Ron Salem's immigrant parents shaped his rise to Jacksonville City Council president

Ron Salem can still point to the pine tree that served as second base when he and other neighborhood children played sandlot baseball at Four Corners Park in Murray Hill.

Half a century has passed since Salem grew up in the neighborhood, the youngest son of parents who immigrated to Jacksonville from the Palestinian city Ramallah in the 1940s.

Salem has lived most of his adult life across the St. Johns River in Arlington, but he periodically returns to his old stomping grounds to stroll along the shaded sidewalks and through Four Corners Park. It's his way of staying connected to the family base that set him on a path to become City Council president on July 1, joining the growing ranks of Jacksonville power players who have Arabic heritage.

"How many people can go back to the house that they were raised in and the park they played in, and live in the same city?" Salem said while standing in the park, just a block from his childhood home. "I think it's special. Those things mean the world to me."

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Those memories have run close to the surface as Salem assumed the office of council president. In City Council meetings, Salem is a data-driven decision-maker who can seem more cerebral than instinctive. But when he talked at his June 22 installation ceremony about his late parents immigrating to Jacksonville, he needed a few seconds to regain his composure.

"I got it," he told the crowd before moving forward with his speech outlining an ambitious list of goals that includes launching a study for building a new jail and getting a deal with the Jaguars for a renovated football stadium.

Even during an interview at his City Council office, where he's been working this week during the council's annual summer recess, Salem's voice catches when talking about his parents.

His father, Bader Salem, was the first president of Jacksonville's Ramallah American Club, a chapter of the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine. Jacksonville has one of the highest concentrations of any U.S. city for Americans who can track their ancestry to Ramallah, a city in the West Bank about 10 miles from Jerusalem.

Salem's father and an uncle co-owned a neighborhood grocery story near Edward Waters University where his father worked six days a week plus "half a day on Sunday." His mother Najla was the enforcer at home. His parents both stressed the importance of education. Salem got a perfect attendance certificate for 12 years of school when he graduated from Lee High School (now named Riverside High School), and he has likewise had an unblemished attendance record for City Council meetings.

"There was no getting up in the morning and saying you didn't feel well," Salem said of his youth, adding that his two older brothers each only missed one day of school over 12 years.

Salem and Mayor Donna Deegan look for 'common ground'

Salem, 67, said his parents' influence, such as his father's leadership of the Ramallah Club, helped shape his own interest in community involvement. He had already been a volunteer for decades on boards and commissions at the city and state levels when he won an at-large City Council seat in 2019. He won re-election in 2023. His council colleagues then unanimously selected him to be council president, the second-most powerful position behind the mayor in City Hall.

Former mayor John Delaney, who has known Salem since the 1970s when they were University of Florida students and involved in campus government, said it didn't surprise him when Salem, a pharmacist, ran for City Council.

"He always had the bug, but he also put his family and career first," Delaney said. "This stage of his career is when he had the flexibility to do the job the way he wanted to do it."

He said Salem has a high degree of self-discipline and "always wants to do what's right and ethical and moral. He's about as straight a shooter as you can possibly get."

Salem, a Republican, supported JAX Chamber President Daniel Davis in the mayor's race. Voters instead chose Donna Deegan, a Democrat whose path to City Hall has parallels to Salem. Both are Jacksonville natives with Arabic heritage. When Deegan, whose family roots are from Lebanon, talked at her inauguration ceremony about big Arabic family gatherings centered around food, Salem said he knew exactly what she was talking about.

Both are fitness buffs. Deegan is well-known for running marathons. Salem, who lives in Arlington, rises at 4 a.m. daily and heads with his wife Nancy to the gym where his intense workout is geared to burn 755 cardio calories. Why 755? That's how many home runs his childhood hero Hank Aaron hit.

Deegan's second cousin Tommy Hazouri was the first Jacksonville mayor of Arabic heritage. While Hazouri was mayor, he hired Salem Salem, Ron Salem's uncle, as the city's public works director. Ron Salem has three grown children who all live in Jacksonville. His oldest child, Anthony, is a circuit court judge who administered the oath of office at his swearing-in ceremony.

Salem also has a family connection to Sam Mousa, the city's former chief administrative officer. Mousa's mother and Salem's mother were sisters.

Salem sometimes gets compared to Mousa, a hard-driving administrator with a reputation at City Hall for working long hours.

"I think he's a little off the charts compared to me sometimes, but there are some similarities in the way we conduct ourselves," Salem said. "You know, I look at this job as council president that I'm here for a year and I really want to get a lot done."

He said he's known Deegan for the past 20 to 25 years. They've met to talk about how they can work together, including a session Thursday in his council office. Salem said he was pleased to hear Deegan, who made public health a pillar of her campaign, talk at her inauguration about bringing down the city's high infant mortality rate, an issue he also has worked on.

"I think we're trying to find common ground," Salem said. "That's the easiest way to start, with health care being one of them."

