JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The embattled Jacksonville Transportation Authority now has less than a week to respond to its latest criminal subpoena. The State Attorney’s Office is asking for a litany of records, among them data on ridership. Action News Jax has questioned JTA’s ridership totals for years.
Here’s why that matters. Under state law, a third of Florida’s transit grant money is handed out based on how many passengers an agency carries. So every rider JTA counts isn’t just a rider. It’s money. Now prosecutors want to know if JTA’s numbers add up.
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Every ride on a JTA bus, Skyway or Navi shuttle is supposed to be a number you can trust. Now state prosecutors want every one of those numbers, going back to January 2023. JTA is funded in part by state grant money, paid for with your gas tax.
Under Florida Statute 341.052, the public transit block grant is calculated with one-third based on population, one-third on revenue miles and one-third on passengers carried. That last third comes down to how many passengers JTA says it carried.
“What I suspect will happen is they will then take those numbers and overlay the raw data with various, say, applications or other information that was provided to outside entities in order to see if that matches up,” said Chris Carson, a legal expert.
The question is: who was actually on board? Prosecutors are asking how JTA counted rides that don’t come from paying customers, specifically “employee, contractor, promotional, demonstration, complimentary, or repeat rides,” and “how those rides were treated in reported totals,” according to Section 5(e) of the subpoena.
An Action News Jax investigation found more than 50 JTA employees signed up to ride Navi on the clock. JTA told a city council member those rides were included in its daily passenger count through its so-called ambassador program.
“If that is proven to be correct, that in a sense the higher-ups within JTA were trying to, in a sense, fudge the numbers of ridership by having employees ride... that absolutely could constitute criminal behavior,” Carson said.
This is not the first time JTA’s ridership numbers have been questioned. In 2025, former board member Megan Hayward flagged a gap between the numbers JTA gave its board and the numbers it reported outside the agency. JTA blamed “differences in reporting criteria.”
“If someone within JTA had gone in and, say, changed numbers or had fudged numbers in order to somehow affect various forms of funding that were coming in, be it locally or state or federally, then potentially that could constitute criminal behavior,” Carson said.
Prosecutors don’t just want JTA’s totals. They want to know who was counted and who changed the count. So does Action News Jax, which has requested the ridership numbers JTA submitted for state grant money so it can compare them to what the agency told its own board.
JTA has until Nov. 20 to hand over the records.
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