Matrix LLC, a Montgomery, AL-based political communications and consulting firm, was in the midst of a plan to turn a Jacksonville, FL, public utility into a private concern -- in a deal that would have been worth about $11 billion. The plan involved luring an opponent of privatization off the Jacksonville City Council with an enticing job offer. It did not work, but the plan has ties to a political scandal that has rocked Florida over the past year, according to a report at the Orlando Sentinel. It also touches on dueling lawsuits, crossing two states, that involve Matrix owner Joe Perkins and former CEO Jeff Pitts. Write reporters Jason Garcia and Annie Martin:
In the middle of 2019, Jacksonville
City Council member Garrett Dennis was approached by a friend about a
mysterious job offer.
The offer was to lead an organization Dennis had never heard of before. He’d make
close to $250,000, expenses included, and travel the country advocating for the
decriminalization of marijuana — an issue Dennis was passionate about.
There was just one catch: Dennis
would have to resign from the City Council.
“I said, ‘Man, I’m not doing that,’”
Dennis recalled this week.
Dennis said nothing ever came of the
cryptic job offer. But records and interviews show it was orchestrated by
consultants working with Florida Power & Light (FPL) — the utility giant whose
parent company soon after submitted an $11 billion bid to buy Jacksonville’s
city-owned electric company.
Any sale of the public utility, known as
Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA), was going to need approval from the City
Council — and Dennis was firmly opposed to privatization.
How did the job offer materialize, and what did it mean? The Sentinel provides answers that trace to Alabama -- and a roiling scandal in the Sunshine State:
The job offer plan was hatched by
employees at an Alabama-based political
and communications consulting firm called Matrix LLC, which was one of many outside consultants FPL enlisted to promote its ultimately unsuccessful campaign to buy JEA. It’s now part of a
bitter legal dispute involving Matrix, some of its former employees and FPL.
But it’s also part of an election scandal that has
rocked Florida politics over the
past year. That’s because the Jacksonville City Council member’s job would have
been through “Grow United Inc.” — the same dark-money group used in 2020 to finance an ad
campaign for the so-called “ghost” candidates who ran in three battleground
state Senate elections.
FPL points a finger directly at Matrix LLC and its founder/owner, Dr. Joe Perkins. (FPL, by the way, is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy). Matrix, in turn, points fingers in other directions. From the Sentinel report:
A spokesperson for FPL confirmed
that Matrix suggested creating a job for Dennis. But he said FPL rejected the
proposal and pointed the blame at Matrix and its owner, longtime Alabama
political consultant Joe Perkins.
“In July 2019, a Matrix
representative working for Joe Perkins approached FPL about a plan to offer
Garrett Dennis a job working to decriminalize marijuana,” FPL spokesperson
David Reuter said. “FPL flatly rejected the plan and communicated our lack of
interest to Joe Perkins’ team.”
An attorney for Perkins pointed to
the company’s former CEO, Jeff Pitts, who left Matrix at the end of 2020 to
start a new Florida-based consulting firm — with FPL as a client. Matrix has
since sued Pitts and other former employees, accusing them of conspiring with
an unnamed Florida-based client on secret projects and cheating Matrix out of
fees.
“Matrix never participated in the
proposal or implementation of any plan involving payment to a member of the
Jacksonville City Council,” Matrix attorney Cason Kirby said. “To the extent
any rogue Matrix employees were involved in those activities, they were undertaken
in secret, without Dr. Perkins’ knowledge or consent.”
A spokesperson for Pitts’ new
company, called Canopy Partners, would not answer questions but accused Perkins
of leaking documents — which Perkins has denied. Pitts has countersued Perkins,
accusing his former boss of extortion, and Canopy Partners has broadly denied
any wrongdoing.
“Joe Perkins continues to leak false
and misleading documents and we are not going to comment on his
multimillion-dollar extortion scheme,” Canopy spokesperson John Collins said.
He did not cite any examples of false or misleading documents.
It does appear, however, that someone did leak documents to the press:
Details of the proposed job for the
Jacksonville City Council member are included in a cache of documents
anonymously delivered to the Orlando Sentinel in late November. The records include
checks, bank statements, emails, text messages, invoices, internal ledgers and
more, all apparently unearthed during an internal investigation Matrix launched
after Pitts and several other employees left the firm. The Sentinel partnered
with Florida Times-Union metro
news columnist Nate Monroe in Jacksonville to report this story.
The documents shed new light on how
the then-Matrix consultants worked behind the scenes — including through
intermediaries, political committees and dark-money nonprofits — to influence
Florida politics on state and local levels, in ways that often advanced the
utility company’s interests.
Why is Jacksonville Electric Authority an attractive target for privatization?
The 127-year-old JEA is one of the
largest publicly owned utility companies in the country, with nearly half a
million electricity customers and nearly 400,000 water customers. Private
companies have expressed interest in buying it for years — including FPL, which
controls the territory surrounding Jacksonville.
The most recent attempt to privatize
the agency began in late 2017, when an ally of Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry —
Republican fundraiser Tom Petway, one of the mayor’s appointees to JEA’s board
of directors — announced he believed JEA should consider privatization.
Around the same time, an obscure new
group appeared called “Fix JEA Now.” The group was organized, according to
three people, by Rev. Deves Toon, the National Field Director for Rev. Al
Sharpton’s National Action Network who had recently arrived in Jacksonville.
Toon recruited Angie Nixon to serve
as the public face of Fix JEA Now. Nixon, who is now a Democratic state
representative from Jacksonville, said she initially agreed to get involved
because she was concerned about a controversial deal JEA had struck to buy
electricity from a nuclear power plant in Georgia.
But she said she soon concluded that
Toon wanted to use Fix JEA Now to promote privatization.
