JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Lenny Curry's first inauguration was in 2015, but someone stole the spotlight.
His son, who was just 10 back then.
Apparently, Boyd wasn't too thrilled about wearing a tie. "It was a complete meltdown," Molly Curry remembers. "The kids were tired."
Mom figured a little bubble gum couldn't hurt. Now the scrapbook photo is a fun memory.
Zip ahead to 2023. Curry's two terms as Jacksonville's mayor are about to end. Donna Deegan will take over the mayor's job come July.
First Coast News sat down with the outgoing mayor to ask him questions about his time in office.
Highlights from our FCN interview:
FCN: Would you rather be Governor Curry or U.S. House Representative Curry?
Curry: (He answers immediately.) "Governor." He says he has no plans right now to run. But why Tallahassee over Capitol Hill? He says he wants to make executive decisions.
FCN: What stands out to you from the pandemic?
Curry: "What I'm really proud of is once we better understood what we were dealing with we started to open things up that we believed we safe as quickly as we could. The Beaches. We got much criticism all over national news. They mocked us and made fun of us. Turns out we were right."
FCN: But any decision you made during the COVID shutdown you'd change?
Curry: "I think the masking went a little too long in Jacksonville. I just wish I'd pulled them earlier. But at the time I didn't have all the information and data."
The mayor says the decisions were hard because the science was just coming in. He says so much was "unknown." He talks about when so many of us wiped down packages from Amazon because we worried about how the virus could be transmitted.
FCN: Do you wish you'd vetted Aaron Zahn better back in 2015?
Curry: "What I wish I had done is I wish I had engaged someone like the (Jacksonville) Civic Council or another third party group separate from city government and said you guys study the issue and you guys come back with recommendations. But what's done is done."
(This question refers to the JEA corruption case now in federal court. Prosecutors say former JEA CEO Zahn planned to pocket 40 million dollars in a scheme to sell the city's utility.)
FCN: Do you think you'll get rid of that stain or bruise from the JEA scandal on your legacy?
Curry: "It doesn't bother me. I acted with good intention, good faith."
FCN: Talk about Eureka Gardens. Part of your legacy?
According to former Jacksonville City Council member Garrett Dennis, "Eureka Gardens is probably the biggest accomplishment of his eight years in office."
Curry: Initially, people inside his administration were warning him to avoid the issue, saying "What other can of worms are we going to open? It's a large city."
But, he said, "I don't care. The emails I was getting were heartbreaking."
Curry went to the HUD development himself to see the awful living conditions. He rallied help from U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and reached across party lines. "I got to the Obama administration," he says.
He pushed for change. Dennis says, "Numerous people came together to make change for the residents who needed us most."
FCN: Talk about what it's like being mayor during our hurricanes.
Curry: "You're all alone in your decisions. It's all yours. And people's lives are on the line." He says making the decision to order evacuations carries with it a lot of stress. If it turns out not to be necessary, people don't forget. Then the next time evacuations are ordered, people might decide to stay home. And that could be the killer storm.
"It's scary to think what could happen," Curry says. He has a team of weather experts but the decisions are on his shoulders. He says, "There are no scientists saying you have to evacuate."
FCN: You received high praise for hiring a CRO, a Chief Resilience Officer, Anne Coglianese. But Jacksonville was the last major city in Florida to take that action.
Jacksonville had the CRO position fully funded through a Rockefeller Foundation grant, as part of the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative. But the Curry Administration dropped out of the program in January 2016. The program gave 30 some cities one million each to address extreme weather crime and sea level rise.
FCN: Do you wish you had hired a CRO years ago instead of in your second term?
Curry: "I don't." He says city experts were already working on plans. Plus, he says, the grant came with strings the city couldn't afford.
"When I tell you we literally had no money to spend when I got into office, here's an example. The infrastructure budget the year before I came into office was 20 million dollars. My last infrastructure budget was over 300 million dollars," he says.
FCN: Out of all your accomplishments for Jacksonville, what was the one which helped the city the most? Your legacy?
Curry: "By far, pension reform because we were broke...Nothing happens without that. Nothing. And it's not a sexy issue."
FCN: As for the next mayor?
Curry says, "The next administration may change what I did. They're going to have a very difficult time doing it... We took new hires out of the traditional pension plans. If they come back it will cost the city over 800 million dollars."
Mayor-elect Donna Deegan says her administration will track the data and study the impact. Will she bring back pensions for new hires instead of the 401k-type of plan Curry created?
Deegan says, "I'm hearing from police and firefighters they are concerned about the level of retention. Other communities have defined benefits and they might have an advantage over Jacksonville. People get trained up here and go off and get pensions other places."
On a personal note, Molly Curry opened a family scrapbook to show us photos from his inauguration times. One shows the Curry family on a church pew in prayer.
The church, she says, was right there for them. "They called us and said prayers for our whole family."
And for eight years as mayor, Curry says, his faith is important to him. "My yoke is easy. I love that verse," Curry says. (Matthew 11:30)
Mayor Curry recently lost his father, Roy. He sent us a photo of the two of them and asked that we say, "In loving memory."
We're told the two were quite close, and his father died unexpectedly.
No doubt family is important to Curry. He volunteered to talk about his first tattoo.
"My first tattoo," he explains, has a '''C' for Curry, 'B' cubed for the kids, and 'ML' for my wife and a cross for my faith." His three children's names all begin with 'B.'
Asked if his wife loves his tattoo, he laughs a bit and says, "No."
Curry says looking back over the last eight years, he's learned how rough social media can be. "If you look on social media, you think everybody hates each other." And he's taken criticism for his bold comments on Twitter.
But he says, "I don't think I've had three negative experiences with people in Jacksonville in person."
And he credits his wife for keeping their children "grounded."
Molly says they've made a strong effort to take their children to events, such as serving holiday meals to the homeless, supporting Rethreaded, the non-profit working to give new lives to victims of human trafficking, and giving toys to underserved children.
What will Mayor Curry do when his second term of mayor ends?
"My oldest is going to college and my other two are in high school. I need some real family time," Curry says.
And that could include an anniversary trip. Curry says he and Molly have been married 20 years this January. And she's an excellent trip planner.
