When Mayor Donna Deegan delivered the Jaguars stadium deal to the Jacksonville City Council on June 11, it marked the beginning of a leadership crucible for Council President Ron Salem.
With the team needing to take the deal to the mid-October meeting of the NFL owners for league approval, Salem reasoned that Council had to pass it by the end of June.
Council’s annual two-week summer break was set to start July 1, followed by the annual crunch of budget meetings into September before the Oct. 1 start of the city’s fiscal year.
Failing to meet the June 30 deadline, Salem feared, would stretch Council’s capacity to pass the stadium deal before the owners’ meeting to the limit. Or maybe past the limit.
But steering the agreement through the tight time frame involved a number of challenges, including:
• A highly compressed process. Council’s normal six-week approval timeline, which includes committee meetings and public hearings before the full Council, would need to be packed into two weeks.
• An extensive and complex agreement. The deal involved nine individual agreements, including a 30-year lease and a community benefits package in addition to the stadium improvements. The legislation containing the deal comprised 336 pages of text loaded with legalese and bureaucratic language.
• An unprecedented spend of tax dollars. At $1.4 billion, including $775 million in public funding, the stadium was by far the most expensive single public project in the city’s history.
Meeting Salem’s schedule could be described as a local government version of a two-minute drill in football, in which teams employ a hurry-up offense to score in the final seconds.
Some observers, including some Council members, thought the goal was unreachable.
Salem felt there was no other option. To him, keeping the Jaguars in Jacksonville was critical for maintaining the city’s prestige as an NFL city, an asset for attracting economic development to Northeast Florida, an element of the community fabric and more.
This is the story of how the approval came about, as told by Salem to the Daily Record.
The effort involved involved teamwork, sacrifice, leadership and fortitude, all mixed with a heightened sense of urgency.
In the beginning
During the fall of 2023, Salem received a call from Jaguars President Mark Lamping inviting him to meet with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Goodell was in Jacksonville for the Jaguars’ Dec. 4 Monday Night Football game versus Cincinnati.
Meeting in Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s office, Salem said he told Goodell he would need 60 days to get the deal approved.
“I told him, ‘I think to put this on a regular six-week schedule may be asking a lot,’” he said.
“We may need more time than that. So I think 60 days is kind of the minimum. He said, ‘So what you’re telling me, Mr. President, is you need it by May 1.’ I said, ‘May 1 would be, to me, ideal.’”
Cut to the spring of 2024, and negotiations between the team and Deegan’s office pushed the delivery of the deal past May 1. On May 14, Deegan made a presentation to Council on the stadium deal’s framework. Two weeks of community meetings on the basics of the deal followed.
“At the end of May, I, in consultation with some others, said, ‘We’ve got to move on this. And we’ve got to start with a framework of which of the agreements can we get done and finished,’” Salem said.
With a strategy in place, Salem met with Mary Staffopoulos, deputy general counsel, and Merriane Lahmeur, chief of legislative services.
“I said, ‘You guys need to devise a plan where we can take a vote in June,’” he said.
Lahmeur and Staffopoulos came back with a schedule that began with a Council workshop on the agreement followed by introduction of the legislation, Ordinance 2024-0904, at the June 11 regular Council meeting.
A required second reading was set for two days later at a Committee of the Whole meeting.
The second reading and advertised public hearing would take place June 17, followed by a Special Council meeting June 20 and another Committee of the Whole meeting June 21.
Final action was set for the June 25 regular Council meeting.
Salem asked staff to frontload Council action on the portions of the agreement that were generally acceptable to both the team and city – the low-hanging fruit, such as security and parking agreements, an amended lease for Daily’s Place and more.
That strategy was designed to keep the deal moving and clear the way for review of the more contentious parts.
Salem said some Council members told him they didn’t believe the plan would work. There was too much work to do and not enough time to do it, especially considering that Council members had to balance the schedule with their jobs.
“My response was, ‘If you don’t get every question answered that you have, we will not vote on this,’” Salem said.
“I will set up a structure that will allow you to get every question answered. But if, for some reason we’re not able to accommodate that, we will not vote.”
Carving out the CBA
In the public eye, the process appeared to progress smoothly. The workshop ended early, and a three-hour follow-up was canceled.
The meetings during the weeks of June 10 and June 17 went as scheduled, and the ordinance came out of the committee meetings with votes of 13-0-4 and 12-0-3, with some Council members abstaining due to potential conflicts involving their employers.
The committee knocked out the low-hanging fruit of the agreements quickly. The meetings ended early.
