New commission chair sets priorities

The new chair of Clay County’s board of county commissioners said her top priority for the new year is drafting a strategic plan for the county.

“We’ve never had an official strategic plan,” Betsy Condon said. “The county manager and I have had a number of conversations about it.”

Condon said last year’s chair, Wayne Bolla laid the groundwork for a strategic plan by holding workshops dealing with each commissioner’s priorities.

“I think that for 2023, we really want to focus on solidifying a real strategic plan for Clay County and the direction we’re going to go in the future.”

Condon said the document laying out a vision for the county and steps to achieve commissioners’ goals had been a desire of county Manager Howard Wanamaker. 

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“And it’s been a goal of mine since I was elected,” Condon added. “I ran on that in 2020.”

The new chair said business owners have complained to her about a lack of vision for the county, and residents have criticized commissioners for reacting to new business formations rather than setting an agenda for economic growth.  

Said Condon: “I’ve heard from business owners, and they’ll say: ‘I don’t know where to go to see what Clay County wants to be.’”

“People say all the time:” she added, ‘I don’t want to see another mini-storage warehouse or carwash.’ And so, I think that one of our roles as the economic drivers of the county, not that we’re necessarily going to go out and find these businesses, but to publicly say we want to bring jobs to Clay County. We don’t necessarily need more residential dwellings.”

The commissioner added that she hopes to begin the transformation of the county from a bedroom community that provides housing for Jacksonville workers into more of an employment center in its own right.  

Condon was first elected in 2020 to complete the final two years of Gavin Rollins’s four-year term. Rollins resigned because of a National Guard deployment to Washington.

Earlier this year, Condon was reelected to a four-year term, and her colleagues selected her as chair of the board of county commissioners in November.

Broadband and dirt roads

During her first two years, Condon focused on broadband internet access and road maintenance and construction.

She said those are two dominant issues facing residents in her rural, western Clay County district that stretches from Maxville to Melrose.

She said she continues to focus on those issues, monitoring a $2 million county-funded project to expand broadband access to underserved residents in Clay Hill, Middleburg, and Keystone Heights.

Condon said she is also looking for additional funding opportunities to expand internet access into more of the county’s rural areas like McRae, Penny Farms and Virginia Village.

As for road improvements, the commissioner said the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization recently agreed to take on and fund a dirt road study for the county.

“They’re coming back with a proposed solution to improve those roads,” she said. “Some of that will be paving, but some of that will not necessarily be paving. Some of it will be drainage improvements or things like that. It will really give us a true picture of what we’re currently spending to maintain those dirt roads.”

Condon said St. Johns and Nassau Counties recently completed similar studies and decided to issue bonds to pave the dirt roads within their jurisdictions.

“We may choose to do something like that,” Condon said.  “That’s one of my long-term goals for my time in office: to see meaningful improvement of dirt roads that we have never seen in our end of the county. I have people who tell me, ‘I was told 40 years ago my road would get paved.’ We can’t keep kicking that can down the dirt road.”