JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Councilman Garrett Dennis spoke about a proposed bill at the beginning of a resiliency committee Thursday morning. This bill would dedicate $41 million to infrastructure projects on the Capital Improvement Plan that weren’t scheduled until closer to 2025.
The bill would break down the money to $2 million per city district.
The money would be borrowed from the bond market, the same way the funds for the Lot J development will be sourced.
“So my thought was, if we can immediately go to the bond market and fund Lot J, we can immediately go to the bond market and fund infrastructure projects,” Dennis said.
While it was not a direct attack on the development project, saying they could fund both, Dennis says he was blindsided.
“You know, I was a little put off about the Lot J, because, you know, we’ve been spending so much time, you know, working on how do we fund the need of resiliency. But I just felt like we were just being pushed off and pushed off and pushed off and pushed off,” Dennis said.
The other council members on the committee said that while they believe Dennis is coming from a good space, now may not be the time to pull out money to focus on future listed projects, when they are trying to focus on projects not listed on the CIP.
“I think it needs to be drainage, it needs to be resiliency in which there are millions of dollars and drainage issues that are are not even on this list for my district. So I think that to me would be, if we’re really talking about resiliency, that’s what we need to be focused on. Not on a stop sign or traffic. It needs to be resiliency oriented," Councilwoman Randy DeFoor said.
For Councilman Matt Carlucci, he says he thinks the resiliency projects should be focused on first, and when those are done, then they can look at the listed future projects.
" I think that we’ve got to find out what our priorities are, and I’m echoing what you’re, I think, trying to say, maybe in a different way, but if we’re gonna spend all this money on Lot J. If that were to happen, what about the rest of the city? And then when we talk about what about the rest of the city? Well, do we want to concentrate on drainage, which in fact kind of shoots two birds with one stone? Because you are talking about resilience."
The City Council must still vote to approve the Lot J development before it moves forward, as Carlucci mentioned. If passed, the total city funds to be spent on the project will be at least $218 million.
Cox Media Group
