55 at 55: Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of
At least for my purposes, U2 released its tenth studio album at the perfect time. Having finished nearly five years of working at the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C. and making the transition back to education at the University of Florida, All That You Can’t Leave Behind was the soundtrack to my first year in law school. It is not U2’s best recording — in my opinion, that distinction belongs to Zooropa, followed closely by Achtung Baby and The Unforgettable Fire — but it provided an ideal set of songs to navigate the process of returning to Florida, becoming a student again, and watching the 2000 presidential election and Bush v. Gore from the political sidelines.
The album roars to life in the first few songs. “Beautiful Day” and “Elevation” are energizing and motivating. “Walk On” reminds listeners what truly matters. And during moments of uncertainty, “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” provides tough love.
You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment
And now you can’t get out of it
Don’t say that later will be better
Now you’re stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it
I have thought about those lyrics recently. With the Mayor’s Office and City Council battling over which entity will set the City Hall agenda, one independent authority reliving its worst moments in a federal trial, another experiencing leadership turmoil, and Downtown development projects disappearing, the City of Jacksonville may be stuck in its own moment that it can’t get out of. Below are a few thoughts on getting unstuck.[1]
6. Focus and Unleash the Strong Mayor System…
Time is the most precious commodity for any mayor. There is never enough of it. For a new mayoral administration, the nine months between October 1 (when a mayor’s first annual budget takes effect) and July 1 (the start of the second year) span an especially crucial period. With the first budget process in the rear-view mirror and City Council past its most time-intensive and public task, a new mayor finally has capacity and time to hone her or his agenda, repeatedly educate the public on mayoral goals, and refocus city employees on those aims.
In her July 1, 2023, inaugural address, Mayor Deegan articulated seven priorities: (1) Infrastructure; (2) Resiliency; (3) Fund riverfront parks and complete the Emerald Trail; (4) Invest in long-neglected neighborhoods; (5) Prioritize community health; (6) Literacy; and (7) Make Jacksonville the small business capital of the Southeast. While each of those priorities is commendable, seven is a large number of goals for a four-year term.
If the Mayor and her team want to regain control of the overall City of Jacksonville agenda and narrative, they should focus relentlessly on three or four of those aims and strategically build the entire administration around them. Every mayoral or staff action or decision — e.g., scheduling the Mayor’s scarce time; reviewing proposals brought to the Mayor’s Budget Review Committee (MBRC); advancing policy proposals; issuing executive orders; advocating with other governmental entities; interacting with independent authorities; introducing legislation; engaging with the media or community stakeholders; assigning tasks to mayoral staff members; posting on social media — should flow from the answer to this question: How will this action or decision advance the Mayor’s key priorities?
That kind of focus will distill the essence of the administration. It will unleash the power of the strong mayor system and provide the public with a clear understanding of how Mayor Deegan and the City are fulfilling her vision. It will help those who support her priorities to organize, rally, and use their effective citizenship skills on her behalf.
7. …Or City Council Will Set the Agenda
In contrast, lack of focus is crippling to any administration. As Aristotle observed, nature abhors a vacuum. If the Mayor’s Office is not singularly focused on articulating and advancing a clear agenda, the co-equal branch of government on the other side of City Hall’s fourth floor will be all too happy to fill that vacuum with its own priorities.
Former basketball star and U.S. Senator Bill Bradley put it bluntly: “When you’re not practicing, someone else is. And when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other person will win.” Right now, the City Council is practicing regularly. In the last few weeks alone, the Council has passed legislation restricting the Mayor’s ability to hire lobbyists and grant-writing consultants; accept donations or gifts on behalf of the City of Jacksonville; and settle lawsuits filed against City agencies or employees.
Some have argued that City Council was primed to blitz the Mayor’s agenda from her first day. There may be some truth to that argument, but it is worth noting that Council passed the Mayor’s first budget and her request for $26 million to fund transition recommendations with minimal changes. It has approved nearly all of her nominees for staff positions, boards, and commissions. Opposition was not reflexive, but it is building.
Having been on the receiving end of Council attempts to dilute mayoral authority, and as a student of the City of Jacksonville Charter, I do not favor that approach. While City Council has a vital oversight role, and the Mayor’s Office can be more effective in preempting and countering Council moves, these fights over whittling away the mayor’s administrative powers are not a good use of anyone’s time. Section 3.04 of the Charter is clear: “The executive power of the consolidated government…is vested in the mayor who is the chief executive and administrative officer of the consolidated government. [The mayor] shall be responsible for the conduct of the executive and administrative departments of the consolidated government. The mayor shall administer, supervise, and control all departments and divisions created by this charter and all departments and divisions created by the council.”
