This story was reported in partnership with News4Jax
A top JEA official had been fielding questions for nearly two hours – sometimes refusing to answer on advice of her city-appointed lawyer sitting beside her – before Matt Carlucci, the senior member of the Jacksonville City Council, had to get something off his chest.
“We’re treating (JEA) like prosecutors up here,” he said with rising frustration, adding that the public hearing struck him as “disturbing and toxic” and “directionless.”
“I’m glad we’re not getting prosecuted.”
The chief prosecutor that day was Jason Teal, a longtime city lawyer who has become an unusual – and unusually influential – fixer for the City Council’s Republican leadership, which has repeatedly clashed with city agencies and the city’s Democratic mayor.
Teal, a former city general counsel, is now the City Council’s secretary and its in-house lawyer, an obscure position that has provided him a wide range of roles that some former and current city officials believe have stretched the limits of city law.
That day, June 8, Teal was leading the questioning of two JEA officials during a meeting of a special, and controversial, City Council committee created by the body’s then-president, Kevin Carrico, to investigate the workplace culture at the city-owned electric, water and sewer utility. At times, Teal’s adversarial questions – sometimes asked through a grin – drew objections from attorneys with the city’s Office of General Counsel, which he once oversaw.
That’s the kind of conflict – not just with other city officials, but with local media as well – that Teal has increasingly engaged in as he’s settled into his dual role as the City Council secretary and in-house lawyer.
That has not gone unnoticed by officials within agencies that have crossed the council’s GOP leadership. It has also raised concerns on the council itself.
Teal was hired as secretary in March of last year by a low-key, five-person committee, which included Carrico and now-President Nick Howland.
Over the objections of the committee’s only Democrat, Rahman Johnson, the council’s personnel committee “increased his responsibilities” in August, according to an offer letter, and officially named him the council’s in-house “legislative counsel,” a position the council has rarely filled over the past several decades.
His start date was the same day as the committee’s vote, the offer letter obtained by The Florida Trib said.
“I would be the council’s lawyer,” Teal told the three council members last year.
Today, Teal’s $281,599.96 salary is nearly as much as the city’s General Counsel, Michael Fackler, who earns $288,166.92 for overseeing some 40 lawyers who provide legal services for the largest municipal government in Florida.
On paper, Teal’s official supervisor is the council president, according to the terms in his offer letter. Some council colleagues see Teal as more sensitive to the agenda of the GOP-aligned leadership, particularly given that his dual role was not voted on by the full council.
“He was, to me, carrying out what the council president (Carrico) and the chairman of that committee (Ron Salem) wanted him to do,” Carlucci said in an interview of Teal’s role as interrogator for the council’s special JEA committee.
In an interview, Teal acknowledged “the ordinance code is very general and generic as far as what role legislative counsel can do.”
“There’s a danger if it’s allowed to go too far,” Teal said. “The danger is lessened with legislative counsel because it’s been in there from the beginning (of the charter), and you have somebody in that role that understands consolidation and appreciates consolidation and won’t let it get out of hand,” he said, referring to himself.
‘It’s pushing the envelope’
Although Teal is not supposed to replace the city’s top lawyer, Fackler, as the City Council’s primary legal adviser, the limits of his role have not always been clear.
That is in part because Teal’s hiring was prompted by council leadership’s distrust in Fackler, whom Deegan appointed as the city’s general counsel in 2023. In his short time as legislative counsel, Teal has directly challenged Fackler’s legal findings – generally considered the final word in City Hall – even suggesting the council could go to court over an unfavorable legal opinion.
Strained relations between the general counsel and legislative branch are not unprecedented – council members of different generations have repeatedly accused the city’s top lawyer of prioritizing the mayor’s whims. But few councils have gone as far as hiring a separate attorney.
An early breaking point between the council’s GOP majority and Fackler was his defense of Deegan’s move to take down a confederate monument in Springfield Park, a campaign promise of hers that riled some elected Republicans.
“I don’t think it’s a secret to members of this body that we’ve had our differences and disappointments with OGC,” Carrico said during the August meeting when he and Howland voted to hire Teal as legislative counsel.
Teal was a longtime line attorney in the Office of General Counsel before becoming the city’s top lawyer in the latter half of former Mayor Lenny Curry’s tenure in office, an affiliation that prompted Deegan allies to view him with suspicion.
In discussing his potential role last year as the council’s legislative attorney, though, Teal framed the job in anodyne terms.
“It is limited to only those matters that will come before the City Council or could come before the City Council,” Teal said as the council’s personnel committee discussed his appointment during an August 2025 meeting.
“So I wouldn’t be able to weigh in on an issue for the airport authority for example or the school board or those kinds of things.”
Recently, however, Teal managed to do just that.
During a tense meeting earlier this month, as the Jacksonville Aviation Authority’s board considered hiring an outside attorney to sue the city – the latest turn in a long-running dispute with Howland, the current council president – Teal admonished the board and issued a stark warning.
