Downtown will be front-and-center this year among the city’s business and civic leaders.
Consider:
Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan is negotiating to develop the 70-acre Northbank riverfront Shipyards mixed-use project and an entertainment zone in the Sports Complex.
Developer Peter Rummell and project partner Michael Munz continue pursuing plans to build the The District healthy-lifestyle community and commercial property on the Southbank riverfront.
The Landing and the unfinished Berkman II condominium are targeted as leading contenders for redevelopment on the Northbank riverfront.
In the core, The Barnett and Laura Street Trio are slated for redevelopment and JEA is figuring out whether it wants to build a new headquarters tower.
And the latest, the Downtown Investment Authority intends to issue a Request for Proposals for a Northbank riverfront convention center whose cost is estimated by a consultant to top $250 million.
Yet, except for work on The Barnett, none of the rest has begun.
The Jacksonville Civic Council intends to re-engage with Downtown development and specifically with the power of the Downtown Investment Authority.
The private group of influential business and civic leaders has re-activated its Downtown task force, which in 2011 called for development of a Downtown authority and a riverfront convention center.
Immediate past Chair Ed Burr told the Meninak Club of Jacksonville last week that the group is looking at how the DIA’s power could be set up to implement a master plan without the stops-and-starts of changing mayoral and City Council leadership.
“We’ve had plenty of master plans, but we turn over city leadership, arguably, every year. We have a new City Council president every year. We have a new Finance (Committee) chairman every year. Those are powerful people in the implementation of a master plan in a city of our size,” Burr said.
“We have mayors every four or eight years. And it’s not the lack of planning. It’s the lack of consistent implementation because you can’t tell anybody today that this master plan is going to be the same thing that’s going to be here 10 years from now,” he said.
“And that’s what we have to change.”
Burr cited the Civic Council’s white paper that called for the authority. That Feb. 1, 2011, Northbank Redevelopment Task Force Final Report recommended the tentatively named Downtown Improvement Authority that would handle Downtown development and split from the former Jacksonville Economic Development Commission.
Mayor Alvin Brown stumped for the changes. In 2012, City Council, the Florida Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott approved a transformation of the former Jacksonville Economic Development Commission into the Office of Economic Development and the DIA.
The mayor names five members to the DIA and the City Council president appoints four.
The 19-member City Council confirms all the members.
The Office of Economic Development within the mayor’s office deals with countywide economic development.
Burr said the Civic Council’s 2011 suggestion covered two angles. “We need an independent funding source and a keeper of a comprehensive master plan of Downtown. And neither one of those had been successfully put in place yet,” he said.
He cited the DIA’s convention center intentions and public questions about the riverfront site: Is that the correct place? How does the site fit in with the other development plans for Downtown?
Burr said any one idea on a piece of land might be good, but not if it doesn’t help the whole of Downtown.
“We define core Downtown — we think that’s where the focus should be — and then connect that to the entertainment sports district. That will be the continued effort through the process,” he said.
Burr also noted that the DIA’s proposed convention center site at the former Duval County Courthouse and City Hall Annex is across Bay Street from the county Pre-Trial Detention Facility.
“What’s going to happen to the jail? The jail’s obsolete. The sheriff told me that they can’t even find replacement parts for the lighting mechanisms anymore. They have to be custom-made every time they have a problem,” Burr said.
“I don’t know about you, but I think a jail ought to be able to be locked up pretty well, right?”
Burr, a developer and owner of GreenPointe Holdings LLC, formerly owned LandMar Group, which wanted to develop the Shipyards property more than a decade ago before the recession.
He called the jail, at Bay and Liberty streets across the street from the riverfront development site, “Jacksonville’s first original all-gated community.”
The DIA has been working on a plan. In February 2015, the authority released the Community Redevelopment Area plans for the Northbank Downtown and Southbank. To read it, visit downtownjacksonville.org/Libraries/PDF_Libraries/CRA-Plans.sflb.ashx.
Burr, who led the Civic Council for three years, said the council will “get more involved in Downtown, really push to get it stronger and really push to get a more comprehensive planning process so the pieces can fit together.”
He sees DIA as the keeper of the plan.
“I’d like to vest that power into an entity that isn’t subject to political changes every year, every four years or every eight years because these are decadeslong plans.”
Burr said the plan could be changed through a public process, “but it can’t be changed because the City Council president decides they don’t like that there and therefore it’s not happening.”
That, he said, “is what we have in our city. If a City Council president or finance chair doesn’t like what’s going on, it’s just not going to happen. And that’s what we have to transcend.”
Burr said that private investors who need public funding for a Downtown project “will spend a year dealing with DIA” for approval. “Then they have to go across the street and get 10 votes from the City Council.”
Private capital, he said, “looks at that process and decides it’s not one worth pursuing. As a result of that, they go elsewhere.”
Burr said a developer can go to Fort Lauderdale “and you can do that in about 90 days, 120 days. When you’re done, you’re done. You can do it in Nashville with their downtown authority. When you’re done, you’re done. You can do it in San Diego. When you’re done, you’re done.”
“We have a system that discourages private capital coming to invest Downtown and I’d like to see that changed,” he said.