The city s upcoming capital improvement program is shaping up as one of the largest in Jacksonville s history with $430 million of projects tentatively slotted for the proposed 2021-22 budget that would include city dollars to help relocate the Jacksonville Fairgrounds from the sports complex to the Westside.
The $430 million covers about 140 line items for public safety, roads, environmental projects, public buildings, and parks. In comparison, that portion of this year s budget totals $211 million, which already was a historically large amount when it was enacted by City Council last September.
Many of the projects carry over from the city s current five-year capital improvement plan that gets updated annually, but some projects are new such as $27.2 million over two years toward relocating the fairgrounds from its long-time home out to the Jacksonville Equestrian Center off Normandy Boulevard.
09:15 PM EST Share The Northeast Florida business group says Jacksonville City Council should pass the bill but reduce money for JTA’s Skyway upgrades to $190 million.
Plans to increase the Duval County gas tax to pay for nearly $1 billion in transportation projects gained the endorsement of the Jacksonville Civic Council on May 10, but millions in the plan to modernize the Downtown Skyway could instead go toward the creation of the Emerald Trail network of parks.
The Civic Council urged city lawmakers to pass a proposed increase and extension to Duval County’s local option gas tax to pay for nearly $1 billion in transportation projects, but reduce the amount planned to modernize the Skyway.
COMMENTARY | A former JEA board member who has mostly avoided the public eye since her departure in early 2020 after the botched attempt to privatize the city-owned utility appeared at the federal courthouse in downtown Jacksonville on Thursday as a grand jury continues to investigate the scandalous saga.
Camille Lee-Johnson, an executive at the food and beverage franchise management firm Lee Wesley, is one of the few major players to have stayed remarkably silent since the collapse of the privatization campaign headed by former CEO Aaron Zahn. Attorneys who worked for a special City Council investigative committee said Lee-Johnson never responded to their requests to interview her under oath, and city attorneys, who conducted a separate employment investigation into Zahn s tenure at the end of 2019, also never spoke with her.
City and Downtown Investment Authority officials can spend $32.9 million to buy three parking garages owned and operated by Metropolitan Parking Solutions should the 4th Judicial Circuit Court find the company in default of its 2004 city contract.
The Jacksonville City Council approved Ordinance 2021-0179 on April 27 to authorize short-term or fixed-rate debt funding and to allow the DIA to exercise its contract option to buy the MPS parking garages at the Duval County Courthouse and VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena.
The vote was 18-0.
The 17-year-old redevelopment agreement has cost the city millions.
When the garages were built, the city agreed to make the payments in the form of development loans to cover MPS operating losses and to ensure a 6.75% annual return on the company’s $3 million required investment.
A federal grand jury investigation of the attempted sale of JEA continued Thursday as the utility s director of employee services went to the courthouse in downtown Jacksonville where the grand jury was meeting.
The appearance at the courthouse of Pat Maillis is an indication the grand jury is learning about an ill-fated attempt to create an incentive plan during Aaron Zahn s tenure as CEO that could have paid out several hundred million dollars to employees if JEA had been sold.
Maillis was not involved in creating that performance unit plan, but she had previously been working with Zahn, other JEA executives and an outside consultant on a different form of a long-term incentive plan that did not have the same potentially large payouts as the performance unit plan.