by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
When Mayor John Peyton spoke to the Rotary Club of South Jacksonville Tuesday, he echoed something said by Jacksonville Journey co-chair John Rood at the June 6 meeting of the Downtown Council of the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Both offered a comprehensive presentation about the City’s current situations relating to the budget, taxes and public safety.
“I don’t like airing our dirty laundry,” Peyton told the Rotarians. “But, Jacksonville is at a watershed moment.”
He then went down the laundry list. The city has ranked as the most likely place in Florida to be murdered for the past eight years. Violent crime overall is on the upswing here while it has decreased or remained flat in the other counties. More high school students in Florida drop out of school than anywhere else in America and Duval County leads the state in that category. Truancy is also rampant with an average of 20,000 public school students skipping class each day and when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases among young people, Jacksonville leads the state in that statistic as well.
Peyton said the recommendations being made by the Jacksonville Journey committees provide the solutions to those challenges, but it’s going to take two things to get the job done. The community has to unite in the effort to change and “revenue enhancement” — in the form of higher taxes — will be required to fund the estimated $61 million it will take to fund the Jacksonville Journey for the next five years.
Peyton pointed out with two vacant seats he will have to get 13 of 17 City Council members to approve an ad valorem tax increase. That’s when he echoed something Rood said four days earlier: “There’s not a more controversial subject in our city than raising taxes. It’s a heavy lift and my instincts tell me we don’t have the votes.”
This is not the first time a mayor has asked for a tax increase to fund community improvements. In 2000 Duval County voters approved a referendum to levy an additional sales tax in an amount that makes the $61 million needed to fund five years of the Jacksonville Journey look like small change.
Today, John Delaney is president of the University of North Florida, but eight years ago he was mayor of Jacksonville when the community made a $2.2 billion commitment to pay for the Better Jacksonville Plan (BJP).
Today, Sharon Ashton is assistant vice president for public relations at UNF, but eight years ago she was Delaney’s press secretary. She said when the referendum was approved by a margin of 57 percent in favor to 43 percent opposed, it got attention on a national level.
“People were shocked to see a Republican be able to convince people to tax themselves,” said Ashton.
Delaney got so many requests from people in other municipalities who wanted to know how the approval process unfolded, Ashton prepared a comprehensive case study that details the process.
“It’s the blueprint for how we sold the program to the public,” she said.
Many of the concepts that helped the Better Jacksonville Plan become reality are also in play for the Jacksonville Journey.
Ashton recalled that during Delaney’s first term as mayor the public was concerned about development and traffic as well as environmental issues and the need to replace the City’s aging sports and entertainment facilities. Delaney met with hundreds of groups in the community to determine what they felt were the most important priorities.
Delaney then hosted a town hall meeting at the old Coliseum. Thousands of invitations were mailed and advertisements inviting the public to attend were published in the newspapers. Hundreds of people attended in person while two television stations broadcast the meeting live including an eight-minute video that explained why Delaney was asking the people to approve the BJP. A promotional booklet that explained the various aspects of the project was distributed at the meeting and by the end of the summer, 70,000 of the brochures had been distributed throughout the community.
Delaney was aggressive on the airwaves, granting more than 400 hours of interviews.
“He was on every radio and television station from the smallest to the biggest and across every genre from religious to country to hip-hop,” Ashton recalled. “He would even call disc jockeys while they were on the air and the mayor appeared on every public affairs show.”
Delaney hit the road and campaigned before almost 300 civic organizations, neighborhood associations, church groups, Chamber of Commerce area councils and Citizens Planning Advisory Committees.
“It seemed like if there were more than two people in a room, John Delaney was talking to them about the Better Jacksonville Plan. It was an absolute full-force blast. He lived and breathed it,” said Ashton.
He called together a group of 33 community leaders to help gain support for the BJP at the neighborhood level. They contacted newspaper editors and even volunteered at BJP headquarters stuffing envelopes and staffing the phone banks.
Another person who was intimately involved with the BJP is also on the team taking the Jacksonville Journey proposals to the people. Susie Wiles is Peyton’s chief of communications and special initiatives, but eight years ago she was Delaney’s chief of staff. She said one of the reasons the projects are so similar is “certain tactics are available to a mayor.”
Wiles said while Delaney carried the torch alone for BJP, Peyton has enlisted the assistance of Journey committee members to spread the message.
“It’s going to be a combination of the mayor and people like (Journey co-chair) Betty Holzendorf, Tom Petway, Tony Boselli and W.C. Gentry,” she said and added so far about 100 groups are on the schedule to hear the presentation.
Wiles also pointed out while some aspects of selling the value of the Journey are similar to the way the BJP message was delivered, the two initiatives don’t have that much in common.
“The Better Jacksonville Plan was all about capital infrastructure while the Jacksonville Journey is all about public safety and human infrastructure,” said Wiles. “People’s reaction to BJP was ‘oh man, we’re getting a new road or a new arena. The Journey is about ‘oh man, we’re getting a safer city.’”