Council veterans likely understand that opposition for opposition’s sake can generate political backlash, especially when it is directed at a well-liked public figure like Mayor Deegan. That awareness may be one reason the legislative branch is advancing a policy agenda of its own. In January, Council President Ron Salem partnered with Visit Jacksonville to allocate $1.5 million to helping Jacksonville host high-profile athletic events. This month, City Council approved legislation to fund initiatives aimed at addressing Jacksonville’s homelessness challenge and moved to create a Homelessness Initiatives Commission to oversee those expenditures. The Council Finance Committee has proposed strategic investments in affordable housing, parks, food security, workforce training, veterans, historic preservation, and other priorities.
In comparing Mayor Deegan’s goals to City Council’s aims, there is clear overlap and potential for collaboration if both parties rededicate themselves to a constructive working relationship. It will take work from both branches, but let’s hope it happens. Restoring two-way traffic between the Mayor’s Office and the Council chambers is in everyone’s interest — especially Jacksonville citizens, who deserve productive government. As AG Gancarski wisely opined in his latest Jacksonville Today column: “[W]e have a choice: a lost decade of bickering, or a renewed attempt to speak to our adversaries and find the common ground of civility necessary to stop creating political potholes and getting back to filling in the real ones, to the unglamorous yeoman’s work of capital improvement and maintenance and the things that actually matter to people who don’t live or breathe the political process.”
8. Make Something Happen on Downtown
Downtown Jacksonville revitalization is not dead. But a recent check of its vital signs should be concerning to anyone who wants to resurrect the center city. Our urban core is in clear need of some urgent care.
Having visited Friendship Fountain since I was a child, I was delighted to see it reopen and look forward to visiting the reactivated Southbank destination. Unfortunately, the exciting fountain restoration was quickly followed by a spate of unwelcome news about Downtown redevelopment. As both the Jacksonville Daily Record and Jacksonville Business Journal reported, multiple Downtown projects have expired or been delayed.
· In May 2022, the Downtown Investment Authority (DIA) approved plans and offered inducements for development of a 22-story mixed use project on the former Duval County Courthouse site. That project is now defunct (yet still appears on the DIA website).
· Four months later, the DIA authorized and incentivized a 44-story residential tower on the former Jacksonville Landing site. The tower proposal has also been terminated.
· The developers planning to restore the historic Ambassador Hotel, Central National Bank, and Independent Life buildings near the Bryan Simpson United States Courthouse and City Hall are in default of their DIA agreements. The apartments, grocery store, hotel, retail, and rooftop restaurant planned for those sites will apparently not materialize.
· Following a previous extension in December 2023, the DIA recently extended a fundraising deadline for the proposed Museum of Science and History (MOSH) move to the Northbank. If MOSH has not raised $40 million by June 30, its DIA agreement will expire.
I found this 2009 Florida Times-Union article authored by former reporter David Hunt and David Bauerlein, who still covers Downtown. Fifteen years later, the similarities are uncanny. As the Davids reported then: “City Hall has set a straightforward goal for downtown: Become ‘the place to be in Northeast Florida’…The reality isn’t kind: A series of high-profile development meltdowns has left downtown scarred with empty, tomb-like buildings. Prime city-owned acreage along the St. Johns River remains barren. Sorely needed revitalization plans have been undermined by on-again, off-again funding. Today, Jacksonville lags behind other cities that have lured tens of thousands of people downtown to live, work and play. And the gap is widening.”
Does any of that description sound familiar?
To be fair, external forces like inflation and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic have created challenges for downtowns across the nation. But if there were ever a time for bold action to restore hope for Downtown revitalization, that time is now. City leaders should focus on activating two projects which could have outsized impacts on urban core success.
· Don’t let the Related Group leave town without a mutually agreeable plan to develop the former River City Brewing Company site. Imagine the combined impact of the Riverwalk, a reinvigorated Friendship Fountain, and the proposed residential/restaurant project on Southbank waterfront redevelopment. But if that development falls through like the Landing site tower and former Courthouse project, Friendship Fountain will be on its own if MOSH ultimately moves to the Northbank.
