Guest Column by Megan Hayward a former member of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority Board, where she served for a year and a half following a unanimous appointment. During her tenure, Hayward raised questions regarding spending practices, budget oversight, and governance at JTA. After her removal from the board, she is now speaking out about recent decisions that shift increased costs onto the agency’s most vulnerable riders—those who rely on para-transit services for essential daily needs.

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It’s been almost a year since I was very publicly removed from the JTA board. A year since I was in the news for asking questions. Questions that called out JTA’s mismanagement of tax payer money — questions that raised red flags about the failing operation of our city’s public transportation system — and questions about the leadership in charge of it all.

Those questions got me removed, so today I have one more:

Why is JTA making the most vulnerable of its riders subsidize the NAVI black hole?

In the same month, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority made the catastrophically overpriced, (non)autonomous NAVI shuttle free, while DOUBLING rates for its Connexion service. This service is used by the blind, deaf, paralyzed, elderly and wheelchair-bound individuals who need para-transit to go to work, grocery shop or see a doctor. 

Meanwhile, JTA is $19 million over budget.

Instead of fixing anything, instead of lowering executive salaries, instead of abandoning its failed venture into self driving transit, THIS is their solution…

Make the disabled, home bound foot the bill. 

It is sick. This is taxpayer money being spent on ego, not on making sure the most vulnerable people in our community can get where they need to go. And it is the latest in a long line of similarly bad leadership decisions that have cost the taxpayer and riders immensely.

Let’s revisit some of the ones I raised question about:

There’s $60,000 a year being donated to JaxUSA—the “outreach arm of the chamber”—directly from JTA.

And who runs JaxUSA? Aundra Wallace. He also chairs the JTA board.

So I asked the obvious question at a board meeting:

“It’s prudent for us to make sure we’re watching all of our dollars and every dollar that this agency spends is benefiting the riders of the JTA system. I would like CEO Ford to explain the justification for this sponsorship and how the riders benefit from spending this money.”

I’m still waiting for that answer.

Then I asked about tuition reimbursement policies…

Regular employees—your bus drivers, your maintenance workers keeping this system operational—can get up to $5,250 a year in tuition reimbursement. But it’s taxable income. They have to pay taxes on it. So they actually lose money on the deal.

Executives? Their tuition gets paid directly to the schools. No limit. No taxes. One executive got a PhD through this program—$80,000, paid in full by taxpayers, with no dollar limit whatsoever.

The policy itself says it shouldn’t discriminate in favor of “highly compensated employees.”

The IRS code is crystal clear on this. The policy even mentions IRS code 127, which explicitly states that plans cannot discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees.

So why is JTA doing exactly that?

Bus drivers are told, “Here’s up to $5,250, and by the way, you owe taxes on the original money.” Meanwhile, executives are getting unlimited education paid directly to universities with no taxes. These same executives already make significantly more money than the people who are literally keeping the system running.

And Mr. Ford gets to pick and choose which executives get help. There are no written parameters. No requirements. Just Mr. Ford’s “discretion.”

Then JTA built the NAVI—this fancy, “automated” system. Originally budgeted in the $20 millions, later budgeted at $61 million.

Actual cost?

$68 million

$50 million of that is all local money.

And what does JTA have to show for it? Ridership is nowhere close to what they told the federal government it would be. It’s not even autonomous, especially now that Balfour Beatty abandoned ship.

Everyone knows this project doesn’t feel right, but Nat Ford wants it to be his legacy project and so it lives on.

People kept asking me, “Why didn’t you bring these issues up before now?”

I DID.

I brought them up in board meetings, quietly, without a lot of inflection. I brought them up in one-on-one meetings with the CEO and his staff. The response? “We will look into this.”

But I never heard anything back. Instead, I — the squeaky wheel was removed from the board.  I served on the board for a year and a half, after a unanimous vote to put me there. But apparently, the concerns I raised while serving my civic duty were enough to be removed by the chief civil servant herself, Mayor Donna Deegan.

To continue giving tens of thousands of dollars to board members, to keep executives from lowering their salaries, to let the CEO keep his pride about his failed project, they decided to charge the most disabled people in our community MORE to get to their doctor’s appointments.