Armed with facts and charm, Kristin Jacobs was a principled political force in Broward County | Rosemary O’Hara
Original Article: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-op-com-kristin-jacobs-rosemary-ohara-20200411-jwugiwzlnbhavgo54wr4yf7mr4-story.html [sun-sentinel.com]
Published April 11, 2020
Kristin. Say the name and many folks in Broward County know you’re talking about State Rep. Kristin Jacobs, whose death from cancer on Saturday leaves a gaping hole in our community’s heart.
Even if you disagreed with her, which didn’t happen often, it was impossible not to celebrate Kristin’s life force. She was just so charming and personable, with that open-face smile, that striking red hair and that passion to educate and explain to anyone and everyone why something was important and why you should care.
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Take the C-51 reservoir, for example. Oh, no. Your eyes didn’t just glaze over, did they?
Kristin would want you to know this water project is every bit as important as restoring the Everglades, re-plumbing the Kissimmee River, protecting coral reefs, preserving Florida’s freshwater springs, ending Lake Okeechobee’s toxic outflows, re-using treated wastewater, addressing sea-level rise and ending the global shark-fin trade.
I’ll never forget the day last June when she called to tell me about this hard-shelled rock mine in northwest Palm Beach County. She said it was a natural reservoir and could be a major new water source for South Florida. She reminded me how salt water has now crept underground more than six miles inland, contaminating drinking water wells in many coastal cities.
As her story unwound, I learned Kristin had been pushing this rock mine up a hill for nine years, and was close to assembling the coalition of local governments needed to make the financing work.
And that’s not all I learned.
I learned she was talking to me while lying flat on her back, where she’d been for four weeks, having undergone 14 hours of major reconstructive surgery for metastatic colorectal cancer. We’d previously talked about her diagnosis, and what it’s like to endure chemo and radiation. So it was maddening to hear that for over a year, her Miami doctor had overlooked a second tumor, requiring that she have a major re-plumbing of her own.
Another major life change
And that’s not all I learned, either.
Her longtime marriage to Stu Jacobs had sadly come to an end, but she’d started a joyful new life with Steven Vancore, a communications and politics pro. They both belonged to a mountain-biking group that rode trails over Tallahassee’s hills. Over time, feelings developed. I was one of the many people she was calling to tell.
“I had so many people I needed to tell,” she told me more recently. “Stu and I were married 28 years and had lots of friends in common. I thought they should hear it from me, that I should just be man enough to tell everyone rather than leave it to the whisper mill. I’m happy I did that. I wanted to preserve the love and respect for Stu that everybody had. He is such a good man.”
State Rep. Kristin Jacobs on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives in June 2015. Her cancer was diagnosed two years later.(courtesy/Florida House of Representatives/ photo by Mark Foley)
Over the past dark days, Stu and the couple’s three grown children — Rick Hames, Lauren Donaldson and Mitch Jacobs — joined Steve by Kristin’s bedside.
“I said, if we’re going to get divorced, you’ll just be my favorite relative,” Stu recalls. “And that’s what she was, my favorite relative.”
Stu was Kristin’s second husband. She met her first at 18 when she was living at home in San Diego. He was “super good looking” and always changing jobs and cities. He also was abusive, both physically and mentally. After about a dozen years, she found her way to Women in Distress, Broward’s shelter for battered women. Counselors helped Kristin and the kids get set up in an apartment.
Domestic violence, it’s personal
Kristin never hid the story of her abuse. In fact, she went public with it. She wanted people — women, especially — to see that abuse can happen to anyone and that it can be overcome.
Look at her, after all. A few short years after hitting rock bottom, Kristin was elected to the Broward County Commission, where she served for 16 years, including two terms as mayor. Then in 2014, she was elected to the Florida House of Representatives.
“Today, domestic violence is more of a mainstream issue, but think about it 20 or 25 years ago,” says Mary Riedel, director of Women in Distress. “It took a lot of courage for someone to come forward and share their experiences and do that with a view of trying to help others.”
Joined by Andy Cagnetta of Transworld Business Advisors, Rep. Kristin Jacobs helps paint a mural in the children's respite area at Women in Distress. Last week, the domestic violence center received a $29,847 donation from Kristin’s campaign.
At the height of the #MeToo movement in 2018, after two male lawmakers resigned in disgrace, Kristin and Sen. Lauren Book of Plantation tried to pass legislation to combat sexual harassment in the Florida Legislature. They proposed an easier way to report abuse and a task force to study what works. Legislative leaders said all the right things, then let the bill die. Kristin told me later that she felt she’d been manipulated.
Kristin, 60, always stayed connected to the women’s shelter. During a renovation, Riedel remembers her climbing a ladder to help paint the mural in the children’s respite center. Last week, Women in Distress received a $29,847 donation from Kristin’s campaign.
Her newspaper had clout
Kristin wanted to get involved in politics from the get-go, Stu said, “so she opened up a neighborhood newspaper, called The Banner” in North Andrews Gardens, now part of Oakland Park. It had a circulation of about 4,000 homes and a lot of people took notice of her, especially on the county commission, he said. “It was so amazing.”
Stu recalls Buddy Nevins, a former political writer for the Sun Sentinel, writing: “If you haven’t heard of Kristin Jacobs, you soon will.”
“Buddy was so cynical, but for some reason, he just liked her,” he said.
Stu said he remembers Buddy telling Kristin, "‘We’ll see what you’re like in another two or three years.’ But with Kristin, what you saw was what you got.”
Today, Kristin’s fingerprints are all over Broward County. One of her earliest projects, NatureScape Broward, encourages people to plant with natives, plant for wildlife and forego turf grass to protect water resources.