· Do something with the Laura Street Trio. For the last 22 years (or more), the potential revitalization of the historic Bisbee, Florida Life, and Old Florida National Bank/Marble Bank Buildings in the Downtown core has seen endless discussion and limited action. Multiple developers have reached agreements with the City to redevelop the properties and yet the structures are not much closer to activation than when Bill Clinton occupied the White House. The latest prospective developer, Southeast Group, has been at it for more than a decade.
Unfortunately, the latest turn in the Laura Street Trio saga has the potential redevelopment bouncing like a ping pong ball between the DIA and City Council. As Florida Times-Union columnist Nate Monroe described a painful January 2024 Council meeting convened to consider the latest iteration of the project, “the result was a characteristic Jacksonville debacle: blame to go around with no clear path forward and, most significantly, a sinking feeling the wraith-like Trio — a huddle of gorgeous but deteriorating buildings constructed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Fire — will continue to haunt downtown Jacksonville for a generation, if its crumbling pillars don’t succumb to gravity first. The council asked Atkins to go back to the DIA to negotiate a finalized deal, an idea so appealing that, after the Thursday meeting, Atkins was openly wondering if demolishing the buildings might be the easiest path forward.”
The Laura Street Trio could be game-changing for the city center. While outlying Downtown neighborhoods like Brooklyn and the Southbank have seen some development success in recent years, urban core revitalization has moved at a slower pace. As Monroe described, “[i]t’s widely understood that restoring the Trio would activate and add density to downtown’s main artery, arguably one of the most, if not the most, important pieces in the revitalization puzzle.”
After more than two decades, it is time to put up or shut up on the Laura Street Trio. If the City is willing to reach a development agreement with Southeast and its principal Steve Atkins, the parties should set a hard deadline to complete negotiations — preferably no later than March 31, 2024. If a mutually agreeable deal with DIA and Council support can’t be reached by then, the City should offer Southeast a fair price to acquire the buildings and find a different redevelopment partnership that will restore the buildings as soon as possible. Otherwise, the inevitable result from a quarter-century of Laura Street Trio futility will be rubble.
9. Leave Pensions Out of Stadium Negotiations
During the time I lived in the nation’s capital, a public-private partnership built a new arena in the heart of Downtown Washington. Now known as Capital One Arena, the sports facility is home to the Washington Wizards of the National Basketball Association and the Washington Capitals of the National Hockey League. It also hosts concerts and other events. Capital One Arena is on the Metro Green/Red/Yellow lines and easily accessible to people throughout the “DMV” metro area. The arena helped to spur the development of the Penn Quarter neighborhood in Downtown D.C.
Slightly more than 25 years after the arena opened, the Wizards/Capitals owner has reached a tentative agreement with Virginia to build a new facility on the Potomac River in Alexandria. You can learn more about the relocation odyssey in this comprehensive Washington Post chronicle. If the deal is ultimately approved — an uncertain outcome in the face of labor opposition and bipartisan concern — Capitol One Arena could become obsolete unless Washington, D.C. stakeholders can repurpose it.
Professional sports franchise owners usually don’t make life-long commercial commitments. As businesspeople, they are focused on the financial success of their enterprise and motivated to maximize return on their investment. What the Jacksonville Jaguars want from the City of Jacksonville in 2024 will change 25 years from now. Heck, it can change in a matter of months — as AG Gancarski of Florida Politics reported, the Jaguars have limited the current negotiations to the stadium alone rather than a more comprehensive plan that included a surrounding development district. But that potential for change means the City should carefully manage its financial risks on stadium renovation. Don’t gamble with assets we have already promised to first responders and other public servants.
While the reduced scale of the negotiations could be good news for taxpayers, who may contribute less than the originally anticipated $1 billion to the project, they would also benefit if officials dropped the notion of borrowing that contribution from City pension funds. Police officers, firefighters, and other first responders assume enormous risks to protect citizens. Other City employees invest years if not decades on behalf of the community. The pension funds which supply these public servants with retirement security should be off-limits as stadium financing.
Having been immersed in pension issues during four years at City Hall, I return to this subject with reluctance. But far too much work has been done across multiple mayoral administrations and City Councils to shore up the fiscal health of the retirement funds and address past pension governing challenges to reverse course now.
