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 — 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, was going to need approval from the City Council — and Dennis was firmly opposed to privatization.
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.
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