But behind the scenes, Salem was working to resolve an issue he feared would push the vote past the June 30 deadline.
Several Council members had pushed back on the $300 million community benefits agreement, which called for the city and team to each put up $150 million for workforce development, affordable housing and homelessness services in the Eastside neighborhood and beyond, plus money for park development.
Among the concerns were plans to frontload the city’s contribution into the early years of the 30-year agreement and the provision of $1 million for each Council district, which to some Council members had the optics of an enticement.
Salem felt that with the CBA attached, the ordinance wouldn’t pass by July.
“I knew if we debated it, it would just go on and on for days,” he said.
After securing a commitment from Vice President Randy White that he would schedule discussion of the CBA as a stand-alone after succeeding Salem as Council president July 1, Salem pressed the Deegan administration to decouple it for consideration after the rest of the deal was approved.
Deegan’s office resisted, concerned that Council would drop or dilute the CBA if it were considered on a stand-alone basis.
Salem said the issue prompted some “difficult discussions” between him and Mike Weinstein, Deegan’s chief negotiator and now her chief of staff.
“There was never hollering or screaming or cussing, but I was telling him what the Council could and couldn’t do,” Salem said.
The Jaguars also considered the CBA a high priority, with Lamping telling Council members the team considered it vital to improve the neighborhood around the stadium.
Salem said he wanted the CBA to be separated, not only because it would threaten the approval timeline, but because he wanted it altered to focus more heavily on the Eastside.
The argument eventually carried the day.
Lamping told Council that although the Jaguars would prefer the CBA being part of the overall package, they would not object to it being split off.
Deegan’s office also loosened its demand for the full agreement to remain intact, but stressed that it expected Council to follow through on White’s commitment to revisit it.
In September, after several hours of hearings, Council approved a version of the CBA that included amendments but contained the full $300 million in funding.
“We spent two or three weeks just on that part, which reinforced my concern that you could not do it” as part of the overall stadium agreement, Salem said.
'The real heroes’
The compressed deadline also put an enormous strain on city staff members, who were pressed into doing work in two weeks that normally would have taken six or more.
Salem said that in addition to Staffopoulos and Lahmeur, staff deserving credit for the deal included the Council Auditor’s Office and Deputy General Counsel John Sawyer.
A team of auditors provided financial and policy analysis. Salem said Sawyer supplied an exhaustive legal review.
“They were working nights, they were working weekends,” Salem said. “I came in a couple of times on the weekends, and they’d be up in their offices working on this agreement.
“Without their diligence to put the hours in to get this done, we would not have gotten it done. I may have been the orchestra leader, but these guys played just as important a part as anybody. They were the real heroes.”
Salem said White also played a pivotal role in committing to bring the CBA up for discussion.
The result was passage of the ordinance after 18½ hours of Council meetings.
Thanks to the auditors and other city staff, Salem had made good on his commitment not to take a vote until all questions from Council members were answered.
Lamping, when asked the night of the vote to comment on the process, said what the public saw was similar to watching a duck floating calmly through the water.
What the public didn’t see, he said, were the duck’s feet paddling furiously below the surface.
What if?
On Oct. 15, the NFL owners voted unanimously in favor of the agreement and CBA, the final approvals needed for each.
By then, the Jaguars had lost five of their first six games. This from a team for which Khan had expressed optimism in the preseason, saying, “Whatever we need to win, we have here.”
The team’s pratfall of a start, which extended to a 3-12 record heading into the final two weeks of the season, left Salem feeling more relieved that Council approved the deal on his schedule.
“I shudder to think what may have happened if we had gotten into September trying to deal with this,” he said.
Under that scenario, it’s imaginable that public opposition to the stadium deal could have increased, putting pressure on Council members to reject or alter it.
Even before the team’s poor start, some residents had argued that the deal should have been put to a public vote, was an unwise use of public funding and was a handout to the billionaire Khan, among other criticisms.
Salem has heard an earful of complaints as the losses piled up. He counters that during the 30-year duration of the agreement, the Jaguars are surely bound to have better teams.
Beyond that, he’s resolute that the team and the agreement are good for Jacksonville.
The benefits include improvements for the Eastside and the entire community, new parks that will help reinvigorate Downtown and will be maintained under long-term funding in the deal, and possibly a new sports entertainment district around the stadium.
“It was just so important we got it,” he said.
“We’re one of 32 places that have an NFL team, and Jacksonville, if you look at it, is one which you wouldn’t think would have one. So we are very, very fortunate to have it, and I’m glad the deal got done.”