JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Camille Lee-Johnson, the only remaining JEA board member who voted at the July 23, 2019, meeting who has not yet testified at the trial of former JEA executives Aaron Zahn and Ryan Wannemacher, invoked her Fifth Amendment right 26 times during a hearing to determine whether she and two other witnesses would be allowed to testify in front of the juries at the trial.
Last weekend, prosecutors filed an additional witness list with three names: former JEA HR executive Jon Kendrick, former JEA chief administrative officer Herschel Vinyard, and Lee-Johnson. The purpose of Friday’s hearing was to determine whether the testimony these witnesses were going to offer was impacted in any way by something the witnesses may have learned from statements that Zahn and Wannemacher gave to city attorneys in January 2020. The statements were given as part of an investigation into whether Zahn could be fired with cause, and later posted online as public record. But, due to the nature of the investigation, the statements can’t be used against them in a criminal proceeding. The hearing was also to determine whether the witnesses would be allowed to testify, despite being added late to the government’s witness list. Juries were not present for Friday’s hearing.
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Lee-Johnson had been the chair of the JEA board’s compensation committee in June 2019, when the committee approved a long-term incentive plan that was presented to the board the following month. In questioning Friday morning, Lee-Johnson confirmed she was on the board in 2019, and confirmed her position as chair of the compensation committee. However, when prosecutors began to ask more specific questions, such as about her role as a board member, what the ITN, or invitation to negotiate, was, or whether she was administrator of the performance unit plan, Lee-Johnson invoked her Fifth Amendment right.
As prosecutors played a portion of the video of the July 23, 2019 board meeting where the performance unit plan was approved, Lee-Johnson did identify two other board members seen in the video, April Green and Alan Howard, as well as Wannemacher. When asked to identify if it was Lynne Rhode, JEA’s chief legal counsel, sitting to her right, Lee-Johnson said she didn’t recall her name, but did acknowledge she was a lawyer from the city’s Office of General Counsel.
When prosecutors showed Lee-Johnson presentations from the June 18, 2019 compensation committee meeting, which she chaired, she said she didn’t recognize them, and that she didn’t know one way or the other if they were presented at that meeting. The subsequent question, where prosecutors asked if she recalled anything about that meeting, was one of the 26 instances where she invoked her Fifth Amendment right.
The final questions from prosecutors all involved the potential for large payouts under the bonus plan if JEA were sold, as they asked if she was trying to help JEA executives become wealthy by passing the resolution authorizing the plan, if she supported substantial payouts to the executives, and if she supported Zahn getting a performance unit plan bonus of up to $40 million. In each of those instances, Lee-Johnson invoked her Fifth Amendment right.
On Thursday, Lee-Johnson’s attorney had filed a motion outlining that she intended to invoke her Fifth Amendment right and asking that she be excused from being forced to appear in person to do so. The motion explains that in early 2020, Lee-Johnson was the CEO of a family-owned business that operates restaurants from Virginia to Florida. It states that her time as a JEA board member, from July 2018 to March 2020, was “quickly forgotten” when she resigned to focus on ensuring her family’s business could survive as the COVID-19 pandemic impacted its operations. The motion also states that in the summer of 2020, she voluntarily participated in an interview with state and federal investigators, without an attorney present. Attorneys argued that a six-page report of the interview prepared by FBI agents made it clear that there were several things that happened in 2019 concerning the JEA board, that Lee-Johnson did not remember. It also references that she appeared before the federal grand jury investigating JEA in April 2021, though the substance of what she told the grand jury are redacted from the publicly available version of the motion, as grand jury proceedings are secret. A brief hearing Thursday afternoon resulted in the judge determining that Lee-Johnson would be required to appear Friday morning to invoke her Fifth Amendment right in person.
Prior to Lee-Johnson’s appearance on the witness stand, the judge heard from Jon Kendrick, who was JEA’s vice president and chief human resource officer in 2019. During the July 23 board meeting, he gave a short presentation about the utility’s total compensation strategy, before Ryan Wannemacher presented on the PUP itself. Kendrick testified he did not have any role in preparing the resolution that the board voted on to approve the PUP, and that at the time, he knew nothing about the volume of payouts that could have occurred under the plan, had a sale of JEA resulted in the city getting $4-6 billion.
The final witness Friday morning was Herschel Vinyard, who was the utility’s chief administrative officer from April 2019 to the summer of 2020. Vinyard, a lawyer who also served as the head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection under Gov. Rick Scott, was questioned about his efforts to get the proposed bonus plan reviewed by lawyers, including sending a letter to Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, requesting an opinion. That opinion was never delivered, Vinyard explained, because Moody’s office was notified the PUP had been pulled and there wasn’t a need to respond.
During earlier testimony in the trial, Vinyard was quoted as saying people would “light themselves on fire” if they learned of the bonus plan. Friday, Vinyard was questioned directly about that, explaining that in a meeting with Zahn, he told him, “If you make one dollar off of this, the public will light themselves on fire,” adding that to him, it didn’t matter whether it was a dollar or a dime. Vinyard also testified that when he first learned of the proposed plan, it sounded to him like a stock plan, and believed that you couldn’t have stock in a government agency.
Monday, prosecutors intend to call Kendrick and Vinyard to testify before the juries, before resting their case. Zahn’s attorneys plan to begin their defense by calling an accounting expert to the witness stand.