Coup d' Cove: Clay County Seat Vulnerable to 'Foreign' Takeover

Bunch of Crazy Sailors Constitute 'Shadow Group,' Chambless Says

And the next thing you know, they had made it into a movie featuring the three newest members of the City Council. (No, this is not a real movie poster, just a fanciful illustration.)

If Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen got high and wrote sci-fi, maybe he’d come up with a plot that reads like this:

Thanks to an accident of commerce, combined with a quirk in Florida voting laws, a block of 2,842 people executes a slow-moving coup to achieve control of a small town on the St. Johns River. They are mostly cruising boaters but also RVers, traveling nurses, expatriates abroad, etc.

Their first order of business is to shake up the police department, issuing new uniforms. Gone are the blue and the battle-rattle. Welcome to Officer Friendly: Hawaiian shirt, ballcap, cargo shorts and flip-flops. Officers drive tie-dyed-motif squad cars.

Theoretically Possible

Supervisor of Elections Chris Chambless calls them a “shadow group.” They are “cruisers,” and the thing that has kept them from taking over the Clay County Seat is a complete lack of interest in doing so.

So far.

These aren’t people who vacation on cruise ships. They are folks who live aboard boats like the ones anchored off the Green Cove waterfront. They live a gypsy lifestyle, traveling America’s waterways. And they are here among us in great numbers—at least on paper.

First, let’s consider a simple statistic: Green Cove Springs, Florida, has more registered voters than people living here who are over 18 years old.

Though technically a city, Green Cove has a population more representative of small-town America, only about 10,000 people. We have a park, a pool, a pier and one major intersection. The city is the seat of Clay County government.

Applying a demographic rule-of-thumb indicates that the number of people over 18 here is somewhere between 7,800 and 8,100. Yet, according to the Clay County Supervisor of Elections, it has 8,611 registered voters.

Election fraud? Nope. Not here, not now, not ever, Chambless says.

The truth is that 2,842 of the city’s voters don’t really live here, and that’s legally okay. Some have only been here long enough in person to get a picture taken for their Florida driver’s license. They are mostly those travelers living on sailboats and trawlers and RV “land yachts.”

They all share the same address: 1063 Bulkhead Road, Green Cove Springs. That’s the address for Reynolds Park Yacht Center, which has a 75-slip marina and small lot for RVs.

Forwarding Service

St. Brendan’s Isle is a local mail forwarding service. Many, if not most of it’s roughly 10,000 clients are living aboard boats. The others include various categories of traveler—a lot of RV people.

For those not familiar with St. Brendan’s, not only does their friendly staff forward mail to wherever in the world you happen to be, but they also have a neat trick to spare you that expense. Every piece of mail gets scanned so you can look at the envelope online the same day. Check a box and they will scan the contents and post them to your account as a PDF the next day—something the Postal Service should have thought of—all at a reasonable price.

So many cruisers’ boat cards display the same 411 Walnut Street address.

Pertinent to this story, St. Brendan’s also provides an address from which to vote for folks who don’t own or rent a home in the U.S.

St. Brendan’s used to be on Walnut Street in downtown Green Cove, but the space became too small to accomodate the growing number of client mailboxes, so the company moved to a nearby commercial park outside the city, while convincing the local post office to keep the same Walnut Street address, thus sparing thousands of people from having to tell all their correspondents and subscription providers to send stuff to a new place.

Then, in 2018, the hammer came down. Chambless at the elections office launched an investigation into the 411 Walnut Street voter rolls, citing a June 2018 ruling by the state Division of Elections:

Customers of a private mail forwarding service who attempt to establish legal residency in a county by filing a Declaration of Domicile that fails to list a residential address or that lists a nonresidential address at which they do not reside and who have no other meaningful contact with the county other than using the services of this enterprise in the county to receive mail, secure a Florida driver license or Florida identification card, and obtain a license plate, or hull number for a boat, without having a past or present physical presence and intent to establish permanent residency in the county is not sufficient to establish residency for voter registration purposes and are most likely not legal residents of the county.

The Deal

St. Brendan’s managing owner Scott Loehr saw this as an existential threat to his business. He hired lawyer-lobbyist Rob Bradley, reputedly the most politically powerful individual here in Clay County. St. Brendan’s came within an inch of filing a lawsuit before a settlement was reached, and it involved Reynolds Park Yacht Center.

Chambless picks up the story:

St. Brendan’s Isle secured legal representation and subsequently expanded their services to include “Club Isle at Reynolds Park Yacht and RV Center (Club Isle)” giving Club Isle members unlimited use of the Reynolds facilities, where members will reside in their RV or vessel while conducting their business affairs and living in Clay County. As such, this establishment of physical address gives the individuals access to all elections within their assigned precinct.

So, now there are 2,842 people residing at 1063 Bulkhead Road, a roadway without a single home on it.

So, you may be starting to see how these folks—35 percent of the electorate—could organize and easily tilt elections. But it’s even worse (or better, depending on your viewpoint), as you will learn reading below.

Coup d’ Cove

Back in 2018, while covering the issue for the boating magazine PassageMaker, the author of this story was told that part of the deal restricted Bulkhead Road people to only voting in state and national contests; they could not cast ballots in local elections. Loehr at St. Brendan’s and Ted McGowan, director at Reynolds Yacht Center, believed the same thing until we spoke this week.

All three of us had been wrong.

So, for the past eight years, even the participants hadn’t realized the true significance of the agreement that had been reached. Calling it an “unintended consequence,” Chambless says the cruisers and RVers had been empowered to dominate Green Cove elections, at least theoretically.

“What was alarming to me was, here Green Cove Springs just got a host of voters out of the blue,” he says.

The reality came to light because one of this year’s candidades for City Council, Tom Centracchio, had noticed that dozens of 1063 Bulkhead Road voters had cast mail-in ballots in the 2025 city election. A little more than 500 people had voted in that contest. A previous city election had seen about 900 cast ballots.

These small totals reveal just how susceptible Green Cove would be to a “foreign” takeover. The city is run by a five-person city council, so it might take two or three election cycles, but once the Shadow Group held three of five seats, they would effectively hold the keys to the castle.

As of now, according to Chambless, 448 voters have signed up for mail-in ballots for the April 14 city election. This number is probably enough to decide the outcome.

However, these folks are probably not thinking about this local election specifically. It’s likely that many of them had signed up for ballots in the 2024 presidential election and checked an option that covered a period through to the 2026 mid-terms, Chambless says.

There are only two items on the April 14 Green Cove ballot. One is the race in which Centracchio is challenging incumbent Ed Gaw for his council seat. Ironically, the other is to decide whether the city manager will be required to reside within city limits.