Nate Monroe: Mayor Deegan hopes to accelerate slow-moving downtown park construction

COMMENTARY | It has been nearly five years since City Hall paid a king's ransom to rid The Jacksonville Landing — and downtown writ large — of Toney Sleiman, the shrewd suburban shopping-center developer who antagonized more than one mayor and held onto the former waterfront mall with an iron grip. But it turns out booting Sleiman didn't automatically herald a renaissance on the hexed waterfront property that once housed the Landing's fading orange-roofed buildings.

The city moved with remarkable speed — by its standards — to demolish those buildings, but it had no serious plan in place to replace them. Former Mayor Lenny Curry seemed to view removing Sleiman, who supported Curry's opponent in the 2015 election, as an end in itself, with the rest an annoying series of details to be worked out later. But with Sleiman out, there was no longer an interested developer in place ready to act on private redevelopment plans, and Curry's administration appeared either unaware or uninterested in the lengthy work and the millions above and beyond the $15 million it paid Sleiman that would be required to build a worthy public amenity. With the city's new sunbaked lot at the southern end of Laura Street, a corridor already starved for density and vibrancy became immediately less dense and less vibrant. For this meager accomplishment — exorcising Sleiman and removing any evidence of his former ownership — the city is in for about $25 million.

This outcome wasn't inevitable: Sleiman's suburban-centric specialty wasn't necessarily the best fit for such a high-profile downtown space, but in a town chock-full of braggadocious would-be downtown developers, Sleiman was among the few who actually had the juice to pull off something expensive and complicated. And he'd indicated he was essentially willing to let the city tell him what to build.

During Mayor Alvin Brown's term in office, the taxpayer price tag for redeveloping the Landing in partnership with Sleiman was about $12 million — which at the time seemed like a giant public subsidy, so much so the City Council refused to sign off on the deal. Today, the city regularly doles out subsidy packages to private developers worth multiple times that amount, and of course taxpayers are in for more than twice that already just for the shade-less waterfront lawn that replaced Sleiman's Landing. Today, that $12 million looks like a bargain-bin gem.

But there is little point in litigating the past: Mayor Donna Deegan inherited Curry's vacant lot — one of the most frustrating and visible signs of downtown's malaise. The Downtown Investment Authority has plans to turn the space into an elaborate park that includes a few pads for private development, but actually starting construction on the first phase of that project has, in characteristic Jacksonville fashion, proved to be a moving target. Why is this patch of land, blessedly parked on the St. Johns River, so cursed?

Deegan said kickstarting that work has been moved to the "front burner."

"Why have we not started on phase 1 of this park? We've gotta get going on it," she said in a recent interview.

Every mayor supports downtown revitalization, a longstanding and bipartisan City Hall priority, but how they approach it can be revealing. Curry — who frequently said residents would no longer recognize downtown at the end of his term (spoiler: it's almost exactly the same) — seemed to prioritize private development while viewing public amenities like parks as a secondary consideration. That stuff just didn't seem to excite him, and the inexplicable lack of progress on some of the lagging projects, like the long-closed Friendship Fountain, and of course the former Landing site, didn't outwardly pique his frustration. Instead, he poured his political capital into selling the public on massive subsidies for developers and landing highly competitive federal money to support their plans instead of the myriad other ways such sought-after funding could have been used to benefit the public.

But developers move on their own timelines and work for their own fortunes, and ultimately they didn't bail out Curry's vision of a transformed downtown. The mega-projects have stalled or remain years away from completion, and the same skeletal downtown remains for the rest of us. Time bleeds away.

Curry, to his credit, initiated city investment in some of the bigger public-works projects in his final years, but that late start guaranteed those efforts would not materialize until long after he was out of office. Jacksonville would be, in other words, stuck with what it had.

Deegan is not anti-development — she stressed this multiple times — but she sees the construction of public amenities and public infrastructure in downtown as the one factor firmly within City Hall's control and thus the thing to prioritize. The lack of progress on those efforts is a palpable source of frustration for Deegan.

"Those parks are a big deal to me," she said.

Deegan's administration is figuring out how to accelerate work on some of the long-desired public projects throughout downtown, including waterfront parks and the Emerald Trail, the planned 30-miles of trails and greenways — talked about in some form or another for about 100 years — that would finally link together the urban core neighborhoods with one another and with downtown.

But the fallow former Landing site, called "Riverfront Plaza," is the first knot Deegan will have to untangle.

She inherited not just the vacant land but a detailed plan for what that park will look like, including private development, some of which has generated criticism.

Last year, the Downtown Investment Authority, the agency that oversees downtown development, put out a call for bidders to submit plans to build out the back corner of the future park. Despite receiving only a single bid, and despite that bid containing an obviously ludicrous proposal for a 44-story luxury skyscraper, the DIA accepted it and treated it as if this were a thing that could actually happen. This tower, of course, would require tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer support — the norm for any development now in downtown. Also egregious: the initial agreement would give the developer, New York-based American Lions, until almost 2029 to complete it, meaning "Riverfront Plaza" would remain a work in progress for years to come.

In private, city officials and other developers have never taken this plan seriously, so I was surprised, pleasantly, to hear Deegan speak out loud some of the same observations about the project. "It seems improbable," she said. "It seems like it would take forever."

Deegan didn't declare the American Lions tower dead, but she did say she was interested in seeing if something "less dense" and something more realistically achievable in a shorter time frame could work instead. Park advocates were concerned the tower would effectively overpower the plaza and turn it less into a park and more a nice amenity for the residents of a luxury high-rise, concerns Deegan shared.

American Lions remains interested in developing part of the plaza, even if the writing is on the wall for its initial proposal. "I just tend to think it's not a very realistic building," she said.

"I obviously want development downtown, but I want it to be led by accessibility and also an eye toward what's best for resilience."

Perhaps this is a low bar, but it was undeniably refreshing to hear a Jacksonville mayor talk honestly about the infeasibility of a rendering, those pretty, kaleidoscopic pictures that have lured so many past city officials into making rash decisions with public resources. More often than not those technicolor dreams dissipate, leaving hard feelings in their wake and sucking away more of our precious time. Jacksonville could create an advent calendar of the many renderings that have passed into God's loving embrace after long battles with reality.

So it's important for a mayor to dream about the possibilities while recognizing the absurd.

Wresting control of the Landing — the center of the center, downtown's front door, its red carpet — was always an option that offered promise and peril in equal measure. Deegan recognizes the urgency of reversing its star-crossed fortunes with a realistic plan built around public need. If she can pull that off, maybe the rest of downtown will start to follow.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Deegan wants accelerated park construction at Jacksonville Landing site