Photo of Jacksonville City Council members at bar sparks discussion over Sunshine Law

Several photos are raising eyebrows with some Jacksonville city leaders, showing four City Council members at a downtown bar after a council meeting in late June.

Council member Matt Carlucci, who was not there, wants to know what was discussed and believes it could have violated Florida's Sunshine Laws, which are intended to guarantee public access to meetings among elected officials.

The four council members were Aaron Bowman, Kevin Carrico, Rory Diamond and Nick Howland.

Times-Union news partner First Coast News reached out to all four and heard back from one, who said no city council business was discussed but provided no further comment.

Darren White, the man who took the picture and posted it to social media, says he overheard the four discussing Carlucci, whose proposal to remove Confederate monuments was voted down by the City Council two weeks prior.

Carlucci believes even if lawmakers didn't violate the Sunshine Laws, they violated the public trust.

"The optics are horrible, and it really reflects on everybody because they don't tend to look at certain council members. They put us in a group, the City Council," he said.

White called it a 'strange' encounter. "I am not a political expert, but I just thought it looked pretty strange. I think that we should have the highest ethical standards possible in our city government," he told First Coast News.

The Northside Coalition released several statements about the photos.

"This is a serious ethics violation involving trust, transparency and accountability on the part of our elected officials," said Ben Frazier, president of the community organization.

The city's ethics director says Florida's Sunshine Law is enforced by the state attorney.

The State Attorney's Office in Jacksonville did not immediately respond when asked if it has received any recent complaints.

The potential for Sunshine Law violations has been a perennial discussion topic for people interested in Jacksonville’s council. A Duval County grand jury that looked into the subject in 2007 reported a "curious absence of candor" by council members who were called as witnesses, but the panel didn’t charge anyone with breaking the law.

The grand jury took up the subject after a Times-Union investigation documented dozens of undocumented meetings between council members where public business was discussed, often in private locations. One member who met people at an Avondale diner labeled the place in his calendar as the "City Hall west annex."

Before the grand jury issued a scolding public report in 2008, the council adopted a set of rules called the Jacksonville Sunshine Law Compliance Act that included a requirement for council auditors to conduct annual reviews of council meeting records and report their findings. That was scaled back to every second year in 2013, after the city’s ethics director argued the original was tying up auditors with unproductive work.

The Times-Union reported in 2015 that the president of the city's firefighters union relayed communication between council members as he worked to sway a vote.

In 2019, the State Attorney’s Office decided not to file charges after a nearly yearlong review of council members’ phone calls to each other, but investigators concluded the phone records might reflect Sunshine Law violations.

“Common sense dictates that Council members do not spend 62 hours, 74 hours, and 38 hours on the phone with other Council members discussing simple scheduling matters or irregular personal matters,” a report on that review said.

Times-Union staff writer Steve Patterson contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida Sunshine Law violation? Photo posted of council members at bar