With Jacksonville’s 2024-25 events calendar missing three sizable entries, the head of the city’s Office Sports and Entertainment told City Council members Aug. 15 that his staff was working to fill the holes.
The office came into a Council Finance Committee budget hearing reporting a $474,309 decrease in operating expenses, partly driven by the elimination of funding for the Sea & Sky Air Show at Jacksonville Beach and a Bethune-Cookman University football game at EverBank Stadium.
Both of those events will not be held in Jacksonville during the 2024-25 budget year. Sea & Sky was dropped after the U.S. Navy Blue Angels told Jacksonville it “wanted to give another city a chance” at hosting the demonstration flying team, said Alex Alston, executive director of the office.
As for the football game, Alston said the economics of the event “just didn’t work” for 2024-25 after the 2023 game produced lackluster financial results.
“We couldn’t get to an arrangement financially that would make sense,” he said.
The loss of the events saved the office $540,000 in operating expenses, split between $290,000 for Sea & Sky and $250,000 for the football game.
Jax River Jams
Elsewhere in the budget, the office removed $500,000 in funding for the annual Jax River Jams concert series. It was unclear during the meeting what effect that would have on the event, but Downtown Vision Inc. CEO Jake Gordon later told the Daily Record that the series would not be held in 2025.
Jax River Jams was co-produced by DVI and the Office of Sports and Entertainment, and Gordon said the organizations were interested in resuming it after next year’s absence.
The move could spell the end of the series.
In June, CEO Jake Gordon said the series’ future was being evaluated amid declining sponsorship funding and rising costs of production.
At that time, DVI said options included maintaining the status quo, shutting down the series or adopting cost-saving measures such as reducing dates or acts.
The free concert series, which began in 2021, has drawn tens of thousands of people Downtown to hear acts from different genres of music presented over successive weeks. At the 2024 event, held on Thursdays in April, the rotation was country, alternative, hip-hop and pop.
The event pairs national acts with regional and local performers. Series headliners have included 1990s R&B chart-toppers Boyz II Men and ’90s rock band Sugar Ray, both of which had Top 10 hits.
Alston said his office was intent on bringing the Blue Angels back for Sea & Sky. The team is scheduled to perform at the 2024 NAS Jax Air Show, scheduled for Oct. 19-20.
HBCU football
Alston said another goal was to attract a football game featuring Historical Black College and university teams, either Bethune-Cookman or other schools.
Bethune-Cookman played at EverBank Stadium in 2022 and 2023, using Jacksonville as a home game while Daytona Beach was crowded during the community’s annual Bike Week event.
In 2022, the game attracted 23,373 fans to see Bethune-Cookman face Jackson State, which at that time was coached by NFL Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders. The crowd was more than three times the size of B-C’s home average.
In 2023, attendance in Jacksonville fell off by more than half to 10,186 in a game against Southern.
Committee member Ju’Coby Pittman urged Alston to more aggressively promote and market future HBCU games in Jacksonville.
“I was at last year’s game,” she said. “It was a great game and most people I talked to said they didn’t know about it.”
As part of the deal between the city and Jacksonville Jaguars to remake EverBank Stadium into the team’s “Stadium of the Future,” the Jaguars agreed to explore holding one HBCU game per year in the renovated venue. That provision was initiated by Council member Rahman Johnson, who holds degrees from Edward Waters, Jackson State and Seton Hall universities.
Money for fireworks, Hispanic Heritage Month
Among other actions, the committee restored a $35,000 contribution to the city of Jacksonville Beach for fireworks for an annual Fourth of July celebration and transferred $35,000 in funding from Mayor Donna Deegan’s sports and entertainment initiatives into support for Hispanic Heritage Month.
That transfer was spurred by committee member Raul Arias, who questioned why the city spends upward of $270,000 on events related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day but nothing to honor Jacksonville’s Hispanic community, He noted that Hispanics are the third most-populous ethnicity in the city.
Darnell Smith, Mayor Donna Deegan’s chief of staff, told Arias the administration was “committed to absolutely ensuring we have money and appropriate focus on various populations, especially the Hispanic community.”
Arias replied: “I don’t want a commitment, I want to see it in action.”
On a voice vote, the committee unanimously approved Arias’ motion to transfer the funding.
The committee is scheduled to meet four more times, Aug. 16 and daily from Aug. 21-23. Its actions are not final but rather constitute a recommendation to the full Council, which will set the budget.
The starting point for the hearings was Deegan’s proposed $1.9 billion general fund budget for 2024-25 and 2024-29 Capital Improvement Plan, which includes $489 million in first-year spending.