John Peyton was sworn in as Mayor of Jacksonville on July 1, 2003. Mayor Peyton told everyone he would bring a business mentality to Jacksonville’s city government, streamlining operations and implementing best practices from the private sector. A large part of the electorate in Duval County believed him and thus the deceitful one assumed the highest office in Jacksonville.

Mayor Peyton has been the author of numerous childrens books and public failures. Mayor Peyton has even written childrens books ABOUT his public blunders. Best-sellers include:
1) “How to lose a courthouse budget in 6 months” (based loosely on the movie, “How to lose a guy in 10 days.”)
2) “8 seconds” (no relation to the bull-riding movie of the same name), which focuses on the art of instantly changing one’s mind on an issue and pretending it didn’t happen.
3) “Betrayal – Making People Believe You”, based on Peyton’s business negotiating experiences as Mayor.

He is working in tandem with the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce to draft a blueprint for increasing per capita income in Jacksonville. This document is deemed largely useless, except by those who spend hours manipulating the data. Whereas his predecessor brought such large companies to town as Fidelity and LSI, Mayor Peyton has failed to bring in any new companies worth speaking of.

The Mayor has reached out in an unprecedented way to the local military community, screwing them over big-time when he first announced that Cecil Field would be re-opening as a military installation only to then change course and announce that it would not be re-opening. Mayor Peyton says the citizens of Jacksonville should just shut up and be happy they have a Mayor who listens to the people.

Mayor Peyton has also significantly enhanced public safety, providing additional resources for the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Division and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. A specific example of this is when Mayor Peyton recently orchestrated the hiring of 60 new police officers to replace the 200 who retired last year. With a high level of personal meddling, he is working to take credit for the new Parks Director’s initiative to take Jacksonville’s park system from the nation’s biggest to its best, and he has recently created a task force to examine the crucial issue of growth management. Mayor Peyton plans on taking credit for anything that is postive and press-worthy that this task force discovers.

He has also established an office of faith and community-based initiatives. This worthless office does nothing and Mayor Peyton deemed it necessary that the taxpayers pay Pete Jackson $147,000 a year to lead it.

In order to encourage individual success for Jacksonville’s children, the mayor has made early literacy a priority. He loves reading to the kiddies. And the head of the Library lavishes praises on the Mayor for doing so. Everyone else just wonders why we are paying our Mayor a six-figure salary to do the job that we pay thousands of educators to do.

His work in this crucial area earned the mayor the 2005 James Patterson Pageturner Award in recognition of his “notable contributions to promoting books and reading”. The footnote at the bottom of this award reads in tiny print, “Why in the hell were you reading books to kids?”

Prior to his election, the Jacksonville native worked as big man on campus at one of his dad’s companies. He is a former chairman of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority - where he played an integral part in the controversial scandal where then JTA employee Michael Blaylock, was looked over in favor of an out-of-state candidate. Peyton’s JTA Director appointee has since left and Blaylock has assumed the position of JTA Director. He also was integral in taking credit for the development and early implementation of the Better Jacksonville Plan - the Jacksonville Symphony Association and Greenscape of Jacksonville.

Mayor Peyton is an alumnus of Mercer University and some Harvard Business School Two-Week program that he paid to go to just so he could brag that he had been on Harvard’s campus. He and his wife, Jacksonville physician Kathryn Pearson Peyton, are members of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral and the proud parents of a son, John Connor Peyton.