Neptune Beach Mayor Cori Bylund read a Reddit death threat aloud at the Sept. 9 City Council meeting, putting the anonymous post into the public record.

The comment, posted beneath a Reddit thread about a civil suit filed against the city, called Neptune Beach's police force, legal staff and elected officials "a bunch of corrupt pieces of shit that deserve to be executed in the street," the Beach Gazette reported.

Bylund said she first saw the post during a Sunday church service. She texted the police chief and city manager before the service ended.

"It made me sick, and it still makes me sick today," Bylund said at the meeting.

The mayor tied the hostility to a pattern she said is shrinking the pool of people willing to serve. In Neptune Beach, two council seats on the Nov. 3 ballot will be filled without opposition. Jerry Wetzel is running unopposed for Seat 4, and Shellie Thole is unopposed for Seat 5 after candidate Nia Livingston withdrew, according to the city's official candidates page.

Jacksonville Beach faces a similar gap. All three of its district council seats, Seats 4, 5 and 6, went unopposed this cycle, the Beach Gazette reported. The Duval County Supervisor of Elections confirmed those seats were up for election. The last time Jacksonville Beach district seats appeared on the ballot, in 2022, those races also drew no challengers, according to the Beach Gazette.

The trend is not unique to the Beaches. A national survey of about 500 local officials conducted in early 2026 by Princeton University's Bridging Divides Initiative found that 76 percent had pulled back on at least one civic behavior, the highest rate the survey has recorded, Governing magazine reported. About 4 in 10 said they were less likely to run for re-election, seek another office or appear in public when off duty.

More than half of those surveyed said they had experienced at least one form of hostility in the previous three months. Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative tied a nationwide spike in threats against local officials to a string of high-profile political attacks in 2025, including the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Bylund framed the stakes in local terms at the Sept. 9 meeting. "This abuse is public, and it has created an environment where people apparently think that death threats are okay … They're not okay," she said.