reportedly gave the former congresswoman the free use of a 2,600-square foot office for her foundation.

CREW’s executive director Melanie Sloan, a no-nonsense former assistant U.S. Attorney, also brought up the questionable circumstances surrounding Meek’s role in her son’s initial election to Congress in 2002, when the 76-year-old congresswoman waited until shortly before the filing deadline to announce her retirement, putting other Democrats in the district at a distinct disadvantage while “essentially bequeathing” the seat to her son.

She was apparently Alvin Brown’s kind of candidate, too.

The Future First Lady and "Cash and Carry Larry"

Santhea Hicks, the future mayor’s wife, has also made a number of contributions, including a $1,000 donation to New York City Councilman Larry Seabrook, a longtime Bronx politician, who was indicted last year on a laundry list of corruption charges, including 13-counts of money laundering, fraud and extortion.

Hicks, who was then working at the U.S. Department of Transportation, made the contribution eleven years ago when Seabrook — long known as “Cash and Carry Larry” — was waging a particularly nasty campaign for Congress against U.S. Representative Eliot L. Engel.

Like her husband, Hicks — who listed her occupation as the executive director of the Willie Gary Football Classic — also made the maximum individual contributions of $2,300 to the presidential campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008.

A Tight Bond

These are just some of the candidates that Alvin Brown and his wife have lavished with campaign contributions over the past sixteen years.

Brown’s most curious contribution, however, occurred in 2004 when he wrote out a check for $2,000 to Republican Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri. Bond appears to be the only Republican that Brown ever gave money to. The former Clinton aide, who had worked closely with the Missouri lawmaker on housing issues while he was at HUD, helped Bond raise money that year, including hosting a low-key fundraising event for him at the River Club here in Jacksonville.

That’s somewhat surprising since the four-term legislator had one of the lowest civil rights scores in the Senate, receiving a dismal 11 percent rating on affirmative action from the NAACP in 2005-2006 — a time-honored organization, incidentally, that our mayor-elect unsuccessfully sought to head a few years later.  As one of three finalists, Brown lost out to current President Benjamin Todd Jealous.

That's because we have, for now, suspended publication of our monthly print magazine.

In addition, we are dropping all syndicated and national content from the Observer website in the future.  The new site is now 100% locally-focused, locally-written and exclusively concerned with Jacksonville politics, our community and the media.

This is a transition that we are excited about and we hope you, our loyal readers, will understand the reasons behind this move.  In the end, we feel that our narrower focus and lower overhead will allow the Observer to produce a higher quality, more meaningful product.

Thank you.

With this crucial difference. Khrushchev ranted behind closed doors, and when Ike refused to apologize, blew up the Paris summit hosted by President de Gaulle.

Obama, however, was lectured like some schoolboy in the Oval Office in front of the national press and a worldwide TV audience.

And two days later, he trooped over to the Israeli lobby AIPAC to walk back what he had said that had so infuriated Netanyahu.

"Bibi" then purred that he was "pleased" with the clarification.

Diplomatic oil is now being poured over the troubled waters, but this humiliation will not be forgotten.

What did Obama do to draw this public rebuke? In his Thursday speech on the Arab Spring and Middle East peace, Obama declared:

"We believe the borders of Israel should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. ... Israel must be able to defend itself — by itself — against any threat."

Ignoring Obama's call for "mutually agreed swaps" of land to guarantee secure and defensible borders for Israel, Netanyahu, warning the president against a peace "based on illusions," acted as though Obama had called for an Israel withdrawal to the armistice line of 1967.

This was absurd. All Obama was saying was what three Israeli prime ministers — Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert — have all recognized.

To get Palestinian and international recognition for a united Jerusalem and Israel's annexation of the settlements around the city, Israel will have to trade land for land.

Obama was not saying the 1967 borders were to be the end of negotiations but the starting point. Indeed, where else would one begin land negotiations if not from the last recognized map?

Undeniably, Netanyahu won the smack-down. The president was humiliated in the Oval Office, and in his trip to AIPAC's woodshed he spoke of the future peace negotiations ending just as Israelis desire and demand.

Nor is this the first time Obama has been rolled by the Israeli prime minister. Obama came into office demanding an end to all new or expanded settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and subsequently backed down from each and every demand.

Fed up, his Mideast peace negotiator George Mitchell has quit.

Politically, too, the president has been hurt. To the world, and not just the Arabs, he appears weak.

In Israel, Netanyahu is seen as having stood up for Israel's vital interests and forced an American president to back down. His right-wing coalition is cheering him on.

Indeed, the issue is not whether Obama has been hurt, but why Bibi, raised in the U.S.A., who knows American politics better than any previous Israeli prime minister, did it. Why wound Obama like that?

