A campaign mailer for Jacksonville City Council candidate Raul Arias inaccurately claims the endorsement of a politically active Realtors organization that actually supports the candidate’s opponent, the group said Friday.

The 12,000-member Northeast Florida Association of Realtors endorsed Democrat Ramon Day for the council’s District 11 seat before Jacksonville’s primary elections in March, government affairs director Nancy Garcia said.

Garcia said Arias, a Republican, told her he “wasn’t sure what had happened” and was trying to get in touch with his campaign manager for information after Garcia called to complain about the false claim in a mailer Day forwarded to her that morning.

Arias,a small business owner, said by email that his campaign didn’t create the ad but that he had issued a retraction and apologized to NEFAR’s leadership when he learned about it.

“I regret that the Northeast Florida Association of Realtors (NEFAR) was inadvertently included on a list of our endorsements,” he wrote.

The mailer was sent out by the Republican Party of Florida and Garcia speculated that someone assembling ads for multiple candidates might have simply mixed up a logo that belonged instead in another GOP candidate’s ad. The ad for Arias also included logos for police and fire unions that had endorsed him as well as business groups including the Northeast Florida Builders Association, which endorsed both Arias and Day when other candidates were still in the contest.

Day, a real...

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