Terrence Rodda isn’t the least bit happy about Liberty Street being fixed in a little over two years.
The longtime homeowners’ association president of Riverwalk Townhomes at the Plaza thinks it should have been done sooner. Or the Downtown street collapse that’s caused more than just an eyesore should never have happened in the first place.
But, despite that feeling, he knows two years is better than the originally proposed five years. And if the courthouse parking lot is demolished, he believes it eventually will be a massive boost for him and his neighbors’ property values.
“I’d love that,” he said. “It would make the 20 townhomes almost a peninsula … it’d be very unique.”
The ramped-up timeline and scope of the project could be headed for a change — and at a cheaper cost, too.
Mayor Lenny Curry’s administration pitched a way Wednesday to expedite repairing sections of the Downtown street that fell into the St. Johns River in February, while demolishing other parts.
Curry’s five-year Capital Improvement Plan submitted in July had a total of $65 million to repair Liberty Street, Coastline Drive and the old courthouse parking lot.
But, as proposed Wednesday — and quickly adopted by the City Council Finance Committee — that five-year fix was slashed to two years. And the price tag drops from $65 million to $37 million, spending $17 million in fiscal 2015-16 and $20 million in fiscal 2016-17.
The area won’t look like it did before, though.
The section of Coastline Drive between Newnan and Market streets — effectively in front of the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront — would be replaced. So, too, would the Liberty Street bridge to the St. Johns River.
Gone, though, would be the old courthouse parking lot and a section of Coastline Drive bridge between Market and Liberty streets. They’d be demolished and not replaced, almost creating the shape of a “U” toward the river. Additionally, the project would have streetscape improvements to the rerouted portions of the Northbank Riverwalk.
Council President Greg Anderson proposed the solution on behalf of the administration, saying the decrepit stretch is a “dangerous and ugly reminder of deferred maintenance” in an area that should have ample pedestrian traffic.
Sam Mousa, Curry’s chief administrative officer, called it a “final fix” for the area. He said before details emerged, the thought was the structures could all be repaired. That wasn’t the case and spending $5 million on repairs would be “a waste of money.”
Instead, that will be put toward the fix and the remaining $32 million will be borrowed. He called projects like Liberty Street the kind of “big time” endeavors for which borrowing was made.
Borrowing the funding would have a “negligible” impact on debt obligation, said Chief Financial Officer Mike Weinstein. Instead of paying down about $70 million in debt, the number next year drops to about $58 million, he said.
Those stretches of Coastline Drive and Liberty Street technically are bridges and, as such, the Florida Department of Transportation will reimburse the city $3.75 million for each as part of a bridge replacement plan, Mousa said.
However, that money won’t be heading to the city until fiscal year 2021.
The city won’t receive anything for demolishing the courthouse parking lot, but Mousa said that part of the project likely would happen down the road anyway. Most developers interested in the courthouse would likely see the lot as a liability and request its removal anyway, so doing it now made sense, Mousa told the committee.
Finance member Aaron Bowman said he was “ecstatic” to see the plan, with others sharing the sentiment that fixing the problem was long overdue.
The full council still will have to approve the city’s budget before the start of the Oct. 1 fiscal year.
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