by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The old United States Courthouse and Post Office building will get a $300,000 face lift, and if word leaking out of Tallahassee is true, it won’t cost the City a dime.
The State Department of Historical Resources is expected to release in the coming weeks its priority list of historical renovation projects. When it comes out, the U.S. Courthouse project will rank No. 31. That should secure a Historical Resource Grant large enough to pay for exterior cleaning and detail work on the 70-year-old building’s masonry. The cleanup is an initial step toward securing the building and preparing it to eventually serve as part of the new Duval County Courthouse complex.
To help secure the grant, Mayor John Peyton told the State that the City has committed to spend more than $10 million to renovate the building. The City’s financial commitment was likely a major reason the project was approved for State funding, said Joel McEachin, senior historic preservation planner for the Jacksonville Historical Preservation Commission.
The State looks to spend its Historical Resource Grants where they will produce the greatest return, said McEachin. When the State approved the City’s request, it likely looked at it as an opportunity to jump start millions of dollars worth of historical renovation.
In fact, the City may end up investing more than double the amount it projected to the State. Joel Reitzer, the project director for the county courthouse project, said estimates for the U.S. Courthouse now exceeded
$23 million.
Reitzer said the City is still figuring out the scope of the final project and said the construction timeline will likely depend on the resolution to problems facing the adjacent county courthouse. But the State grant will allow the City to move ahead with the first phase of the U.S. Courthouse project. The money will help pay for masonry and roofing work that would have been necessary regardless of the county courthouse’s fate.
“These are the basics that have to be done no matter when we go ahead with the rest,” said Reitzer.
The City has fared well in past years getting the Historical Resource Grants. The City has received nearly half a million from the grants since 1997. But the size of this year’s grant has the City’s historical developers particularly excited. Prior to this year’s award, the most the City had received was $250,000 in 2000 for a Brentwood restoration project. This year’s grant is $100,000 larger than the sum of every Historical Resource Grant received by the City since 2000.
There’s still one potential pitfall facing this year’s award. If the legislature were to reduce the pool of available funds it could bump the U.S. Courthouse project in favor of higher-ranked alternatives. Barring that, Reitzer said he’d been
told the grant was “an absolute
certainty.”