Nate Monroe

nmonroe@jacksonville.com

COMMENTARY | Herschel T. Vinyard Jr. is probably best known as the bureaucratic enforcer of a bizarre, unwritten Rick Scott-era prohibition on the use of the terms “climate change” and “global warming” by employees of the state’s top environmental protection agency.

A foot soldier in Scott’s war against science and Florida’s environment — which Gov. Ron DeSantis has, to a degree, sought to reverse — Vinyard’s legacy as the head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection was one of reduced morale, reduced headcount, reduced focus on protecting the state’s natural grace and reduced transparency. (Vinyard’s officials at the time said no “climate change” prohibition existed, but interviews and records from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting were far more compelling.)

So why not hire Vinyard to oversee corporate compliance and environmental affairs for JEA?

Ousted JEA CEO Aaron Zahn must have really liked the guy: He made up a brand new, $350,000 per year position just for Vinyard (a staggering sum: It’s more than twice what the head of the state’s environmental protection agency earns today).

“It was out of the blue,” Vinyard told city attorneys, in an under-oath interview, of the first time Zahn reached out to him.

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For more than a century, JEA had run perfectly fine without a “chief administrative officer,” but Vinyard has displayed remarkable staying power in this expensive new position: He escaped the bloodletting after Zahn got the boot by the board of directors, despite playing a key role during Zahn’s tenure as a legal and strategic adviser.

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He’s still up there, somewhere, on the newly renovated 16th floor, soldiering on even after the fall of his liege lord.

Vinyard has made at least two substantial contributions during his time at JEA, and both involve procurement:

• He recommended Foley & Lardner, his former employer after he left DEP, for a lucrative contract handling privatization issues — a contract that originally had a not-to-exceed amount of $250,000 but that, by December, had been billed more than $900,000, according to the City Council Auditor’s office.

“ ... we didn't need to be paying New York rates for Florida law services,” Vinyard, who speaks in a distinctive Southern drawl, told city attorneys in an under-oath interview in January. (Someone didn’t get the memo on that.)

• Vinyard was also one of two JEA officials to sign off on no-bid contracts worth millions of dollars to outside consulting firms without going through the agency’s public procurement process, which city lawyers believe should not have happened. All that work was awarded under the umbrella of JEA’s contract with the New York-headquartered Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman (so much for those excessive Yankee rates), which along with Foley & Lardner was one of the main consultants to JEA on privatization.

THE BONUS PLAN

In his under-oath interview, Vinyard portrayed himself as a bystander to the internal discussions that produced JEA’s now-infamous cash-for-stock scheme, which as written could have resulted in payouts to employees of tens of millions of dollars if JEA had been sold to a private buyer.

No one within JEA’s executive ranks has taken full credit for coming up with the much-scorned bonus scheme: It just dropped as a fully formulated, executed plan out of thin air.

“So when I started at JEA, I do know that there was a long-term incentive plan discussion occurring, but that was not in my wheelhouse,” Vinyard told attorneys under oath.

It was interesting, then, to recently discover in Vinyard’s inbox, through a public-records request, an email dated April 19, 2019, (the month he started) about his participation in a conference call with one of JEA’s law firms, with the subject line, “LTIP.”

JEA referred to the bonus scheme internally two different ways: Initially, it was referred to as a “long-term incentive plan”(or LTIP, a common acronym in the corporate world) and later, by the time the board of directors approved a specific plan, as a performance-unit plan (or PUP).

His involvement in the issue didn’t end in April.

“Aaron insists that he has to have the memo by his meeting on Tuesday,” Vinyard emailed a colleague June 13, with the subject line, “Lti.”

“I will call with ideas.”

Vinyard told city lawyers the first he could remember having any sit-downs or discussions with Zahn about the plan’s details took place during an off-site meeting at The Club Continental in Orange Park the week of July 4: “But there — if there was any work done prior to Club Continental, it would have been minor. But I don't — because I don't remember anything prior to the Club Continental meeting,“ he said.

BAD ADVICE

Vinyard, an attorney, also imparted questionable advice to the board of directors.

He told the board any effort by JEA to find more lines of business would run into substantial roadblocks: Expensive and time-consuming efforts at the state level to change the constitution, or locally to change the city charter.

This was presented authoritatively to the board. In reality, it’s at best debatable: Public power experts who spoke with the City Council on Monday flatly rebutted it and said multiple public power agencies in Florida have been able to branch out into other lines of business without pursuing such changes.

“I have to say it’s painful when you’re talking about expanded programs to hear what you’re saying because we were told that because we’re a public utility, we were restricted in our ability to get into these underlying businesses, plain and simple,” City Councilwoman Randy DeFoor told the public power representatives.

Vinyard’s presentation also clashed with JEA’s own history: The utility has been searching for alternative revenue sources for years, from managing thousands of acres of timberland it purchased to bolster the city’s Preservation Project to an ultimately unsuccessful partnership with a private company exploring multiple natural gas projects.

Council members called Monday’s presentation “eye-opening.”

It was just the latest in a series of revelations about the scale and scope of misstatements and deceptions made by JEA executives throughout the utility’s tumultuous 2019.

Nate Monroe’s City column appears every Thursday and Sunday.

nmonroe@jacksonville.com