City Council member Reggie Gaffney, joined by faith and business leaders in Jacksonville’s black community, voiced support Dec. 30 for Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s $450 million Lot J project near TIAA Bank Field, a deal that has stirred opposition.
In a news conference at City Hall, Gaffney framed Khan’s entertainment, retail and residential proposal as an opportunity to create jobs for minority-run small businesses and residents in the Eastside neighborhood adjacent to Lot J and the stadium.
Gaffney’s news conference comes as Council prepares for a possible final vote Jan. 12 on Mayor Lenny Curry’s proposed $245.3 million taxpayer-backed incentive deal for Lot J, a partnership of the city, Jaguars and The Cordish Companies of Baltimore, Maryland.
In an interview Dec. 18, Gaffney said he has commitments from the Jaguars and Cordish for job creation related to Lot J and future Eastside investment.
Gaffney, who represents District 7, declined to provide details during the interview and at the Dec. 30 news conference. The district includes Lot J and the Eastside.
“A strong commitment from the Cordish Companies and the Jaguars will make that happen, along with the city,” Gaffney said Dec. 30. “In my opinion, this will be one of the singular greatest opportunities I have seen in Jacksonville in my lifetime. To pass this up would be a huge failure of the leadership of this city.”
Additional support
Gaffney was joined at the news conference by Council Vice President Sam Newby, District 10 Council member Brenda Priestly Jackson and District 8 Council member Ju’Coby Pittman.
Newby called Lot J “a game-changer” for Downtown Jacksonville and surrounding neighborhoods.
Priestly Jackson and Pittman said they still have questions about the city’s proposed deal with Khan and Cordish.
They said they attended the news conference to show solidarity with Gaffney on Lot J’s potential to create jobs and to express the need to improve public infrastructure in the majority-black Council Districts 7, 8, 9 and 10 and the city’s distressed neighborhoods.
Priestly Jackson said her support of the Lot J bill will depend on the Curry administration’s ability to show that public investment in Khan’s project does not inhibit the city’s debt capacity to fund infrastructure improvements, such as septic tank remediation, streets and sidewalks, elsewhere in Duval County.
The Council Auditor’s Office says interest on the $208 million in bond debt the Curry administration proposes to fund the project will be $157.5 million. That brings the total debt service cost to taxpayers to $365.8 million with a $12.2 million annual payment.
Priestly Jackson said she’d be closer to supporting the deal if the Jaguars and Cordish agree to absorb what’s expected to be expensive environmental mitigation costs at the Lot J site before construction and add a more clear-cut financial indemnification clause to the agreement.
“I need to feel confident we are not saddling and burdening future generations by a bad decision today,” Priestly Jackson said. “I will not support Lot J or any other development that precludes the ability of us to take care of the everyday needs of our neighbors and quality of life — infrastructure, first responders.”
The Council Auditor’s Office says the existing Lot J deal would generate 44 cents to the city for every $1 invested in the project.
Deal finds opponents
Gaffney’s news conference comes as community organizations speak out against the deal.
Gaffney said Dec. 18 the event was not a direct response to a letter sent Dec. 17 by the NAACP Jacksonville Branch to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell asking the league to pull any support its given to the Lot J deal.
“Not everybody on the Northside of town or in Districts 7, 8, 9, and 10 are against Lot J,” Gaffney said.
NAACP Jacksonville Branch President Isaiah Rumlin said in the letter that the Lot J deal will give Khan and Cordish more than $200 million in taxpayer money while infrastructure improvements promised to predominantly black neighborhoods during the 1968 city-Duval County government consolidation are largely unfulfilled.
“The continued failure to deliver on these promises of consolidation has led to blighted neighborhoods, unprecedented crime rates, especially in the predominately black neighborhoods,” he wrote.
Rumlin said in his letter that the Lot J deal may be a “worthwhile endeavor” but must be fair to Jacksonville residents.
“It is frustrating to witness the latest attempt to enrich millionaires and billionaires with taxpayer dollars while many Jacksonville residents live in poverty and suffer disproportionate impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic,” he wrote.
District 9 Council member Garrett Dennis did not attend the news conference. He said Dec. 18 that he was surprised by Rumlin’s letter to the NFL but understands the NAACP president’s frustration.
“For the most part, everyone supports development down there (in the Sports and Entertainment District), but we just want a good deal,” he said. “We don’t want to be taken advantage of. We want to have some skin in the game but how much is too much?”
OurJax opposition
The 501(c)(4) social welfare organization OurJax Inc., led by retired CSX Corp. CEO Michael Ward, Brightway Insurance Executive Chairman David Miller and former JEA board chair and lobbyist Mike Hightower, have launched a television and social media ad campaign against the Lot J incentives.
The social media effort urges Jacksonville voters to contact Council members and tell them to “scrap” Lot J,” OurJax said in a Dec. 29 email.
Like the NAACP, OurJax has compared the Lot J negotiations to the halted 2019 attempt to sell Jacksonville’s municipal energy and water utility JEA to a private company.
The group also wrote an open letter to Council President Tommy Hazouri dated Dec. 29 urging him to withdraw the Lot J deal negotiated by Curry’s administration and start over through the city’s standard economic development processes.
Curry officials negotiated both the Lot J incentive package and completed the final weeks of negotiating with bidders in JEA’s invitation to negotiate a sale. The JEA sale was ended by the utility’s board of directors amid public and Council pressure.
“Like the JEA deal before, the current Lot J deal was fundamentally broken before it made it to prime time,” OurJax said. “It was rigged from the beginning because it undermined standing public policy, bypassed normal negotiating procedures, evaded standard city development requirements, and circumvented accepted taxpayer safeguards.”