Why would the leader of a nation of 7 million that is dependent on U.S. arms, foreign aid and diplomatic support choose to humiliate a president who could be sitting in that office until 2017?

The one explanation that makes sense is that Netanyahu sees Obama as more sympathetic to the Palestinians and less so to Israel than any president since Jimmy Carter, and he, Netanyahu, would like to see Obama replaced by someone more like the born-again pro-Israel Christian George W. Bush.

And indeed, the Republicans and the right, Mitt Romney in the lead, accusing Obama of "throwing Israel under the bus," seized on the issue and, almost universally, have taken Netanyahu's side.

This could be a serious problem for the president and his party in 2012. For, consider:

In 2008, Obama won the African-American vote 95 to 4, or 16 to 1. He won the Jewish vote 78 to 21, by 57 points, a historic landslide.

These are arguably the two most reliable of Democratic voting blocs.

And while the Jewish vote may be only one-seventh of the black vote, it has proven decisive in the crucial state of Florida. Moreover, Jewish contributions, by some estimates, may make up half of all the contributions to the Democratic Party.

If, after hearing an Israeli prime minister berate Obama for ignorance or indifference to the cold realities the Jewish state faces, Jewish folks decide Obama is bad for Israel and close their checkbooks, the impact in a tight election could be critical.

On the other hand, for African-Americans to see the first black president treated like some truant third-grader by a prime minister of Israel whose nation is deeply dependent on this country has to grate.

In the short run, Bibi won the confrontation, hands down. Like no other leader before him, he humiliated a U.S. president in front of the world, forced him to revise his remarks of four days previous, then graciously accepted the revision.

But a second-term Obama is unlikely to forget what was done to him.

Dear Carrie:

I've heard about consolidating loans as a way to lower my monthly payments. Is that a good idea? Are there other options? — A Reader

Dear Reader: First, congratulations on your graduation. Nursing is a challenging and important field, and it demands a special dedication. But as you pursue your professional goals, you'll also have to dedicate some energy to paying off your loans — and that's often a challenge in itself. As you seem to understand, it's extremely important to be consistent and on time with your payments. So, you're smart to create a plan now.

GETTING STARTED

First, gather all your loan documents and make a chart that includes the following for each loan: amount owed, interest rate, whether that rate is fixed or variable, term of the loan, minimum monthly payment, and the date you need to start repaying. This may seem like a lot of work, but it's really important to see the big picture.

Clearly, you want to pay off higher interest loans first, but make sure to pay at least the minimum every month on every loan. That's because defaulting on a student loan has serious consequences. Not only will you pay hefty penalties and fees, but a default could damage your credit rating for many years.

Start by adding up your monthly minimums. Where does that put you? If the figure is out of reach, don't despair. There are options, including consolidation. For federal loans, the government offers a Direct Consolidation Loan as well as several repayment alternatives designed to lower your payment and possibly even get your debt forgiven. Many private banks offer their own consolidation or alternate repayment programs. The details are beyond the scope of this column, but I can give you some things to consider as you look into your choices.

THE PROS AND CONS OF CONSOLIDATION

Looking at the positives, consolidating can make your life a lot simpler. Private and federal loans must be kept separate, but consolidating each group of loans would give you just two payments, making it easier to manage your debt. Even more significant, you may be able to lower your payment by extending the life of your loans. Plus, if you have several variable interest loans, consolidating into a fixed interest loan may reduce your overall interest rate.

That all sounds great, but there are a couple of minuses to consider. First and foremost, if you extend the loan term, while your monthly payments may go down, the amount of interest you pay in the long run will go up — just like for a mortgage or a car loan. So you have to decide how much you're willing to pay over the long term. For instance, if you increase a 10-year loan to 25 years, your monthly payment could go down about 40 percent, but you could end up paying almost twice as much interest over the life of the loan.

Also, if some of your loans still have a grace period before repayment is due, you'll lose that grace period when you consolidate.

OTHER REPAYMENT OPTIONS FOR FEDERAL LOANS

You might also want to look into various repayment options available for federal loans, including:

— Graduated Repayment: Payments start low and gradually increase every two years. The term of the loan can be up to 30 years, depending on how much you've borrowed.

— Income-Based Repayment (IBR): Monthly payments are based on a percentage of discretionary income , not the amount owed. Discretionary income is your adjusted gross income (AGI) minus 150 percent of the poverty guideline for your family and state of residence. If you make less than 150 percent of the poverty line, your payment is $0. Otherwise, it's capped at 15 percent of your discretionary income. Any remaining debt and interest is forgiven after 25 years of repayment.

