No previous slate of Fernandina Beach City Commissioners has been vilified, despised or mocked more than the current Gang of Four (Genece Minshew, Joyce Tuten, Tim Poynter, and James Antun).
The crushing rejection of Paid Parking by 75 percent of voters in the August 18 election branded the quartet so unpopular they now feel it’s safer for them to go out in public in Dr. Anthony Fauci disguises. Their approval ratings are below those of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of Pestilence, War, Famine and Death.
The 25 percent of voters that approved of the paid parking fiasco apparently failed remedial English in grade school and didn’t understand the blithering piffle on the ballot confusingly explaining that “Yes” meant give paid parking the boot and “No” meant keeping it.
Had the “No” voting block received their GEDs it probably would have been 100 percent against it.
This dim Commission quartet never learned, never gave up, and never apologized for their Paid Parking blundering despite the thundering warning shots of street protests, petitions, and City Hall “Get-Outta Here with your stupid paid parking crap and stick it where the sun don’t shine” warning shots. It took shots fired directly into the ballot box to convince them, or at least three of them.
Commissioner Tuten, the tree-hugging wooden Indian, further varnished her splintery reputation as completely tone deaf and blind to public sentiment, by being the lone Commissioner to say, “It ain’t over yet”, as she cast the dissenting vote in a 4-1 Commission meeting where three of the battered Horsemen and the grinning White Knight, Darron Ayscue, voted to terminate the city’s paid parking contract
Tuten said: “Not so fast here, let’s see what the lawyers, consultants, the lunch room ladies, and Flossie the Wonder Chicken have to say about this.”
After this is all over all she will have left in her quiver is a shrieking spittle-flecked tantrum until she finally realizes that Fernandina residents have no interest in listening to her efforts to lead us out of the mud of our ignorance and backwardness.
If she runs again she has as much a chance of being reelected as Sophie Cunningham does of being picked by a Pride team in a pickup basketball game at the Y.
This crowd won’t give up attempting to milk taxpayers so residents need to brace themselves for the next cockamamie scheme they’ll concoct. Cutting budgets and trimming boated staffs are foreign concepts to them.
Hopefully newly elected Commissioner Scott Inglis will hop on a white horse alongside Ayscue and dash any future super majority voting craziness.
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How Did We Get Here? A local guy whose opinions and analysis I respect and knows more about local politics than most explains how we got where we are today with these four city commissioners who have caused so much angst and waste.
Here’s his take:
Start with the 2022 city election, where turnout was 38% (out of 11,400 voters):
- Darron Ayscue beat Genece Minshew by 211 votes—with 52%
- James Antun beat Mike Lednovich by 323 votes—with 54%
Then came the 2024 general election, where turnout was 85% (Trump on the ballot):
- Minshew beat David Sturges by only 21 votes—with 50%
- Tuten beat Bradley Bean by 804 votes—with 54%
- Poynter beat Kelly by 412 votes—with 52%
Bean (who would still be on the Commission if he could have made up his mind whether to recuse himself or not on the ethanol issue) and Mike (“Black Lives Matter”) Lednovich were under a cloud and vulnerable, as shown by the numbers, So we got Antun, the chamber’s potted plant, as commissioner/mayor and Tuten the anti-growth tree-hugging stump.
Poynter ran against a mystery candidate so earned round three, and Minshew just plain lucked out.
None of these elected officials have a mandate, yet they govern as if they do.
He concluded observing: “We put them in place because those were the only choices at hand—sometimes ‘The devil you know is better than the one you don’t.’ ”
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Even The Left Concedes: Mike Lednovich, a former City Commissioner and mayor who once marched through town wearing a “Black Lives Matter” sandwich board couldn’t defend remnants of the paid parking wreckage, writing the following in the online city newsletter and pretend news outlet, the Observer:
“The voters did not whisper. They shouted,” he wrote.
“Nearly 75% of those casting ballots — 3 out of every 4 voters — approved the citizen-initiated restriction on paid parking. A total of 5,183 city voters participated in the referendum. That is not a narrow victory open to competing interpretations. It is an unmistakable public mandate.
“The City Commission must now honor it.”
It might be the most honest and accurate piece Lednovich, who has been attempting to rearrange the community’s mental furniture, has ever penned since he lost his reelection bid.
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How High and Fast Can You Count? As a kid were you ever challenged to count to 100 out loud in front of friends or stand around listening while one of them did? It was boring, tiring, and a waste of time. I did it once but never again.
According to the book “Huge Numbers” by Richard Elwes, the biggest number ever counted to by a human is one million.
It was accomplished in 2007 by a guy in Alabama named Jeremy Harper and it took him 80 days.
That’s 80 days Jeremy will never get back.