by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The Jacksonville Economic Development Commission has yet to approve new development incentive policies but it already has set goals for the growth those policies are expected to produce.
The JEDC is targeting faster growth in Jacksonville jobs, wages, downtown housing and tax revenue. By 2010, the JEDC expects the City’s tax base to grow by $123 million, wages to increase to an average of $45,200 and the number of downtown residents to swell to 11,500. Downtown jobs are expected to climb to 41,000 while employment across Duval County is expected to grow to 426,000 jobs.
Those numbers indicate a slightly faster rate of growth in those areas than Jacksonville has seen in the last decade. When finished, the JEDC’s new incentive policies will direct public money to projects that have the best chance of furthering the City’s objectives for development.
JEDC Chairman M. C. “Ceree” Harden said the performance targets align with the priorities set by Mayor John Peyton last year when he ordered an overhaul of the commission’s operation and organization.
“Traditionally, the JEDC has been very reactive in that people would come to us with projects and then we find out how to make them work,” said Harden. “Now we have the opportunity to look at what kind of outcomes we want to create with the limited resources we have and what kind of strategies we want to employ to create them.”
Peyton’s charge to the JEDC was to put policies in place to create sustainable job growth, rising personal incomes and a broader tax base throughout Northeast Florida. The performance targets are in line with those objectives.
The desired 1.9 percent rate of job growth would be a slight improvement over 2004 when the number of jobs county wide increased 1.8 percent to 381,602. The JEDC targets 1.9 percent growth through 2010, a pace that would result in 425,968 jobs in Duval County. That rate would exceed the growth rate in the Southeast U.S., which is projected at 1.5 percent through 2010.
The JEDC expects those jobs to raise the county’s average wage. The target is $45,237 by 2010. That would be about a $6,000 increase over the current average salary of $38,645.
The new incentive policies will favor projects that propose to create higher paying jobs. That should facilitate larger paychecks in Duval County, said Harden.
The targeted average wage would again put Jacksonville ahead of the regional curve. The projected 2010 average wage for the Southeast region is $39,248, according to the JEDC’s research.
One of Peyton’s primary objectives was to continue the City’s trend toward an expanding tax base. Along those lines the JEDC expects to help increase the City’s pool of tax revenue from around $350 million in 2005 to about $475 million in 2010. The JEDC projects an increase of about $123.5 million.
That would require annual growth of 5.1 percent. The target is even more aggressive when inflation rates are taken into account. According to the JEDC projections, the growth in the county’s tax base would exceed by $40 million the growth expected from rising inflation and population.
Not all of the targets relate to countywide growth. Peyton specifically directed the JEDC to bring more jobs and residents downtown, and the commission has a pair of targets to measure that progress.
The JEDC wants to increase the number of downtown residents to 11,500, up from about 9,500 currently. The commission also hopes to bolster the number of jobs downtown, projecting the addition of 4,400 jobs by 2010.
That would bring the total number of employees downtown to 41,000. The JEDC expects downtown job growth to eventually outpace job creation countywide. Traditionally, the downtown job market’s growth has lagged behind the county’s. Reversing that trend should help absorb some of downtown’s office vacancies, according to the JEDC’s projections. The commission pegs the vacancy rate for Class A and B offices at 19.8 percent.
JEDC Commissioner Joe Barrow worked with JEDC staff to set the goals. The City hasn’t set these kinds of objective goals for growth before, so Barrow’s team looked at performance trends in comparable cities.
Harden said the JEDC looked at Charlotte, Atlanta, Savannah and Tampa/St. Petersburg, among others, in setting Jacksonville’s benchmarks.