He said he's interested in Deegan's ideas for working to reduce violent crime. Overall, he said the Deegan administration will need to make its case to City Council for what she wants to do.

"I'm open, but you've got to educate me, you've got to educate the council," Salem said. "We need to understand where we're putting this money and why we think it will work. That's important to me."

The last time City Hall had a Democrat in the mayor's office and a Republican-controlled City Council, Alvin Brown's relationship with the council increasingly frayed over his four years in office from 2011 to 2015.

Delaney said he thinks Deegan and Salem can have a productive partnership because at the local level of government, the issues "just aren't quite as partisan" as they are at the state and national level, with the possible exception of tax increases.

"He's somebody that will cooperate when there's grounds to cooperate," Delaney said and quoted the line from former New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia that there's "no Republican or Democratic way to pick up garbage."

Salem stakes out busy agenda for his year as council president

In Salem's case, the updated version of LaGuardia's quote might be there is no Republican or Democratic way to recycle garbage. He immersed himself in the topic of solid waste collection during his first term when the city suspended curbside recycling for months. He said during his time as council president, he wants to improve the city's recycling and composting programs to take pressure off the city's landfill.

Using his power as council president, he will create a special council committee that will examine moving the city jail out of downtown. Salem said one possibility the committee will explore is whether it would make sense to have a private company build a new jail and lease it back to the city so the city wouldn't pay the full cost upfront.

He said by having the City Council dive into all the facets of building a new jail, including location, he hopes it will create momentum toward actual work starting on a new jail in the next four years.

"The jail has been talked about in this community for years," Salem said. "It's over 30 years old. It's in bad condition. We need a new jail, so I decided we're going to move the jail forward."

Delaney said he thinks Salem will follow through on that goal.

"I anticipate the jail is going to happen," Delaney predicted. "He's someone who is just flat willing to persevere."

Salem also wants the city to move forward on negotiations with the Jaguars on a renovated football stadium and an extension of the team's lease to play at the city-owned stadium. He said he's confident the Deegan administration and the Jaguars can complete those negotiations and bring a deal to City Council during his one-year term as council president.

The Jaguars have pitched a stadium costing between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion packaged with development near the stadium for a total price of about $2 million, split equally between team owner Shad Khan and the city.

In a difference from how the Jaguars want to proceed, Salem said his preference would be for the city to engage first in negotiations on the stadium and then separately talk about development outside the stadium.

He said the city's robust economy is creating the kind of tax growth that can fund a major project like the stadium renovation within the city's existing tax rates. The latest figures show that at the current property tax rate, for instance, the city will gain $130 million more this year in property taxes, far above the historical trend of annual increases in the $50 million range.

"Fortunately, we are booming as a community," Salem said.

At his installation ceremony, Salem ticked off a list of other initiatives ("My sixth goal, and there's only a couple more," he said to laughter) that covered the opioid crisis, healthcare for the working poor, mental health treatment rather than jail for some offenders, regular meetings between City Council and the Duval County School Board, homelessness and affordable housing.

Along with those citywide issues, he said he wants to see three holes added at the Blue Cypress Golf Course in Arlington so Jacksonville University's golf team can use it and the First Tee program for youth can be expanded at the course. He said that will help the ongoing revitalization effort of the University Boulevard corridor in Arlington.

And he got the loudest round of applause by talking about a stadium that isn't the one where the Jaguars play.

Salem said historic J.P. Small Memorial Stadium, located off Myrtle Avenue in the Durkeeville neighborhood, is a "gem in this city." The renovations planned for the baseball stadium's field will bring it up to the standards of a Major League facility and enable it to host major high school and collegiate-level games.

For Salem, it's a project that resonates from his time growing up in the Murray Hill neighborhood. Before the days of round-the-clock sports coverage on television, Salem recalls surreptitiously listening to Atlanta Braves baseball games on a small transistor radio so his mother wouldn't know he was staying up instead of going to sleep on a school night.

His favorite player, Hank Aaron, played minor league baseball at J.P. Small Park in 1953. Salem sponsored legislation approved by the council in 2021 to name the field "Henry L. Aaron Field at J.P. Small Memorial Stadium."

The multimillion dollar renovation of the stadium will put up lighting that meets Major League Baseball standards, install artificial turf with Aaron's jersey number "44" stamped in the outfield like it is in the Atlanta Braves stadium, and enhance the park's museum that celebrates its historic ties to Negro League baseball teams.

"I hope this becomes one of those 'Field of Dreams' games the Major Leagues do," Salem said. "Can you imagine blocking off Myrtle Avenue and playing a Major League game there? It would be unbelievable."

For Salem, that kind of "Build it and they will come" result would be both a long way from playing neighborhood baseball games with pine trees marked as bases, and at the same time, a continuation of that chapter of his life.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville City Council President Ron Salem wants a year of action