“I am not here in my current role with the City Council, but I’m voluntarily here because I care for both the consolidated government and the Office of General Counsel,” Teal told the board members, before arguing that any lawsuit against the city “could result in each of you being held personally liable for those funds, potential criminal liability, and a determination of malfeasance or misfeasance.”
Bill Gulliford, a JAA board member and former Jacksonville City Council president, told the Florida Trib that those comments were “inappropriate” and were likely due to “strong pressure” from Howland.
Teal confirmed that speaking at the meeting was outside of his responsibilities as legislative counsel or secretary but said he wanted to share his government law expertise with the JAA board.
Other longtime City Hall observers also said his comments were notable.
“It’s pushing the envelope no question,” said former Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney, who also served as the city’s general counsel, of Teal’s appearance before the aviation authority board. “The legislative counsel for the city council is not really supposed to be issuing legal opinions.”
Aviation officials also see in Teal a certain hypocrisy: Like the council, the aviation authority has sharply disagreed with the Office of General Counsel and wants to find different legal representation.
“So, if a council can have their own attorney, why shouldn’t an independent authority be able to have their own attorney?” Gulliford said.
A few months earlier, when the council’s GOP majority wanted to dilute some of Deegan’s appointment powers – which Fackler said the charter did not allow – Teal’s complaints about the Office of General Counsel echoed the Aviation Authority’s own frustrations. If the council didn’t have the ability to challenge Fackler’s legal views in court, Teal said, then “in essence Mr. Fackler is god because there is no check or balance. It’s just what he says, goes.”
When asked why the City Council having its own lawyer is less of a threat to consolidation, Teal said his background as a former city general counsel allows him to “fully understand and support the fact that the legislative counsel is inferior to the general counsel.”
“It’s probably safer, I think, for consolidated government to have me in that role than to have somebody else,” Teal told the Trib.
Does Teal usurp the general counsel?
Teal was also at the center of a public-records controversy this summer that dogged Carrico, the former council president.
Earlier this year, State Attorney Melissa Nelson’s office issued a subpoena, addressed to Teal, for Carrico’s communication records related to any discussions around JEA – an outgrowth of controversy around Carrico’s decision to nominate his boss at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Northeast Florida to the JEA board, which has since been abandoned.
Several media organizations requested copies of any records Carrico turned over to Nelson’s investigators. Teal initially said those records would cost $4,000 to retrieve because Carrico had not kept any copies – meaning he’d have to reproduce them to satisfy the records requests. A coalition of media organizations, including The Florida Trib, pushed back, and the council eventually lowered the cost.
But the records eventually provided had been visibly altered and contained missing elements, which Teal repeatedly defended as a lawful decision to withhold Carrico’s “personal communications.”
“I have not found, nor have any of the myriads of legal professionals advising the media provided me with (despite my repeated requests to do so), any law that states that private communications submitted in response to a criminal investigation subpoena converts those private messages into a public record,” he wrote to multiple media outlets who’d asked about the missing records.
A more complete set of records provided by Nelson’s office showed that among the withheld records were texts between Carrico and his boss about the status of valuable JEA land that the Boys & Girls Clubs’ Nassau County organization had been hoping to receive as a donation from the utility. Nelson’s office had also issued a subpoena to JEA for information about that possible land donation, but it was unclear what about that potential transaction had attracted her investigators’ notice.
In the more complete records her office provided, Carrico and his boss discussed why JEA leaders eventually decided they could not provide the nonprofit the land for free.
“First they said no to giving it away because of fear of the board, now they say not interested in selling either because of future growth in Nassau county,” Carrico wrote. In the same text, Carrico then said, “Guess it’s time they get a new board member to show them who’s boss … You ready to play the game?”
Teal again defended the initial redactions, arguing Carrico had stepped out of his role as council president and into his private one as a Boys & Girls Clubs leader – even as he was discussing JEA land with a prospective JEA board member.
Amid the dispute, Delaney, the former mayor, said, “The Council’s attorney is not the correct lawyer to review these.”
“The City’s General Counsel is who should be reviewing the emails.”
Rick Mullaney, executive director of Jacksonville University’s Public Policy Institute, and a former city general counsel, agreed. “The question is who gets to make that call and that call should generally be made by the general counsel’s office,” he told Florida Trib news partner News4Jax’s Tarik Minor.
But that could be a sign Teal’s role is working as his council advocates had hoped.
“The general counsel is the glue that holds our consolidated government together, and that should be honored,” Carlucci said. ”It was like the City Council suddenly divorced itself from the Office of General Counsel, and we decided to get our own general counsel with Jason Teal.”
Citing attorney-client privilege, Teal declined to clarify his role in the redactions of Carrico’s texts but called Delaney’s comments a “narrow view of the role of legislative counsel.”
Molly Farrar is a Report for America corps member and the Florida Trib’s Jacksonville municipal watchdog reporter. She can be reached at molly.farrar@floridatrib.org.