“I decided to leave because I
noticed some stuff that was fishy — it seemed as though they were going the
route to sell JEA,” said Nixon.
That leads to a tangled money trail:
The records sent to the Sentinel
include ledgers for various entities controlled by the former Matrix employees
that show more than $180,000 in combined payments to Toon in 2018. Some of
those payments are explicitly associated with JEA.
It’s not always clear from the
ledgers which entities the payments came from. But one payment — $15,000 for
“consulting” in December 2018 — came from a nonprofit organization called Mothers
for Moderation directly funded by FPL.
The Mothers for Moderation records —
which also include copies of corresponding bank statements, checks and
fundraising solicitations sent to FPL CEO Eric Silagy — show that FPL donated
$14.15 million to the group in 2018. That represented more than 90% of
the money that Mothers for Moderation raised that year; all of the remaining
money came from other nonprofits.
A November 2018 letter from the dark-money nonprofit Mothers
for Moderation, one of several soliciting millions from Florida Power &
Light via its CEO, Eric Silagy. Records show FPL donated $14.15 million to
Mothers for Moderation in 2018, nearly all of the money the dark-money group
raised that year.
Reuter, the spokesperson for FPL,
said the company was “aware” that Matrix was paying Toon for work related to
multiple clients. One of his tasks was to build support for a sale of JEA.
“As we understood it, Rev. Toon was
engaging with members of his community to ask for their support to privatize
JEA,” he said.
Part of the money trail led from FPL to Matrix LLC:
Invoices show that Alabama-based Matrix LLC was billed
Florida Power & Light for millions in the days before the consulting firm
began moving money through Grow United Inc., the dark-money nonprofit central
to the "ghost" candidate scheme.
But Kirby, the lawyer for Matrix,
said Matrix had explicitly forbidden its employees to engage in any projects
related to the sale of JEA “due to the public controversy surrounding the
sale,” which became a political lightning rod in Jacksonville and eventually
sparked local and federal investigations.
After Nixon quit, Toon brought in a new person
to serve as the public face of Fix JEA Now: Dwight Brisbane, a political
consultant in Jacksonville — and a longtime friend of City Council Member
Garrett Dennis.
It was Brisbane who approached
Dennis about the job offer.
In an interview, Dennis said
Brisbane called him sometime in the spring or summer of 2019. The City Council
member said he was in the middle of two big policy debates at the time: His own
push to decriminalize marijuana and the debate over whether to sell JEA.
“[Brisbane] called me up one day, he
said, ‘I was talking to Toon and they’re going to offer you this job doing the
whole [decriminalization] thing for this organization,’” Dennis said. “‘They’re
going to pay you about $250,000 a year, full expense account, to go around and
speak on the decriminalization ... But the catch is that you’re going to have
to resign from City Council.’”
Dennis said he couldn’t find any
record of the organization existing and he suspected it was a scam. He also
said he was suspicious of the motives behind the offer.
Dennis was seen as one of the
staunchest opponents to selling JEA on Jacksonville’s 19-member City Council.
Privatization was expected to be a tough sell to the council, because multiple
past efforts to sell JEA had never gone anywhere and proven very controversial,
both with the community and JEA’s own employees.
In a separate interview, Brisbane
also confirmed that he approached Dennis about a potential job with a marijuana
advocacy organization — and that he did so at the request of Toon. Brisbane
said Toon told him that Toon “had a group that [Toon] would like to see if
Garrett would be interested in.”
Brisbane said he did not recall
telling Dennis that he would have to resign from the City Council, though
Brisbane said he may have told Dennis that it would be difficult to remain in
elected office because of all the travel the new job would involve.
A strategy memo shines light on the job offer:
Dennis’ memories align with a memo
that was included in the records sent to the Sentinel.
The document is a three-page
“strategy report” outlining a plan to create a nonprofit called Grow United to
promote the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana around the country.
It identified two “project goals” — one of which was to “create a job
opportunity for District 9′s Garrett Dennis.” And it proposed paying a director
$180,000, with another $60,000 set aside for travel and expenses.
The strategy report is dated July
21, 2019, two days before the JEA board of directors voted to begin the
formal process of privatization — and three days before Grow United was
formally incorporated in Delaware.
There is no author listed. But the
summary of the internal Matrix investigation said it was written by April Odom,
another former Matrix employee who is now being sued by the company. Odom’s
brother is listed in public records as the chairperson of Grow United.
Odom did not respond to requests for
comment.
The records provided to the Sentinel
do not show FPL donating money directly to Grow United or communicating with
the consultants about it. But they do show that the former Matrix employees
appear to have created Grow United with FPL in mind.
Grow United wound up becoming entangled in Florida politics, which led to Republicans winning key state races under dubious circumstances -- and that has sparked a criminal investigation:
Ultimately, Grow United was used for
other purposes — including supporting little-known independent candidates who
ran for office in three key Senate races, including District 9 in Central
Florida and Districts 37 and 39 in South Florida.
Though those candidates did no
campaigning of their own, Grow United provided $550,000 to a pair of political
committees that paid for mailers that
appeared worded to appeal to Democratic voters. The political committees were run by Republican
strategists in Tallahassee out of the headquarters for the big-business
lobbying group Associated Industries of Florida, whose members include FPL.
Republicans ultimately won all three
races, helping the GOP retain its majority in the 40-member Florida Senate. But
the scandal has sparked a criminal investigation out of Miami-Dade County, in
which two people have been arrested: Alex Rodriguez, who ran as the independent
candidate in one of the South Florida races, and former Republican Sen. Frank
Artiles, who authorities say bribed Rodriguez to run. Rodriguez has pleaded
guilty and agreed to testify against Artiles, who has pleaded
not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Nobody else has been accused of
wrongdoing, though Miami-Dade authorities say the investigation is still
ongoing.
