The St. Johns River Ferry will be taking an extended hiatus starting Tuesday.
The link between Mayport and Heckscher Drive will be out of commission until mid-February for a planned inspection and repairs costing about $1.4 million.
That cost is split between the city, which operates the service, and the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, which is expected to take over operations by April 1, if details can be hammered out.
The ferry typically has been out of the water in December — generally the slowest ridership month — for inspection and work but timing didn’t allow it this year, said City Council member John Crescimbeni, chair of the St. Johns River Ferry Commission.
The delay, he said, was to ensure contractors repairing the ferry’s slip wall had the materials and were ready to go when the boat wasn’t in use.
The slip wall repair is a separate $4.5 million project being handled by JTA.
Construction has begun on areas of the wall that don’t affect the ferry’s back-and-forth route across the river, said authority spokeswoman Leigh Ann Rassler.
Crescimbeni said the expectation is the inspection and repair will mean just six weeks without ferry service, “but you never know with a haul-out.”
“It’s like taking an old car to the service department,” he said of dry-docking the vessel.
If the Coast Guard were to find additional needed repairs, it could delay the ferry’s return. Crescimbeni said additional costs above the contracted $1.4 million or so would be shared by the city and JTA.
The two had many meetings in 2015 on the logistics behind transferring the service from the city, which accepted it from the Jacksonville Port Authority in 2012, and JTA.
That handoff is tentatively set to happen by April 1.
However, Crescimbeni said the transfer agreement still needs work. Determining who pays how much for future capital expenses “probably has been the biggest hang-up,” he said. Those talks are expected to continue over the next couple of months.
When that transfer comes to fruition, it’ll be for a service that’s had an upward trend in both ridership and revenue the past two years.
There were 372,085 passengers and 212,888 vehicles that took a ride on the service in fiscal 2013-14. That jumped to 480,382 passengers and 251,337 vehicles last year.
Revenue wise, the increase went from $1.2 million to $1.7 million.
Numbers are slightly down in the first couple of months this year, which can be attributed to being out of service seven days due to mechanical issues.
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