Numbers tell the story. The Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund (JPFPF) draft annual actuarial report provides information on the fiscal soundness of the fund as of October 1, 2023. According to the report, the total JPFPF unfunded liability — the difference between the City’s total police and fire pension obligations and the value of its assets on hand to pay those obligations — is $2.8 billion. Another way to think of unfunded liability is as pension debt. The net unfunded liability is $1.45 billion because the City is receiving present credit for future revenues it won’t even start receiving until later this decade. All told, the JPFPF is approximately 45% funded, meaning it currently has less than half of the assets needed to pay its pension obligations. The report projects that funding percentage will still be approximately 45% ten years from now.
The General Employees Pension Plan (GEPP) has comparable challenges. According to its most recent actuarial report, the GEPP had an unfunded liability of nearly $1.6 billion as of October 1, 2022. The plan was less than 57% funded. Future projections show the GEPP pension debt growing to nearly $2.1 billion and the funded percentage dropping to 45% by 2029. Similarly, the Correctional Officers Retirement Plan’s latest actuarial report revealed an unfunded liability of $275 million. The plan is 49% funded.
In light of these numbers, now is not an appropriate time to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from already undercapitalized pension funds, even if the City will pay back the loans at a 6.5% interest rate. That rate is also a potential challenge. Since local governments can borrow money tax-free, the City may be able to obtain a lower interest rate on the open public finance market. A lower rate could decrease the cost of borrowing and lessen the burden on taxpayers.
As this Governing column explains, some stadium projects succeed while others do not. There are no safe bets and no sure things. With that uncertainty, the City of Jacksonville’s most prudent course is to consider EverBank Field financing options which minimize risks to taxpayers and other municipal assets. At a time when City pension accounts need deposits, now is not the moment to make major withdrawals.
10. He’s Just Ken
Speaking of stadium renovations, the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp and City of Jacksonville have announced Project Next — a plan to invest $32 million in 121 Financial Ballpark. According to the Jacksonville Daily Record, the investment “includes a larger videoboard, enhanced club space behind home plate, new multilevel building in right field and a front porch and center field plaza to welcome fans.” The new building will have a venue that News4Jax reports “could serve as a spot for wedding receptions, a party venue or business luncheons and workshops.”
Ken Babby, the AAA team owner, called the renovations “a generational moment for the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, our city, fans and community partners.” But I believe that moment occurred in 2015, when Babby purchased the former AA Jacksonville Suns. At a time when the prices of many entertainment options — e.g., Walt Disney World, Jacksonville Jaguars season tickets — have been on the rise, Babby distinguishes himself with his dedication to keeping Jumbo Shrimp games accessible to fans. Upon buying the team, he actually lowered ticket prices. Nearly a decade later, the Jumbo Shrimp start ticket prices at $5.00 and sell hot dogs for $2.00.
For anyone who has met Ken Babby, his commitment to “affordable family fun” is not surprising. He is a genuinely nice person whose ego, if any, seems even more impervious to inflation than Jumbo Shrimp prices. Look for Ken at the ballpark when the 2024 baseball season begins next month.
11. Post of the Month: Cocaine Bear
For those of you who don’t know, Mark Woods is a highly respected Metro columnist for the Florida Times-Union. In the column attached to the above post, Mark “applauds” proposed legislation to protect Floridians from cocaine-affected bears and suggests a variety of similar measures the 2024 Florida Legislature should consider (e.g., the Sharknado bill, Snakes on a Plane bill, the Jurassic Park bill, etc.). But I was disappointed that Mark missed this opportunity to address a scourge so noxious that it spawned four films: Killer Tomatoes. Surely legislators should empower Floridians to act when the vine-ripened become villains.
Thanks for reading the second edition of 55 in 55. More to come next month. Best wishes for a great end to February and start to March!
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Chris Hand is an attorney who served as Chief of Staff at the City of Jacksonville from 2011–2015. He previously co-authored America, the Owner’s Manual: You Can Fight City Hall — and Win and authored the 50th anniversary update to A Quiet Revolution: The Consolidation of Jacksonville-Duval County & the Dynamics of Urban Political Reform.
[1] Reader’s Note: I published the first of these 55 in 55 columns in November 2023. Before the end of 2024, I will have shared 55 insights, questions, or recommendations related to the Consolidated City of Jacksonville on the occasion of its 55th anniversary. That first edition included the first five observations. This version provides the next five (#6 to #10). I welcome your feedback.
