Overdevelopment in St. Johns County, Florida, is on the horizon if conservative, America First candidates do not win, St. Johns County Republican chair Denver Cook said on Breitbart News Saturday days ahead of the primary races.
St. Johns County, he said, is “one of the fastest growing counties in Florida and maybe the United States,” and with that, developers are building thousands and thousands of homes every year.
“There’s a lot of money at stake for them, and they have been … granted more authority over our county elected officials and the citizens, and the citizens are not being heard,” he said, noting that the development is “moving at a pace which is unsustainable for both our county government and our school districts and has created significant challenges in our infrastructure” as well as their debt.
While it is a bit unconventional to do so, these dire circumstances led the St. Johns County GOP to unleash their own endorsements. Every single one of the candidates they endorsed, Cook said, are “America First, MAGA grassroots candidates.”
“They’re not funded. They’re looking to try to restore responsiveness, accountability and transparency in government, not the federal level, but at the state and the local level,” he explained, going into detail at what is at stake for the red county this primary election cycle.
“What’s at stake locally is if these incumbent candidates for commissioner lose their races and are replaced by our grassroots candidates, development will be slowed until the infrastructure can handle it,” he said.
“And at stake for the funders and supporters, financial backers of the incumbents is hundreds of millions of dollars in development that will be slowed. It’s not a small thing. We’re up again in one instance, an expansion of one development of 5,600 homes. The county staff said we shouldn’t do this. The commissioners approved it. That expansion, according to one of the incumbents in an interview, put $56 million of road impact costs on the taxpayers,” he said, providing an example.
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“So how much as a developer would you be willing to pay for a positive vote against the advisement to county staff that saved you $56 million in road county road improvements. There’s no amount of money. I believe that, you know, if they spent $30 million to preserve that ability, it would have been a worthwhile investment. So that’s what’s at stake for the factors of these well-funded candidates, locally as well as the state level and the national level,” Cook said, noting “they want business as usual” where the well-connected and insiders thrive.
“And those of us who are considered the outside, grassroots, you know, citizens and citizen servants are on the outside. We’re all faced with the negative impacts of what we have seen just from this county commission, from you know, to try to help offset some of these behaviors,” he added.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.