— Public Service Loan Forgiveness: This program forgives any remaining debt after 10 years of full-time employment in a public service job (and 120 payments), such as police, fire, government, public health and education and certain nonprofit organizations. This might be of particular interest to you depending on the nursing job you get.

NEXT STEPS

Recent legislation has changed the way certain student loans are handled, so I suggest digging a little deeper before making a decision. Two good resources are the Department of Education (www.ed.gov) and Finaid.org. Also, talk to the financial aid department at your college or university.

With a little research, I'm sure you can find a plan that will help you stay on top of your payments while you use your education to follow your dreams. Best of luck!

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER (tm) is president of the Charles Schwab Foundation and author of "It Pays to Talk." You can e-mail Carrie at askcarrie@schwab.com. This column is no substitute for an individualized recommendation, tax or personalized investment advice. To find out more about Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

World War II, ending in 1945, produced two truly victorious nations, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin and the America of Harry Truman.

Out of the Cold War that lasted from Truman to the disintegration of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of Ronald Reagan's term came a lone victor: the last superpower, the United States.

Who emerged triumphant from the post-Cold War era, 1991-2011?

Indisputably, it is China, whose 10-12 percent annual growth vaulted her past Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Japan to become the world's second largest economy and America's lone rival for first manufacturing power.

If we use a metric called "purchasing power parity," China overtakes America in 2016. Says the International Monetary Fund, the American era is over.

Strategically, too, the United States seems in retreat, nowhere more so than in that region that was the focus of George W. Bush's "global democratic revolution." And no nation reflects more the relative loss of U.S. power and influence than does Israel, whose isolation is today unprecedented.

A decade ago, Turkey, a NATO ally of 50 years, was a quiet friend and partner to Israel. Today, the Palestinians in Gaza view the Turks as among their staunchest friends in the Middle East.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt scrupulously adhered to the terms of his predecessor's peace treaty with Israel and maintained the western end of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Since he fell, the interim Egyptian regime has midwifed a unity government of Fatah and Hamas, moved to establish diplomatic relations with Tehran for the first time since the fall of the Shah and begun to lift the Gaza blockade. September's elections are almost guaranteed to deliver to parliament a huge if not controlling bloc from the Muslim Brotherhood.

While the Brotherhood appears to be the strongest party in Egypt, it has held back from openly seeking the presidency or absolute power in the legislature. It appears to be playing a waiting game. After them, us.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader who had looked to President Obama to bring a halt to new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and preside over peace talks, appears to have given up on the Americans.

Though the beneficiary of hundreds of millions in U.S. aid, he has entered a coalition with his old enemy Hamas, and together — if they can stay together — they plan to seek recognition of an independent Palestine by vote of the U.N. General Assembly in September.

The likelihood is that the overwhelming majority, including many of America's allies, will vote to recognize Palestine and seat it in the General Assembly, where it can make demands on Israel, backed by U.N. sanctions, to terminate its occupation and vacate its national territory.

The General Assembly resolution will set as the borders of Palestine those that existed between 1948 and 1967. But, today, beyond those borders live no fewer than 500,000 Israeli Jews.

While the United States vetoed a recent Security Council resolution condemning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's continued expansion of settlements, we have no veto in the General Assembly. If Obama opposes the U.N. resolution, we and Israel will stand virtually alone.

Nor are these the only crises Israel confronts.

To Israel's north is Hezbollah, which has become the dominant force in Lebanon. To the south is Gaza, dominated by Hamas, which has never accepted Israel's existence. Israel has fought wars with both.

To the east is the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority appears to have given up on U.S.-sponsored peace talks. Beyond lies Jordan, whose King Abdullah rules over millions of Palestinians, who is under pressure to take a tougher stand against Israel and who has no love for Bibi Netanyahu.

And what happened Sunday on the 63rd anniversary of Israel's independence and the Palestinian "nakba," or "catastrophe," where 700,000 fled or were driven into exile, is perhaps the most ominous portent of all.

Palestinian protesters approached the fence separating Lebanon and Israel and climbed the fence on the Israeli-occupied Golan heights to come and reclaim Palestinian lands. Fifteen to 20 were shot to death and scores were wounded by Israeli troops.

Though the White House backed Israel, across Europe what Israel did to these protesters seemed exactly what the king of Bahrain and the president of Yemen had done to theirs.

Given the coordination of the Palestinian actions, we may be on the verge either of a Facebook revolution or a "third intifada," an uprising by Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of descendants of the original exiles still live.

Such an uprising would divert the attention of Arab peoples from the failures of their own regimes and isolate Israel and her principal — indeed, only — ally, the United States, as they have never been before in the Arab world.