Mayors of Jacksonville

Donna Deegan holds the office now. The City of Jacksonville describes her as the 45th mayor of the City of Jacksonville and the 9th mayor since the city's consolidation with Duval County in 1968. She was elected on May 16, 2023 and sworn in on July 1, 2023. Before her, the consolidated city had eight mayors in 55 years, a short list because Jacksonville gives its mayor four-year terms and the job has tended to go to people who already knew City Hall well: council presidents, legislators and longtime civic figures.

The older city, before the 1968 merger with Duval County, had a much longer and more crowded roll. Two names from that era stand above the rest for staying power, John T. Alsop and Haydon Burns, and both left their names on downtown landmarks. The record below follows the office from those long pre-consolidation tenures through the 1968 merger to the present administration.

John T. Alsop holds the record by years. According to a 2022 Florida Times-Union history roundup, voters made him mayor for 18 years, from 1923 to 1937 and again from 1941 to 1945, and his seven terms are the longest mayoral run in Jacksonville's history. That is why the downtown span over the St. Johns River, the Main Street Bridge, which opened in 1941, was named for him in 1957. Earlier, Duncan U. Fletcher, who first won a City Council seat in 1887, served as mayor two times between 1893 and 1903 before 27 years in the U.S. Senate; Fletcher High School in Neptune Beach carries his name.

Haydon Burns holds the record for an unbroken run. The Florida Department of State says Burns, who moved to Jacksonville with his family in 1922, was elected mayor in 1949 and reelected four more times, becoming the longest-sitting chief executive in Jacksonville history. He left City Hall to become governor, serving from January 5, 1965 to January 3, 1967, a two-year term created when Florida moved its governor's race off the presidential cycle. Lou Ritter followed Burns as mayor from 1965 to 1967, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record. Burns's name has since faded from the skyline: the Times-Union notes that a downtown library named for him was renamed after the building was sold to the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, and the former City Hall annex that carried his name was imploded in 2019.

By the mid 1960s the old city government was in trouble. News4JAX summarized it in 2018: a financial crisis, a discredited school system, corruption scandals that saw 11 officials indicted, and 600 million gallons of raw sewage pumped into the St. Johns River every month. Duval voters approved consolidation in August 1967 by 65 to 35 percent, and the consolidated government took effect on October 1, 1968.

Hans Tanzler was the mayor in the middle of it. A Jacksonville native and former University of Florida basketball player, he was elected in 1967 as a supporter of consolidation. In July 1967 he told the Jacksonville Daily Record that he was completely in support of the plan ahead of the August 8 referendum, though he did not plan to campaign for it. The merger then cost him the office he had just won: at the city's 40th anniversary luncheon in 2008, the Daily Record reported that Tanzler had been one of dozens of officials who had to resign as part of the restructuring. He returned as mayor of the consolidated government, so WJCT could call him both the last mayor under the old system and the first mayor of consolidated Jacksonville.

Tanzler used the new countywide revenue on downtown. News4JAX credits him with what became the downtown campus of Florida State College at Jacksonville and the Independent Life building, now the Wells Fargo Center, and above all with cleaning up the St. Johns River through sewage treatment, then water skiing on it to prove the point. He resigned in January 1979 to run for governor, and City Council President Jake Godbold was appointed to succeed him, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record.

In March 2007 Mayor John Peyton hosted six predecessors at a City Hall luncheon, and the Daily Record caption gave their terms: Lou Ritter (1965 to 1967), Hans Tanzler (1968 to 1979), Jake Godbold (1979 to 1987), Tommy Hazouri (1987 to 1991), Ed Austin (1991 to 1995) and John Delaney (1995 to 2003). Peyton served from 2003 to 2011, Alvin Brown from 2011 to 2015, Lenny Curry from 2015 to 2023, and Donna Deegan since July 1, 2023, which makes nine mayors of the consolidated city counting Tanzler.

Each left a different mark. Godbold, a 12-year council member before he became mayor, was noted for downtown redevelopment and the push to draw a professional football team, and the Jake M. Godbold City Hall Annex carries his name. Hazouri came from 12 years in the Legislature, served one four-year term from 1987, then sat on the Duval County School Board from 2004 to 2012 and on the City Council from 2015 until his death in 2021. Delaney championed a sales tax increase that paid for infrastructure, downtown facilities and the conservation of undeveloped land, then spent 15 years as president of the University of North Florida. Peyton became president of Gate Petroleum in 2012.

Mostly through gatherings and place names. In October 2008, Mayor Peyton marked the 40th anniversary of consolidation with a City Hall luncheon for more than 100 people, four former mayors among them, the Daily Record reported. General Counsel Rick Mullaney told the room that in the 1960s the schools were unaccredited and there was sewage in the river, and guests received copies of the book A Quiet Revolution, with a long line forming for Tanzler, then 81, to sign it.

Tanzler's later career and memorials fill in the picture. Before City Hall he practiced law and became a judge, and his 1978 run for governor ended in a seven-way Democratic primary won by Bob Graham, according to the Daily Record. A 2010 ceremony put his name on part of Interstate 295, and his 2013 funeral was held at St. John's Cathedral on East Church Street downtown. When he died, Mayor Alvin Brown called him a tireless advocate for local education, downtown development and the St. Johns River.

Party lines moved in 1995, when Delaney became the first Republican elected mayor of Jacksonville in 107 years, according to the Times-Union. In 2011 Alvin Brown became the city's first African American mayor and the first Democrat to hold the job in 20 years. He served one term. On May 19, 2015, Lenny Curry beat him in a runoff, making Brown only the second incumbent mayor to lose since consolidation, the Jacksonville Daily Record reported; Brown conceded to supporters gathered along the Northbank Riverwalk.

Curry won that runoff 51 to 49 percent and was reelected outright in March 2019 with 58 percent, according to Ballotpedia News, which noted in January 2023 that Jacksonville was then the most populous American city with a Republican mayor. Term-limited in 2023, Curry was followed by Deegan, a former First Coast News anchor and founder of the DONNA Foundation, who won the May 16, 2023 runoff. The city lists her administration's focus as infrastructure, public health and economic development. Last verified: October 9, 2026, on the City of Jacksonville website.