Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan held a holiday party on his megayacht last week, and invited Mayor Donna Deegan and members of the city council that in June approved $775 million in public funding for renovations to Khan’s team’s stadium. But no worries, this totally ethical, or at least within existing city ethics rules, according to, uhhhh, one of the mayor’s aides:
Carla Miller, who is a special adviser to Deegan and previously spent years as the city’s ethics director, said the per-person cost of the party stayed within the legal limit of what an elected official could accept by attending it.
“In this case, it was totally allowable,” Miller said.
Florida state law and city ordinances, it turns out, limit the value of any gift from a business that lobbies the city to $100, and attendees were allowed to bring a +1, so that capped the value per person at $50. Miller said a Jaguars representative — who surely would have no reason to fudge this just to evade illegal lobbying charges — assured her that the total value of the finger foods and alcoholic beverages served came to less than $50 per person, so all was copacetic.
It’s worth noting, though, that this ignores the 400-foot elephant in the room, which is the yacht itself. When you go to a party on a superyacht, you don’t go for the canapes, you go to hang out on a superyacht, but Florida ethics law doesn’t seem to factor that into the $100 limit. (One councilmember, Matt Carlucci, told the Florida Times-Union that he agreed the “optics weren’t the greatest” but that “if I turned it down, my wife would have been very disappointed.”) If the party had been held at a stadium suite during a game, say, presumably the Jags would have to factor in the value of tickets to the game; instead, Khan gets to use his $360 million boat as an ethics-free investment in schmoozing.
This is important not just because of abstract ethical lines, but because we have seen time and again how important informal social pressure is in encouraging local electeds to approve stadium subsidies even when their constituents are opposed, because everyone in the local growth coalition that shows up at these parties agrees that the business of local government is subsidizing local business. That makes the true value of an event like this invaluable to Khan, even if he didn’t attend himself (he sent his team president, Mark Lamping, instead) and only served domestic beer.
Another councilmember, Rahman Johnson, described the megayacht party as “an elegant, understated affair,” and the Jaguars and Khan as “a corporation and an individual who has contributed more to the betterment of downtown Jacksonville than anyone in our city’s history.” You can’t buy goodwill like that — or rather, you can, so long as you keep the food and drinks tab under $50 a pop.
Blaming a lack of ethics on his wife is lame. That is what could cost him reelection. It would be far cooler for him to respond, “Yeah I went. So what?”
Also, publicly saying the cost of food and drink was limited to $50 a person and only domestic beer was served makes Khan look like a loser. Did his son throw this party while the dad was out of town?
The domestic beer thing was a joke I was making — there’s no indication Khan skimped on party supplies. The Jags have to claim that it was less than $50 a person because otherwise the councilmembers have to pay for any food and drink they got above that amount, but there’s no one checking to see if they’re claiming that they served caviar that conveniently fell off a truck.
The elder Khan only ever pops his head in Jacksonville whenever he has something to ask of the city government, or whenever some project he has in town is either breaking ground or about to open. His relationship with Jax has always been entirely transactional, and his business dealings in other, much bigger cities (i.e. London and Toronto) mean that Jax is no higher than third in terms of the attention it gets from him.
Granted, there’s some truth to the things he’s said about the city, especially about its the downtown core — but building a Four Seasons property in a traditionally blue-collar town like Jacksonville is an indication to me that he *still* doesn’t understand how the city and its people view themselves after a decade-plus of being “locked-in” with Jax, so to speak.
It’s so funny and appropriate that Shad Khan didn’t even show up to his own party on his own yacht. He’s never seen Jacksonville as anything other than one humongous ATM; whatever love and fondness he professes to have for the city has always been a lie, because there has always been a hefty set of demands attached to each of his proclamations.
Ultimately though, Jacksonville is a small-market, one-horse sports town with something of a city-wide imposter syndrome. To wit: Shad Khan still remains a popular figure in the area, even though he’s gleefully deprived the city of a home game every (non-covid) season, and even though Jacksonville’s Q rating as a city has arguably gone *down* as a result of him driving the Jaguars not just into the ground, but into the earth’s mantle.
Khan seems to be hoarding much (if not all) of the credit for “saving” the Jags from leaving, which completely omits the fact that there was this pesky little thing called a stadium lease that locked the franchise in town until the end of this decade anyway, and that Khan himself had the option of running down the lease until it expired, at which point he could have hoisted the franchise elsewhere. He just got lucky that the late surge in the 2022 season generated enough of a feel-good factor to make him and the Jags feel comfortable about pushing the stadium proposal to the public.
And this is a theme that I’ve harped on a bunch of times before, but if you don’t live in one of these small-market, one-horse sports towns, then it’s difficult to understand the level of desire/desperation that exists to keep hold of their lone team, the level of courting and cavorting that the local electeds are willing to do with the team’s owners, the extent to which remaining a “major league” city matters to business and political leaders in these types of places.
I lived in Florida for 22 years. Finally escaped! Ethics and anything involving that miserable state can’t really be in the same sentence. What ethics??? Home of the Carpetbaggers.
No data to back this up obviously, but Florida probably has the highest instance of “Wait, how did THIS person end up becoming a politician???” per capita than any other state plus DC. There’s never been a shortage of scammers and shysters wanting to enjoy the trappings of public office, nor a shortage of sugar daddies willing to entertain them and ultimately take advantage of them.
This just in, Florida man blames ethical lapses on wife, those crazy womenfolk and their insatiable cravings for the trappings of luxury, right? Tune in at 11 for all the juicy details!
Folks, the cost per person was well below 50 dollars. Shad and Tony Khan were seen in The St Johns Town center area Costco with a cart full of boxes of Kirkland brand pigs in a blanket and a few gallon jugs of white and red wine.
Seems like Shad’s mega-yacht ($360m??? Really???) is a bigger economic driver for the area than the Jags are. Maybe this was just the opening salvo in a subsidy deal for the boat as well… after all, unlike a stadium, the boat can just unmoor and leave anytime…
“Mr. President! We cannot allow a megayacht subsidy gap!!!”
You can talk about corruption in Washington all you want, but the stuff that goes on day to day in your municipality – things like this – is what truly impacts your user experience as a citizen, so to speak.
Every. Single. Day. Your local elected officials are taking advantage of the system and bleeding you to death with a thousand tiny cuts.