COMMENTARY | The imminent departure of JEA CEO Jay Stowe, expected during a special board of directors meeting Monday, is the culmination of a gradual accumulation of gripes from board members about his management team, his communication style, a recent and controversial reorganization of appointed employees, and his operations and spending habits. In other words, following the dramatic fall of his predecessor, Aaron Zahn, who was convicted last month of federal crimes, Stowe's departure is pretty boring stuff — normal, by the standards of Jacksonville government, at least.

JEA hired Stowe in 2020 to be a stabilizer and the pro-public power face of Jacksonville's city-owned utility after the chaos sowed by Zahn during his disastrous effort to privatize the agency. There is a consensus he was successful in this, and Monday's meeting, which will be cordial, will likely give voice to that. Stowe "settled the waters at a very difficult time," said Jacksonville City Council member Rory Diamond.

Stowe to go: JEA CEO 'settled the waters at a very difficult time.' Now he'll be replaced, council says

Stowe was so associated with that role he literally embodied it during Zahn's corruption trial: Federal prosecutors named Stowe the final witness of their weeks-long case with the intention of showing the jurors what a normal public-power CEO looks like — a stark contrast to the renegade executive they were trying to convict.

But Stowe struggled to win board support over the long term. He implemented a lenient remote-work policy, including for highly paid executives, that contributed to a sense, fair or not, held by some within JEA that his management team was a collection of interlopers — people not deeply rooted here.

Personnel will be a major challenge for JEA's next leader.

Several years ago, JEA had a deep bench of talented executives with long ties to the agency, several of whom could have stepped into the top role. It felt like there was a bit of an informal succession plan in place. Zahn's tenure completely destroyed that: He either ran off the knowledgeable veterans or brought out the worst qualities in the ones who remained, rendering them incapable of leading JEA. The sum of it was a total depletion of institutional knowledge from within JEA's c-suites, a precarious situation for such a complex, vital agency.

So in Stowe's defense, he was starting from scratch, and his successor will either have to live with a management team he or she didn't handpick or start all over again themselves. Either way, it will be hard to form a team that doesn't at least initially feel like a collection of unknown quantities.

And they will be doing so while grappling with long-term challenges on the horizon. Under Stowe, JEA raised base rates on electric bills to adjust for a costly obligation it holds to buy nuclear power from two reactors in Georgia. That 2008 agreement, struck long before Stowe's arrival, has cast a long shadow over JEA, pressuring the agency's finances even as it serves a city that is rapidly growing.

The top job at the agency has changed considerably from the days when utilities could count on 3 percent growth in electric sales as a near certainty, but JEA remains a leader in public power and is well regarded. In January, Moody's, one of the nation's credit-rating agencies, said it had a positive view of JEA's credit "driven by strong management."

Stowe had come to loggerheads with the board over other issues, though there's nothing particularly scandalous to mine. He and some of the board members simply have different ideas about his role and theirs, and so it's time to go. Turnover happens at the city's independent agencies from time to time. So that's well enough, but it can't happen again — at least for a long time.

Changing CEOs at an agency like JEA is serious business. JEA needs a long-term leader, and that leader will need some reasonable latitude from the board to put their team in place. And the board needs to find a candidate it could live with for as long as the next decade because asking for mulligans every two or three years is no way to run JEA.

The board, in other words, needs to justify this turnover in leadership by finding someone who will be empowered to do this for a long time and is capable of doing so. We can't be back here one or two years from now.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville public utility CEO Jay Stowe's departure unsettles agency