Julie Ward Bujalski's legacy — and the standard she set

By Jeremy Reynolds

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I've had the pleasure of knowing five Dunedin mayors: Manny Koutsaris, Bob Hackworth, Dave Eggers, Julie Ward Bujalski, and Moe Freaney. Each of them left a mark. But Julie is the one I argued with the most, and I've come to understand that this is the highest compliment I can pay her.

She served this city from 2006 — first as a commissioner, then two terms as vice mayor, then three terms as mayor beginning in November 2014, when she became the first woman to hold the office in 26 years. She left in November 2024. That's eighteen years of showing up.

## What she said she'd do

I remember two commitments specifically, because I heard her make them and then watched what happened.

The first was the Dunedin Causeway. For years the fear in this town was that the county would replace our drawbridge with something like the Belleair Causeway — a high fixed span that would take our recreation, our fishing, and the whole character of that stretch of water and trade it for engineering convenience. Julie said she would stand up to the county on that. She did. As vice mayor she got the engineering study accelerated and pushed for Dunedin residents to have input on the design. As mayor she was in the room at the county commission when the vote got delayed, and she was the one pointing out that the project still had to survive federal NEPA review. The county eventually landed on a mid-level movable bridge — the option Dunedin residents actually wanted, and the most expensive one on the table. That outcome was not inevitable. A cheaper fixed span was sitting right there.

The second was the Blue Jays. When she took office in late 2014, the team was shopping. They had explored a shared complex with the Nationals. Our facilities were the most basic in the Grapefruit League, with the ballpark and the training complex four miles apart. Losing them was a live possibility. Julie said she'd keep them here. Six years of negotiation later, Dunedin had a 25-year lease and a $100 million–plus overhaul of TD Ballpark and the player development complex, with the bulk of the money coming from county bed taxes, the state, and the Blue Jays themselves. The team that has never trained anywhere else still hasn't.

You can argue about whether those were the right priorities. That's a fair argument and I've been on both sides of it. What you can't argue is that she said what she was going to do and then went and did it.

## The sentence that got my vote

What actually got me to vote for her — twice — was one line. As I remember it: Dunedin should be an affordable place to live that's inclusive of all walks of life.

That's it. That's the whole pitch, and it was enough.

I'm not going to pretend that promise got kept. Look at what a house costs here now. Look at who can't afford to move back to the town they grew up in. Rents in this county have outrun wages, and no mayor of a 36,000-person city was going to reverse a regional housing market by force of will. But there's a difference between a goal you fall short of and a goal you never set. Julie set it, out loud, in public, and she let people measure her against it. That takes a kind of nerve that has gone out of fashion in local politics.

It's also worth remembering that when paid parking came to the commission, she was the only one who voted against it.

## The arguing

Here's the part that matters most to me.

I disagreed with Julie plenty. Some of those conversations got unpleasant. I often found her overbearing, and I'd guess she found me something similar. But she would take the meeting. She would sit across from a resident who thought she was wrong and go three rounds on it. She didn't route you to staff, she didn't run out the clock on your three minutes at the podium, and she didn't pretend to agree with you to make you go away.

That is not a small thing, and I don't think most people appreciate how rare it is. A mayor who will fight with you is a mayor who is actually reachable. You always knew where the disagreement was and who was going to be in it. You could bring a concern and get a real answer, even when the answer was no.

I miss it. I didn't expect to, but I do.

## What comes next

We haven't had a real donnybrook in Dunedin since — no paid parking fight, no development proposal that pulled a hundred angry people into a chamber. It's tempting to read that as progress.

I'd read it more carefully than that. Some of that quiet is the result of personnel decisions made during Julie's tenure, which changed who was generating proposals in the first place. That kind of peace is inherited, not built, and it lasts exactly as long as the people who created it stay in their chairs.

Quiet isn't the same as settled. The causeway bridges still have to get built, and the county is chasing federal money to do it. Affordability is worse than when she named it as the goal. Our downtown economy is more exposed to Canadian travel patterns than most people here want to admit.

So the question for the current commission isn't whether things are calm. It's whether they'll say out loud what they intend to do, and then let us hold them to it.

That's the standard Julie set. It's a higher bar than it sounds.

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*Jeremy Reynolds is a Dunedin resident, a former chair of the city's Committee on Environmental Quality and Sustainability, and a co-author of Dunedin's sustainability master plan. He currently serves on the code enforcement board. The views here are his own.*