With a top-floor Wells Fargo Center view of EverBank Field, Jacksonville Jaguars President Mark Lamping told a group of area bankruptcy lawyers last week that Downtown development was critical to the city and the NFL franchise.
“Helping Downtown is really important,” he told members of the Jacksonville Bankruptcy Bar Association at the group’s annual board installation meeting at The River Club.
Lamping shared details of the well-publicized $90 million investment by the city and the franchise into upgrades at EverBank Field, including a 5,500-seat amphitheater he expects will host its first performance before Memorial Day.
He envisions events taking place there the same weekends as Jaguars home games to maximize the Sports Complex as a destination.
He said the facility could bring perhaps 45 events a year Downtown. That, combined with action at the Veterans Memorial Arena and the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville, would generate attendance in the Sports Complex, on the eastern edge of the Northbank.
He said the frequency of visitors Downtown will create a ripple effect.
“Hopefully once they visit, they’ll feel more comfortable coming here,” Lamping said.
That might lead to more people living and working Downtown and create a new revenue stream for the Jaguars by their support.
That revenue “goes to support our goal, which is the stability and sustainability of our franchise here in Jacksonville,” Lamping said.
He also said the key to a strong region is a strong commercial central Downtown district.
“The whole reason behind the amphitheater is to bring more people to Downtown Jacksonville and it’s been our belief that we have to appeal to the entire region to be a successful team. We believe that we will only be as strong as this region is strong,” he said.
Jaguars owner Shad Khan had proposed a mixed-use project for the vacant city-owned Shipyards property. But after unveiling his vision in February 2015, environmental and other factors stalled the plans.
He opted instead to pursue development of an amphitheater and more amenities at EverBank Field.
“As you go from here to EverBank Field, there’s a spectacular piece of riverfront property with nothing going on on it,” Lamping said of the Shipyards property.
According to Lamping, the undeveloped property breaks up the city’s walkability because there is nothing on the riverfront side of the eight-tenths of a mile stretch.
On the opposite side sits the Duval County jail and the Maxwell House plant.
“You have a beautiful piece of property on one of the nation’s most historic rivers across the street from a prison, across the street form a bunch of bail bond shops. And you wonder whether that’s the highest and best use,” he said.
Lamping said Khan and the Jaguars are not developers by experience.
“The only thing Shad has in common with developers is Shad has a lot of money to make developments occur,” he said.
Lamping said the Shipyards project “has been on pause” as the city resolves the pension issue.
Mayor Lenny Curry is rallying support for voters to approve a half-cent sales tax extension on the Aug. 30 ballot to help pay down about $2.8 billion in pension debt and free up funds for other city uses.
“Doing development along the riverfront is very important to us. Now whether it’s the Shipyards, maybe it’s a little further north of that, we don’t know,” Lamping said.
He said a number of “really good projects” are in the pipeline, referring also to Southbank deals that include The District healthy-lifestyle development proposed on vacant riverfront land owned by JEA.
“Hopefully we can get moving on these projects sooner as opposed to later because what we don’t want to happen is the financial markets turn the cost of capital in the wrong direction and all of a sudden we have the willingness, we’ve got the plans but you can’t justify financially in the investment,” he said.
Lamping told the bankruptcy lawyers and attending judges “we all know what that was like between 2008 and 2011 or ’12.”
Bankruptcy filings peaked in 2010 in the Middle District of Florida.
He also talked about how the franchise progressed since his speech to the group in September 2013.
The team hasn’t accomplished all it had hoped for since then, “but all in all we’re pretty satisfied with what’s happened over the course of the past few years except for the fact that we’re not winning many football games.”
Khan bought the franchise Jan. 4, 2012, and Lamping became president Feb. 13, 2012.
The Jaguars, whose first season was 1995, haven’t posted a winning record since 2007.
The team won five games in 2015, more than during each of the previous three years.
Other than the performance of the team, Lamping said, the franchise feels good about the past several years.
“We really only have one objective,” he said, “and that’s to have a very stable, sustainable NFL franchise here in Jacksonville forever.”
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