T.K. Waters unopposed in spring election, will get full term as Jacksonville sheriff

Barely two months after taking office, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters retained his job unchallenged for a full four-year term as the qualifying deadline for Duval County’s spring elections passed Friday.

Property Appraiser Jerry Holland locked up a return role as the county’s supervisor of elections and Tax Collector Jim Overton retained his seat with no opposition while three political veterans squared off to compete for the open appraiser’s job.

Term-limited City Council members Danny Becton and Joyce Morgan and former School Board member and state Rep. Jason Fischer all qualified to run for appraiser, a post Holland will vacate at the June 30 end of his second term.

The race is the only contest for a constitutional officer’s job in an election cycle dominated by the competition to replace Mayor Lenny Curry and last-minute changes to council district boundaries.

Waters had faced the prospect of a challenge for the sheriff’s post last week, when retired assistant chief Lakesha Burton filed initial campaign paperwork for a rematch of the runoff race she lost to Waters in November. Voters in that race chose someone to fill the rump term created by former Sheriff Mike Williams vacating his job when he moved out of the county before he was scheduled to leave office.

But Burton said last week that she wasn’t sure she would again challenge Waters, who won handily two months ago.

At a news conference this week, Burton said she’d decided that “the single most important thing right now is for our sheriff to be focused on making our city safer and not focused on a campaign. A campaign that, quite frankly, I cannot win.”

The appraiser’s race will pit Morgan, a Democrat and retired television news anchor, against two Republicans in a March 21 unitary election where all voters choose between candidates regardless of political affiliation. If no one gets a majority of the votes, a runoff will be held May 16.

Morgan, who represents Arlington’s Council District 1, has celebrated her role as the first African-American and first female candidate for the appraiser’s seat, saying on social media “I am so excited to be on the ballot.”

Becton represents council District 11 in southeastern Jacksonville. A retired business owner and former Winn-Dixie employee, he’d been an advocate on neighborhood issues and a member of a neighborhood planning committee and a city fiscal commission before joining the council.

Fischer was a School Board member from 2012 to 2016, then was elected repeatedly to the Florida House of Representatives. He has consciously aligned himself with Gov. Ron DeSantis, touting him on Twitter as the “Greatest Governor in #America!“ and celebrating DeSantis’s endorsement of him in the appraiser’s race.

Holland is returning to an elections job he held from 2005 until 2015, then vacated after the Florida Supreme Court said voter-approved term limits apply to Jacksonville constitutional officers. Overton left the appraiser’s job in 2015 because of that ruling and won a 2018 race to fill a vacant post as tax collector, then won his first full term there in 2019.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 3 vie for appraiser's job as qualifying ends for Duval County elections