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Orange Park decides: John Hauber wants to be a leader, not politician, on Orange Park Council

By Wesley LeBlanc wesley@opcfla.com
Posted 2/24/21

(In the third of four weekly installments, candidates for the Orange Park Town Council have been profiled. This week, Seat 3 challenger John Hauber is looking to unseat incumbent Roland Mastandrea on …

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Orange Park decides: John Hauber wants to be a leader, not politician, on Orange Park Council


Posted

(In the third of four weekly installments, candidates for the Orange Park Town Council have been profiled. This week, Seat 3 challenger John Hauber is looking to unseat incumbent Roland Mastandrea on April 13. Next week, Seat 4 candidate Susana Thompson will be profiled.)

ORANGE PARK – Don’t call John Hauber a politician.
He’s just a born-and-raised resident of Orange Park who wants to see the ideals and tight-knit community of his childhood return to the town. That’s why he’s running for Orange Park Town Council’s Seat 3. He wants to bring back the passion of years past and marry it with an ever-evolving Orange Park so that the soul of the town is kept intact.
“We’ve lost that small-town feel and have become a St. Augustine without the attractions,” Hauber said. “We need to be smart with our development. We don’t need to be hasty, and we need to think logically about how it is going to affect our neighbors.”
Only then can Orange Park retain its essence as it inevitably grows. Hauber is digging into the ideals of his youth when it comes to his platform in this election. He was born in Orange Park and even became an Eagle Scout with Orange Park Troop 20 in 2002. He joined the U.S. Marines three years later and lived in Savannah, Georgia, as a result.
He was medically retired from the military in 2010 due to an injury and in 2012, he tried his hand at a fire department in Savannah before becoming a law enforcement officer. He fell in love with law enforcement and became a violent crimes detective in 2016. He remained in that role until 2018, which is when he came back home to Orange Park. He still recognized the town when he returned home, but he could tell some of the ideals that made the town what it was back in his youth had gone dormant.
“There was a lot more growth, and that’s not a bad thing,” Hauber said. “It’s something inevitable in most cases. The biggest things I’ve found is a lot of residents, and this is from going around and talking to people I’ve known for many years…(they’d say things like), ‘we didn’t know this was going to happen,’ or, ‘we did know and we spoke up and nothing was taken seriously.’”
“The other change I saw was that the community wasn’t like it used to be. Community outreach has changed. It’s not the same feel I had when I was a kid. We’ve lost touch in reaching out to citizens…politicians and the leaders of our community would actually come out to neighborhoods...and talk to people. That’s stopped as well.”
Hauber plans to be extremely active not just with the townsfolk in the Town Hall every other Tuesday Night if elected, but with the residents. The people that can’t attend meetings because of work, or church, or because they have kids at home – Hauber wants to knock on their doors and talk to them about their issues, gather their thoughts on current proposals in the town and ultimately, restore a sense of transparency he feels has been lost in politics.
Hauber doesn’t even like to refer to these kinds of things as politics, viewing the word “politician” as almost offensive these days.
“I almost find the word politician offensive and I find ‘leader’ more appropriate because that’s what you should be,” Hauber said. “Leading your residents and youth in the area – to want to do better for themselves and the community and the only way to do that is to give it back to them.”
Having been an Eagle Scout and having a son in Scouts BSA, Hauber envisions the town asking troops around the area to help with cleanup efforts that are otherwise completed using town resident tax dollars. He said troops are willing and able to perform clean-ups because they’re all about community service.
Hauber spoke to Clay Today for nearly an hour about his desire to run for town council and his reasons why, but distilled down, his message is this: He wants to bring back the small-town feel of Orange Park while figuring out smart ways to grow. He wants to keep the history of Orange Park alive in doing so and above all that, he wants to be transparent.
He wants to donate his monthly check for being a council member to a local youth sports organization to sponsor children that might not otherwise be able to afford to join. He’s not against mega-corporations necessarily, but he loves Orange Park’s commitment to local business and wants those business owners to feel welcome and supported in town.
He wants to continue the town’s commitment to its local law enforcement and its fire department. Having a history in law enforcement himself, he knows firsthand what the officers go through day in and day out in that field of work, he said. He wants to continue to open up the town’s surrounding waterways to the public, something the Rob Bradley Conservation Park will soon make happen.
He wants his children, and all of the children in town and their families as well, to be able to create the same memories of Orange Park he holds so dearly in his mind today.
“I will be transparent in everything I do,” Hauber said. “If you’re just presenting an idea, let’s be transparent about the details of that idea. We’re not dealing with classified information. These are civic issues and they need to be presented that way.”
Hauber will be running against incumbent Roland Mastandrea in the April 13 election.