As the city moves toward finding a new location out of Downtown for the Duval County jail, some City Council members want to keep it out of their districts.
Council member Jimmy Peluso is preparing to introduce legislation to keep the jail out of his. Two Council members, Ju’Coby Pittman and Reggie Gaffney Jr., want that resolution extended to include theirs as well.
Peluso represents District 7, which encompasses Downtown and several neighborhoods to the north, as well as the west bank of the St. Johns River from Brooklyn to Naval Air Station Jacksonville.
Pittman represents District 10, which is north of Peluso’s. It is south of the Trout River and west of the St. Johns River.
Gaffney represents District 8, which contains the western half of North Jacksonville surrounding Jacksonville International Airport.
Two at-large Council members, Matt Carlucci and Ron Salem, also attended the meeting.
Peluso presented a draft of the legislation at a public meeting Dec. 12 at City Hall. The legislation would recommend that Council refuse to build a jail in neighborhoods that have been redlined during Jacksonville’s history.
Redlining is financial services discrimination of neighborhoods with minority or low-income populations.
Based on the 1937-40 Home Owners’ Loan Corp. residential security maps, many of the areas Peluso seeks to exclude include Jacksonville’s Eastside, Brooklyn, Moncrief, Longbranch and other neighborhoods. Those maps, according to Peluso’s legislation, designated predominantly Black neighborhoods as “hazardous” investment areas.
Peluso’s move comes as Jacksonville prepares to begin its search for a new jail location.
Jacksonville’s John E. Goode Pre-trial Detention Facility, the jail’s official name, is aging, and the city expects to replace it with a facility outside Downtown. The cost of a new facility could exceed $1 billion.
The city is close to entering a contract with one of three companies to begin identifying potential sites, according to Mike Weinstein, Mayor Donna Deegan’s chief administrative officer.
The city will choose one of three companies, which will provide three options for the jail location and its potential capacity numbers.
“We haven’t begun to do anything as to where these may go,” Weinstein said.
“We’re going to spend some money with outside groups to help us come up with three sites that could potentially hold it.”
Weinstein said the city expects to sign an agreement within a month and have three potential sites in eight to 10 months. Residents, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and Deegan would offer input with Council making the final decision.
Weinstein said the city has not begun to look at specific locations. Additionally, he said the city could have an outside company build the jail, then rent it.
Council expects Weinstein to provide an update on the jail search during the first half of 2026, said Council member Will Lahnen, the liaison for matters related to the new jail, in a text message.
The next jail will likely be close to 500 acres, Weinstein said. That would likely keep the jail out of an urban area.
By comparison, the Downtown jail along with the Police Memorial Building at 501 E. Bay St. is on 10.06 acres.
“I appreciate the resolution,” Council member Ron Salem said.
“But I think at this point, we need to get this consultant on board. And, with the size that we’re talking about, you can just imagine that this is not going anywhere near the core city of Jacksonville.”
Council members at the Dec. 12 meeting said they didn’t expect the jail to be near Jacksonville’s urban areas. However, several said they wanted a resolution to guide the process on where the jail could go.
“Before ... we move on to our next terms, I want to make sure that this Council can get together saying, ‘Hey, we’ve done a lot of work on this. Yeah, let’s make sure that we don’t put it in one of the redlining routes,’” Peluso said.
Many of the concerns from Council members came after the city placed the Medical Examiner’s Office in Brentwood, a lower-income neighborhood north of Downtown and Springfield, despite residents’ concerns.
“We need to pass a resolution that shows the places that we want to avoid,” Council member Matt Carlucci said.
“These folks in these areas … have been told that will never go there, and then it goes there.”
Peluso said he expects to file his legislation in January 2026. He said that he would be open to including Pittman’s and Gaffney’s districts into his legislation, though they would need an official map to justify that decision.
“I don’t want to cut giant swaths of this city and make it look like we’re forcing a jail in a certain part of town, because that’s also going to be a problem,” Peluso said.
“If my colleagues have different areas that they can kind of show, ‘Hey, if today we had a redline map, this is what would be in there,’ I think I’m open to that.”