about my county st johns county florida

The St Augustine Record posted two interviews last week with candidates challenging the incumbents for County Commissioner in Districts 1 and 5. Ann-Marie Evans is running in District 1 against incumbent Christian Whitehurst, and Ann Taylor is running in District 5 against Henry Dean.

They call themselves “the Anns.”

In the August 1, 2024 interview with Ann Taylor, when asked about transparency in the current Commission, she responded that “We’ve got to be more transparent.  I’d love to see an outside company audit our finances.  Most companies have audits.  We need to run our government the same way to account for the county commissioners.”

As is typical for Nicole Crosby’s protégés, Taylor’s innuendo that the current commissioners are mishandling our tax dollars is wrong. 

Good News!

But the good news is that the county recently released the results of the 2023 audit of the financial and operational health of the county conducted by an outside CPA firm.  The bottom line:  it is healthy.

If you would like more information than my simple bottom line, here are a few links you can follow:

St Johns County Tracking your Tax Dollars: A guide to St Johns County Finances (2023)

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for 2023

Letter from the CPA firm conducting the audit for 2023

Link to the website of the CPA firm

Ann Taylor should have done her research

The interview with The Record had the following statement, “Taylor is convinced that the present commissioners ‘waste tax dollars’ and then ‘ask for more,’ while representing the developers and not the residents.”

That is a bold statement for someone who apparently hasn’t even tried to find a report of an audit of the County financials before calling for an audit by an outside company.

Had she tried, the information would have been available.

How frightening is it that a candidate for county commissioner doesn’t understand the need to do research?

Then there was Ann-Marie

On her campaign website, she claims, “I have attended Board of County Commissioner meetings for several months now.  I can assure the voters of St. Johns Count that there is waste.” I guess she wants folks to take her word for it.

So here we have two individuals who apparently know very little about how the County works but have not done the homework necessary to educate themselves. Yet they feel very comfortable making accusations against incumbent commissioners. They rely on Commissioner Joseph and Nicole Crosby to feed them marketing talking points to make voters believe that the county is a mess and only they can fix it.

The County Finances are not simple

Commissioner Joseph wants to do the Kevin Kline thing to cut expenses. Sure, it sounds good to those who don’t understand the complexity of the county’s finances, but that’s not how I trust our commissioners to make hard financial decisions for over 300,000 residents.  And Nicole Crosby has a bit of an allergy to the truth when it doesn’t serve her purposes.  Apparently the protégés have picked up some habits.

What is painfully obvious is that none of these people who want to “fix” our County understand the financial and operational complexity of operating a billion-dollar budget. Push out the software to a future year?  Wow – when the current software is obsolete?  That would make it hard to produce even basic required reporting about the County’s finances.  So because the Commissioner and the Anns don’t understand, they are declaring a crucial technology product as “waste.”

This is not what we need in our County Commissioners.

Oh, and the report “Tracking your Tax Dollars” is exceptionally well done and very much worth a read.  I promise it will be enlightening.