$75 million gift to clinic by philanthropists Paula and Randy Ringhaver
St. Augustine philanthropists Paula and Randy Ringhaver have given $75 million to Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville—one of the largest gifts in the institution’s Florida history—in memory of their infant son, Randal “Lee” Ringhaver, Jr., who died in 1980 at eight and a half months old from an aggressive form of leukemia.
The gift will support Mayo Clinic’s transformative “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” initiative, and the expanded hospital tower at the Jacksonville campus will now be named Lee Ringhaver Tower.
Lee was just a baby when he was lost, and his sister, Bree, was two and a half years old. More than four decades later, the couple found a way to let his brief life resonate across generations.
“When we walk into the tower, we feel optimism and confidence,” Paula Ringhaver said. “It symbolizes growth and progress. We believe in what Mayo Clinic is building here, and we trust that Lee’s legacy will live on through the care and hope this tower represents.”
The Ringhavers are among the most quietly consequential philanthropic families in Northeast Florida.
Randy is the chairman and president of Ring Power Corporation, the family-founded Caterpillar heavy equipment dealer now headquartered in St. Augustine and serving 44 Florida counties—a company whose roots stretch to 1961, when Randy’s father, L.C. “Ring” Ringhaver, launched it from a former shrimp boat yard on the St. Johns River.
That philanthropic tradition began with L.C., who received care at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and became what his family calls “an ardent advocate” for the institution. Over the years, Ring Power employees and multiple generations of the Ringhaver family have received care at Mayo Clinic in Florida.
“We’ve seen firsthand the value of having Mayo Clinic’s expertise close to home for our family and for Ring Power employees,” Randy Ringhaver said. “This gift reflects the values our company was built on — including giving back to the communities we serve — and it demonstrates our confidence in Mayo Clinic’s future.”
Friends and colleagues have long described the Ringhavers as “quiet givers”—people who simply do what they believe anyone in their position should do.
Their philanthropy extends across Northeast Florida’s civic and health landscape, from Flagler College, where Randy served on the Board of Trustees for more than three decades and donated more than $3 million in scholarships, to Flagler Hospital, Community Hospice of Northeast Florida, Dreams Come True, and the St. Augustine Cancer Society.
In March 2026, just weeks before this gift was announced, Ring Power donated a conservation easement protecting more than 1,700 acres of St. Johns County land — the DeerCreek Plantation — to the North Florida Land Trust in perpetuity.
The $75 million gift flows directly into what Mayo Clinic describes as a once-in-a-generation reimagining of American healthcare. Bold. Forward. Unbound is a multibillion-dollar investment across Mayo Clinic’s campuses in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota, designed to create integrated digital and physical healthcare spaces that will ultimately add more than four million square feet of transformative facilities across the system.
The Florida component alone encompasses more than 725,000 square feet of new clinical, research, and education space and includes the Duan Family Building—home to the first carbon ion therapy system in the Western Hemisphere—a biomanufacturing expansion for cancer immunotherapies and transplantation advances, and a research and education building now under construction.
The Lee Ringhaver Tower is central to this vision. A five-story expansion of the tower began serving patients in 2025, adding 121 new rooms equipped with digital technologies that allow patients to control every aspect of their room environment through a mobile app, enable family members to join care consultations virtually from anywhere in the world, and allow care teams to monitor patients with greater precision and fewer disruptions.
The tower also carries shell space for three additional stories and capacity for future growth. The Mayo Clinic in Florida now holds 419 licensed beds—nearly double the 214 beds it had when the Jacksonville hospital opened in April 2008.
Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville has been ranked No. 1 among all Florida hospitals by U.S. News & World Report for eight of the last nine years, with national top-50 recognition across ten specialties, including cancer, neurology, cardiology, and urology.
Kent Thielen, M.D., CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida, called the Ringhavers’ philanthropy both a gift to the present and an investment in the future. “Philanthropy makes it possible for us to build the future of healthcare,” Dr. Thielen said.
“We are deeply grateful to Paula and Randy for their extraordinary generosity and trust. Their gift will change lives — now and for generations to come — in our community and around the world.”
With the $75 million Mayo Clinic gift announced, the Ringhavers have placed themselves among the most consequential philanthropic families in Florida’s history.
Their long practice of giving quietly — Randy once accepted a community service award only on the condition that it really belonged to his employees — makes the scale of what they have built all the more striking.
For the Ringhavers, the math of the gift is almost beside the point.
At its heart, a $75 million donation to one of the country’s finest medical institutions is also something more intimate: a family’s way of making sure that a little boy who lived less than a year did not pass through this world without leaving something lasting, hopeful, and healing behind him.