Now comes the hardest part.
City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed Mayor Lenny Curry’s ballot initiative asking voters to extend a half-cent sales tax to pay down more than $2.8 billion in unfunded pension liabilities.
The action served as a formality to get to the next — and maybe most difficult — step in the lengthy process: Having voters sign off on the idea, something they’ll consider on the Aug. 30 primary ballot.
“It really is the only viable option we have that solves this problem once and for all,” Curry said earlier Tuesday.
Council members have supported the plan since January when they passed a resolution to send the idea to the Legislature for approval.
Now they will be counted on to go into the community and help sell the proposal to voters.
The message, Curry said, needs to be how the extension finally cures the pension woes that continue to eat away at annual budgets.
This year the city contributed $260 million of its $1 billion budget toward pension costs. Next year, it’s expected to rise to more than $280 million and peak at more than $400 million over the next decade if nothing is done, the mayor said.
The idea of the sales tax freeing up money annually for budgets was one Curry pitched early, saying it could provide as much as $100 million. That message has been muted in recent weeks.
“If we get budget relief out of this, that’s an added benefit, that’s nice … but I am not looking for a pot of money to create new programs,” he said.
Instead, that relief would go toward services like paving roads, hiring police officers and funding crime prevention programs.
How a dedicated revenue source starting in 2030 would help pay down pension plans or help budgets until then is still unknown.
Curry said it could come from a number of options still under review. They include annually bonding millions of dollars and using future revenue to pay off the obligation or trying to count the sales tax proceeds from 2030-60 as current assets.
The latter, he advised, is “an incredibly long process” that requires approval from several federal agencies.
Some council members have sought such details and wanted to know how much could be freed up for annual budgets, but that information isn’t yet available.
Voters will want to know that information as council members and others sell the plan, but those details can’t or haven’t been decided yet.
Instead, it will be about trust — something many council members said Tuesday they had in the Curry administration. There aren’t any other viable options on the table that would benefit districts or the city as a whole.
“I want to believe they are going to do the right thing,” said council member Reggie Gaffney.
While council was unanimous Tuesday, not everyone in the audience was.
A group calling itself the Concerned Citizens & Clergy Against Crime used the comment and public hearing portion of the meeting to press the administration for financial guarantees for their community.
Promises made for issues like sewer, drainage and septic tanks were made by past mayors pitching projects, the group said. But those never happened for North Jacksonville.
Without some type of guarantee, “then we should all vote no on that referendum.”
The Rev. James Sampson, president of Florida General Baptist Convention Inc., said he didn’t trust elected officials on the topic — he trusted history.
The group isn’t against Curry, he said, but instead wants tangible information and cooperation to help with community issues.
There were no such guarantees made Tuesday by council, which simply made the next step in a series aimed to help the city’s long-term future. If an August vote is successful, it’s then sitting with the city’s six bargaining units to hammer out new deals, another tough proposition.
“We’re off to the races,” said Sam Mousa, Curry’s chief administrative officer, after the vote.
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