Friends of Hemming Park for sure will operate the Downtown venue for the next couple of months.
And there’s growing City Council support for the group to continue overseeing the city block for the first six months of the fiscal year.
After that? It’s a question a special council committee determining the future of the park is wrestling with.
It came up with a couple of possibilities Thursday.
One option could be to tweak the current Friends operating contract to include a new scope of services and performance standards.
The contract between Friends and the city has a couple of years left on it but has been criticized by council members and Mayor Lenny Curry’s administration for not having proper metrics in place.
The current standards are more event and attendance driven. Officials would rather see success defined more by safety and cleanliness.
However, tweaking the contract to such a degree could pose a perception problem.
If it’s determined such changes are considered a major departure from the deal in place, it effectively would be sole sourcing a contract to Friends and would require waiving procurement rules.
To council members like President Lori Boyer, that could bring a level of discomfort given the history of concerns with Friends.
A mid-July audit showing how the nonprofit spent parts of its $1 million taxpayer-funded contract led to criticism from the special council committee and council as a whole. Short-term restrictions were placed on funding and questions of the group’s long-term viability mounted.
In response, Friends shifted leadership and made financial changes in hopes to continue operations.
Boyer said given those concerns and the six-month window of funding for the group, there isn’t enough time to see a significant change or provide her with enough confidence to sole source the contract.
The other option — the one the committee seemed to favor Thursday — was to craft a new request for proposals that features new metrics and see how many vendors would apply.
That could include Friends, which was the only group to respond to the request in 2014.
Requests for proposals typically take 60-90 days after a final draft is complete. First, though, the council committee would have to decide how success is defined.
Events and attendance are more quantitative than determining clean and safe, though. Figuring out how that will be done is a job of the committee and Chair Greg Anderson.
“That’s going to be the more difficult part,” said Anderson.
He said one possibility could be a survey of Downtown patrons that could generate statistics over time.
Anderson will work with city officials in the next couple of weeks for language on a potential RFP then report back to the special committee members, some of whom will have a couple of related tasks.
A subcommittee will look at how city ordinances can be shifted to allow law enforcement and security to better enforce park rules.
Another will look at the boundaries of the park itself, with the possibility of expanding it to the front steps of City Hall and in front of the Jacksonville Public Library and Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.
That could further remove loiterers kicked out of the park for breaking the rules.
Friends’ future for the first six months of the fiscal year was a scrutinized topic in the past month, but Anderson said he believes the path Hemming is headed on is “solid.”
To that end, he doesn’t believe the committee needs to provide the full council a recommendation on whether the nonprofit should receive a $250,000 budget to operate the first half of the year.
That six months, said Anderson, allows everyone to figure out what the next — and best — step is.
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