by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The City is counting on a pair of roads to help development at the Cecil Commerce Center get off the ground.
Ron Barton, the executive director of the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission, said Thursday that the end is in sight for a pair of road projects that are judged critical for the success of the Westside industrial park. Barton was the inaugural speaker at law firm GrayRobinson’s first Community Leader Forum at the River Club Thursday.
Barton said construction on New World Avenue north of Normandy Boulevard should be finished by the end of the year. An interchange connecting Brannan Field-Chaffee Road to I-10 will take longer, perhaps two and a half years after the project is bid this summer.
The roadwork plays the vital role of connecting Cecil Field to the rest of Jacksonville and to Florida’s interstate highways.
“Even after all the work we’ve done to prepare Cecil Field, the access element is crucial,” said Barton. “You can have all this land... but if you can’t get to it, you don’t have much.”
Progress has been slow at Cecil as the City has rehabbed the former Navy base for use as an aerospace industrial park. Barton said environmental issues had to be addressed and the land, more than 16,000 acres of it, had to be entitled.
“The military doesn’t tend to leave clean sites,” said Barton. “It took five years just to prepare Cecil so we could market it.”
Barton plans to work with Cornerstone, the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s corporate recruiting arm, to pitch Cecil across the country and internationally.
Some question whether the City’s earlier plan to give Cecil back to the Navy hurts those marketing efforts. During the forum, Barton was asked whether a recent Boeing offer to build spy planes at Cecil could hurt other development opportunities.
Barton said military contractors and the presence of quasi-military agencies like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Air National Guard are productive uses of Cecil land.
He distinguished between those developments and a full return by the military. On that subject, Barton said the debate was over.
“My charge from the mayor is to develop Cecil as an industrial job generator,” he said. “There’s no going back to where we were this past summer.”
For the City to consider a military return, the U.S. government would have to offer Jacksonville, “a lot of money,” he said. The scrapped deal with the Navy would have cost the City $50 million to prepare the land for military use.
“There’s a definite role for Cecil Field in the City’s development plans,” said Barton. “And until I’m told differently, it doesn’t include the military.”
Cecil’s development would be aided by the Jacksonville Port Authority’s recent deal with Japanese shipping line Matsui.
That $200 million deal is expected to open up Asian shipping routes to Jacksonville, expanding the scope of its trade. Barton sees a role for Cecil as a base for distribution of goods brought in through the Port.
Those centers don’t bring in the much talked about high-wage, targeted-industry jobs, but Barton said sound economic development adds jobs at diverse wage levels and addresses all sectors of the economy.
“People say we don’t want distribution centers, that those aren’t good jobs,” said Barton. “But we don’t want to focus exclusively on high-wage jobs.
In some communities, a job paying $15 an hour with good benefits is just as important as an $80,000 job at Merrill Lynch.”