by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Dick Linn remembers the first City Council meeting he attended as the new city manager of Neptune Beach.
“There were two hot issues at that meeting,” he said. “One was people not cleaning up after their dogs . . . how we were going to force people to clean up after their dogs.
“The other issue was the overpopulation of Muscovy ducks in Jarboe Park.
“I thought, if those are the most serious problems we have, this has got to be heaven on earth.”
There have been a few more issues of consequence since that day six and a half years ago. Most can be boiled down to keeping rampant development on the other side of the city limits signs.
“When I ran, I knew that one of the first things to promise everybody is you wouldn’t change much,” said Dick Brown, who was elected mayor in 2000. “Many cases when you run for public office, you make some grand promises of things you would like to do for the area.
“Here, you get too carried away with that, you’re not likely to be elected. These people really like their community to look the way it is.”
Linn clearly understands.
“For years, Neptune Beach has been able to successfully maintain small-town types of relationships,” he said. “It has not been overdeveloped by the commercial elements.
“The residents here are very, very passionate about keeping the small-town character and the residential nature of the community.”
The challenge is finding ways to preserve the feel of a small seaside village and pay the bills without boosting taxes.
It won’t be easy.
Signs of the future swirl around Neptune Beach, from a flood of traffic rolling off Atlantic Boulevard in the north to the high-rise development of Jacksonville Beach in the south.
“What I would like to see, and what I hear from other people, is for Neptune Beach to stay basically like it is,” said City Council member Harriet Pruette. “There’s a different flavor in Neptune Beach. And we don’t want to be a cookie-cutter community.”
Progress, in Neptune Beach, doesn’t mean growth. It means refining what’s already there.
The dividing line, clearly, is Third Street. The old neighborhood of quaint, shingled cottages on the east side is still there, settled in the pre-air conditioning days by Jacksonville residents looking for a cool ocean breeze in the summer.
The homes in that area are generally larger than those on the west side of Third. They’re also a lot more valuable.
“Five years ago, you could buy a home in Neptune Beach for $90,000 east of Third,” said Pruette. “You cannot touch a piece of junk over there for less than $380,000 today.”
“We’re so close to built-out,” said Brown. “You ride along First Street, close to the ocean, along the side streets, you might see one vacant lot. But even a vacant lot would be worth a small fortune.
“What used to be a small beach cottage is now desirable for possibly a million-dollar home.”
The city of 7,300 was incorporated in 1931, following a split with Jacksonville Beach over taxation.
“It was just a very informal little beach community east of Third Street [A1A],” said Brown. “There were a lot of weekend cottages, things like that.
“While it still retains a lot of charm in the old area, there’s so much demand that it’s tough to come up with a suitable way to let somebody invest and improve property.”
There are only a handful of ways to increase revenue in a community with so little vacant space.
Encouraging the conversion of triplexes and quadriplexes into single-family homes is one.
Raising taxes is another.
Opening the doors to developers with high-rise condominiums and office complexes is not open for discussion.
Height restrictions in the city vary somewhat from one district to another. The maximum is 28 feet for homes, 35 feet in the business and commercial districts — too low to catch the eye of a developer.
“The local resident feels that commercial development is acceptable to the extent that it serves the needs of the residents,” said Linn. “It’s not acceptable as an attraction to outside business.
“They want their daily needs met here in Neptune Beach. But they don’t want to become a shopping area for people outside.”
Pruette has no intention of yielding an inch on height restrictions.
Some people, she said, have suggested commercial buildings could be a little taller west of Third Street.
“But a lot of other people feel, once you start inching up, it doesn’t stop,” she said. “They do not want to be a Jacksonville Beach. They are very adamant about this, even though there is tax money there.
“We are going to have to find a better way of coming up with revenue to maintain what we’ve got.”
Brown, too, appreciates the tension among the competing interests of providing services, keeping taxes low and blocking the developers at the gate.
“Preventing [high-rise development] is the challenge,” he said. “Secondary to that is how to meet rising costs with a stagnant tax base.
“The challenge will be, do you want to keep your taxes as low as possible at the expense of not putting a condominium up to avoid raising taxes? Or are you residents willing to pay the continuing escalating cost of services to protect this way of life?”
