Weeks after JEA hired a retired director to serve as its interim CEO, the city-owned utility announced May 28 that it is bringing back another former leader at JEA for an executive position.
Jody L. Brooks will be JEA’s chief administrative officer beginning June 3, the utility said in a news release.
Brooks was JEA’s CAO from 2021 to 2023 after being JEA’s first chief legal officer from 2016 to 2019.
In her 2019 departure, she cited difficulties working with CEO Aaron Zahn, who would later be convicted in federal court of deceiving the JEA board into putting the utility up for sale and approving an incentive plan that would have paid Zahn tens of millions of dollars in undeserved bonuses.
The announcement came on the heels of the JEA board’s April 15 vote to hire Vickie Cavey as interim CEO and managing director. The vote came on the same day that the board accepted CEO Jay Stowe’s resignation.
Cavey has twice come out of retirement to return to JEA, first in 2020 and then in March 2024 as an adviser and staff liaison for the board. In March, her duties included helping the board examine JEA’s organizational structure and capital improvement plan.
“As we transition to a renewed vision for JEA, it is critically important that our leadership team can depend on someone with Jody’s sound municipal utility insights and judgment, not to mention her deep institutional knowledge of JEA itself,” Cavey said in the release.
On May 21, the board approved a one-year contract for Cavey to serve as interim CEO. The contract, including an annual salary of $560,000 and up to $2,850 in monthly allowances for vehicle use and business expenses, came amid an investigation by the city’s Office of Inspector General about whether Cavey’s selection violated state open government law and whether she met a requirement in JEA’s charter for five years of executive experience for the CEO role.
During her career with JEA, Cavey held such positions as special assistant to the CEO for external affairs, director of strategy development and execution and director of strategic partnerships and acquisitions.
Brooks handled JEA’s legal matters for the city Office of General Counsel from April 2013 to March 2019. During the last three years of that period, she was chief legal officer for the utility.
After resigning in 2019, Brooks worked in the county attorney’s office in Clay County for two years. During the past year she ran a private legal practice in Orange Park, JEA said.
In her role as CAO, Brooks will lead oversight of the utility’s infrastructure protection and compliance, audit services, corporate records retention and other areas. She will also work with the OGC.
Brooks has a law degree from the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law and a bachelor’s degree in business from Jacksonville University.
In an interview connected to a special Council committee’s investigation into allegations of wrongdoing by Zahn, Brooks said she left JEA partly because she believed Zahn was not qualified to run JEA and because he would not pay attention to her legal advice.
A summary of the interview says Brooks thought her reputation could be ruined if she stayed at JEA, and applied for the Clay County position the day after Zahn became the long-term CEO in November 2019.
In March 2024, a jury found Zahn guilty of federal wire fraud and conspiracy charges. A co-defendant, former JEA chief financial officer Ryan Wannemacher, was found not guilty by a separate jury.