Downtown Jacksonville update: Apartments, townhomes under construction
Construction is underway at the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences Jacksonville and One Riverside developments in downtown Jacksonville, Florida.
- Jacksonville City Council withdrew a proposal to gain authority to terminate the Downtown Investment Authority’s CEO.
- Three finalists will interview for the CEO position next week.
- Concerns arose that the proposal would hinder the ongoing search and potentially set a precedent for other city boards.
Jacksonville City Council members dropped an attempt to give themselves the power to fire the next CEO of the Downtown Investment Authority after hearing concerns it would hurt the ongoing search to fill that position.
Three finalists will be in Jacksonville for a series of interviews next week as the DIA board selects a successor for CEO Lori Boyer who is retiring after six years.
The finalists to take over the top administrative job for the agency that spearheads downtown development are Danny Chavez, most recently the chief economic development officer for the city of Waco, Texas; Lara Fritts, division director of the Frederick County Department of Economic Opportunity in Maryland; and Colin Tarbert, president and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corp. in Maryland.
The finalists will all be in Jacksonville on June 9 when each will meet with Mayor Donna Deegan and her chief of staff Mike Weinstein, City Council president-elect Kevin Carrico, and then the DIA board which will vote on whom to hire.
Legislation introduced by Carrico and City Council member Joe Carlucci would have required the board’s pick to go to council for confirmation. The legislation also would have given the DIA board and the City Council the ability to fire the next CEO.
Giving council the ability to fire the CEO would have been unusual because other city boards that hire an executive have sole power to do the firing.
“It’s not a power trip,” Carrico said last week during a May 29 meeting of the council’s Special Committee on the Future of Downtown. “It’s an accountability thing. The likelihood of this council wanting to remove a CEO would be pretty extreme.”
But when council committee committees rolled around on July 2 to take up the legislation, Carlucci moved during Neighborhoods Committee to delete that expansion of council’s role. Carrico later said he agreed with the change.
City Council member Ken Amaro said if City Council put in a provision for being able to fire the CEO, it could have opened a “Pandora’s box” for the council to likewise expand its power to fire the top executives hired by other authorities.
The city created the Downtown Investment Authority to focus full-time on downtown development. The mayor makes five appointments and the City Council president has four appointments to the board that hires the CEO.
Other parts of the legislation introduced by Carrico and Carlucci are headed toward a final vote. Those include allowing the Downtown Investment Authority to bring proposed redevelopment agreements directly to City Council rather than going first through the Mayor’s Budget Review Committee. Carrico said that will streamline the process.
The legislation also would change the limits on the Downtown Investment Authority being able to use tax revenue it controls for downtown development. Currently, the authority must go to City Council if the total value of incentives exceeds $18 million for a redevelopment agreement that uses funds generated by the downtown property tax base.
The legislation would reduce that threshold to $10 million but it also would remove muti-year property tax rebates called REV grants from counting against that limit. Carrico said the upshot of the change would be to give the authority more leeway in approving deals without going to City Council.
If incentives in any amount come out of the city’s general fund, which supports the city’s everyday city services, the deal still would need to go to City Council for final approval.