Even without the lure of attractions and a Maxi-Mall, traffic feeding off Atlantic Boulevard into the village can be as congested as anywhere else in the greater Jacksonville area.
There’s not much the Council can do.
“I think one day you’re going to see three or four lanes down Penman Road all the way through from Atlantic Boulevard to Beach,” said Pruette. “When that happens, I think a lot of the citizens will be very upset. But it’s coming down the road.
“And it’s not something we can control. We can control land development and our height limits on buildings, things like that. But we can’t control traffic coming through Neptune Beach.”
If there is an answer to the swelling volume of cars, campers, SUVs, residents, commuters and day-trippers heading south off Atlantic Boulevard, it isn’t apparent.
The Florida Department of Transportation completed a corridor study several years ago and recommended the City take a closer look at its signs, signals and lights.
“The major traffic congestion now is at Penman Road and Florida Boulevard, the two major arterials through our small community,” said Linn. “We have a local road, Forest, that comes into play there.
“The traffic does back up there, particularly during the school year . . . and quite a bit during peak traffic flows.
“I don’t have any suggestions for how to improve it that would not destroy the character of the neighborhood.”
Traffic flow and development may dominate conversations in Council chambers and around the coffee tables, but they’re not the only issues in Neptune Beach.
Adequate drainage is a concern on several streets, where rain tends to pool on surfaces with dips in them.
“There has been ponding on various streets for a very long time,” said Linn. “Engineering studies go back to 1967.
“The problems are still there, the solutions are the same, but the price keeps going up.”
The City also has made a considerable capital investment over the past two years to upgrade the water and sewer system.
“The water supply project was just completed, which has vastly improved the water flow east of Third, in the oceanfront area,” said Linn. “We’re now installing new sewer lines. The sidelight to that is control of infiltration and inflow, where storm water gets into our sanitary sources and overloads our sewer plant.
“We’ve been able to reduce the flow to the sewer plant by about 30 percent, which is environmentally sound and fiscally responsible.”
The City is preparing to replace the King’s Road bridge, which has been deteriorating over time. The timber and decking structure goes over a tidal stream to serve residents of Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach.
Design work is just about complete on a new concrete bridge, which will cost about $433,000.
The big-ticket item is a $2.2 million facility for a three-acre public works complex on the west side of town. The project is about to begin and will take nine months to complete.
There will be a large administration building with automotive and maintenance garages attached. It will also include buildings for the water and wastewater departments, one for the animal control office and a property room for the police department.
For all of that, stopping commercial development and maintaining an aura of old-fashioned charm are still at the top of most lists.
“One of the things I would like to see — and I brought it up to the Economic Development Committee for Neptune Beach — is to get something done with some of these vacant strip malls,” said Pruette. “We’ve got an A&P over there that’s been vacant for 20 years.
“Something needs to be done. Vacant lots. Overgrown bushes. Junked cars in people’s yards. So I’m thinking about working on a `blight’ ordinance. We don’t want to be run down in Neptune Beach. We want to be proud of our little community.”
Officials know what they would like to see if they could peek 50 years into the future. They’re not so confident their vision will match reality.
“I would like to believe that the area would remain about the same — absent condominiums, absent apartments and high-rises, absent major shopping centers,” said Linn. “I would like to believe our pristine coastline would stay that way, open to the public, enjoyed by the residents.
“I hope we would continue to provide a safe, wholesome environment for mixed age groups to live in harmony.”
“I’d like to think there will still be the small-town flavor, and people will still feel very safe,” Brown said. “That’s one of the big pluses here.
“It may look like it does now, but I think you wouldn’t recognize the neighborhood east of Third Street. I expect to see almost everything remodeled, refurbished or rebuilt.”
Pruette hopes future Councils will continue to preserve what residents value. But she fears the worst:
“I think what we’re heading for, most definitely, in the next 50 years is the average citizen on an average income cannot live in Neptune Beach, at least not east of Third Street.
“We have what we have, the quality of living that a lot of people absolutely love, because some of us have stood up to issues. We’ve worked hard to preserve what we’ve got. Future Councils have to maintain that.”