“She called impatiens the most politically incorrect plant in South Florida because they were such drivers for water demand,” recalls Jennifer Jurado, Broward’s chief resilience officer. “Her early career led to this impactful program that will always be here and represented in our landscape. And it’s beautiful.”
Climate compact, her big legacy
Kristin is most famous for a coalition she pulled together in 2008 after watching South Florida politicos lobby Congress on a federal climate bill, each with their own maps, charts and talking points.
“We have got to get our act together. This is not particularly effective,” Jurado recalls her saying. Kristin gathered everyone in a U.S. Capitol hallway and proposed a regional approach she knew would be far more effective.
The hallway huddle gave birth to the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, a ground-breaking collaborative that today encompasses Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County governments, plus 109 cities and two tribal governments.
From the compact has come a unified sea-level rise projection that informs regional building codes and seawall heights, an assessment of our vulnerabilities and greenhouse-gas emissions, and the model for similar collaboratives elsewhere in Florida. It also led President Obama to tap Kristin for two presidential task forces, one on climate and another on ocean policy.
At its annual meeting, held in Key West in December, the compact awarded Kristin its lifetime achievement award.
“She was so proud of the work of the compact,” recalls Susan Glickman, a clean-energy advocate who sat next to Kristin in the front row. “But despite all the important subject matter, at one point, Kristin leaned over to tell me she liked my matching purse and computer bag.”
Fitness, fashion and finesse
Kristin was a classy dresser, with a great fashion sense. Fitness was a priority, too. Sometimes when we would meet for lunch, she’d describe having just run six miles around the blimp base in Pompano Beach. And after her health challenges began, she missed those Tallahassee trail rides.
In the state Capitol, longtime political writer Steve Bousquet, now a member of the Sun Sentinel editorial board, says Kristin “should be remembered for sincerely trying to work across the aisle with Republicans, which is not an easy thing to do here.”
Indeed, Kristin’s third big issue — after water and domestic violence — was our political divide.
From where I sat, she faced an un-winnable position in the Florida House, where a veto-proof Republican majority doesn’t seem to care what Democrats think.
But Kristin didn’t see it that way.
“Things must be messaged in a certain way, with certain words used, or you further the divide,” she once told me. “If you’re a firebrand partisan and you’re not in the ruling party, your stuff isn’t going to be heard. If you’re reaching across the aisle, your bills will get in there and move.
“You can’t get all of what you want. Those who insist, end up with nothing.”
Compromise at a cost
But buying half a loaf can cost you political capital — and friendships.
“She tended to create a little space between herself and the more liberal members of the Democratic party,” recalls Frank Bernardino, a lobbyist on water issues.
“She was always very sensitive to, and spoke somewhat bitterly at times about, this notion that it’s all or nothing,” he said.
Near the end of her career, Kristin felt that some people in the environmental community had begun to turn their backs on her because she was perhaps too willing to compromise when they weren’t, he said.
My last conversation with Kristin, about a month ago, was about her shark-fin bill. For two years, she had been trying to ban the sale, import and export of shark fins, primarily to China, where shark fin soup is a delicacy. Florida law sets limits, but not enough to stop bad actors from whacking fins off sharks, then letting them drown.
From her hospital bed at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Kristin tried, unsuccessfully, to block an amendment that gives today’s fishermen a legal right to continue to sell and export shark fins. She settled for a ban on imports and a study. And she was disappointed when her hometown newspaper’s editorial board called for the bill to be vetoed.
In her final Sun Sentinel op-ed, she said “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
“She’s leaving exactly how she came in,” says lobbyist Ron Book. “She came in as that soccer mom environmentalist who was going to do it her way. She wasn’t part of any political machinery, she wasn’t part of anybody’s political anything.”
The day she took to the House floor to fight for her shark-fin bill, Kristin had an open stomach wound. Within months of that surgery last May, new tumors popped up and caused complications. She tried immunotherapy, which worked until it didn’t. A couple weeks ago, she and Steve spent some time at the beach. Days later, she took a turn for the worse.
“I talked to Steve last night,” Bernardino told me this week. “He told me that in her delirium, she broke out into a floor debate on water and why water was so important. Of course she would.”
‘Guys, I have to take this call.’
At Mayo, Steve recalls a team of people working on her stomach wound when Kristin said, “Guys, I have to take this call.” It was about the shark-fin bill.
One of her doctors asked why she was doing this. “You’re pretty sick,” he told her.
“This is the world I built and I love this and it keeps me going,” Steve recalls her saying.
Steven Vancore and Kristin Jacobs found their love for one another late in life. They didn't have much time, but as Steve says, he found her "just in the nick of time."
When Steve and Kristin found each other later in life, they both knew they’d found a great gift. “I know I feel horribly ripped off,” he told me. “She feels ripped off, too.”
“You can look at it one of two ways — that I found this woman, the love of my life, and I lost her. Or I found her just in the nick of time. That’s how I feel. I found her just in the nick of time.”
Because of the coronavirus lockdown, a service can’t be held.
But Kristin’s loved ones have a plan for her ashes. It starts at Kissimmee State Park, where she loved to camp in the springtime, when so many babies are being born. “She saw a baby bear there one time,” Steve says.
They plan to place her ashes in the headwaters of the reclaimed Kissimmee River, which she fought so hard to restore. From there, she’ll flow into Lake Okeechobee and then the Everglades, which she fought so hard to preserve. She’ll then make her way back home to Broward County and finally, to the ocean, whose reefs and wildlife she fought so hard to protect.