FOLIOJacksonville’s reputation as one of the country’s most dangerous places to walk or ride a bike became a personal truth for Abhishek Mukherjee on Sept. 7, 2011.
He was pedaling down Riverside Avenue on his way to San Marco at about 5:30 p.m. Just past the Fuller Warren Bridge from Computer Power Place to Forest Street, Riverside Avenue has no bike path. As Mukherjee pedaled along that stretch of road, a city bus passed him on the left, clipping his handlebars. Mukherjee’s bike twisted underneath him, and he bounced off the side of the bus and landed in the street (video: bit.ly/v04y6c). Mukherjee was one of five local cyclists struck by a vehicle within a three-day period that September. Mukherjee survived, with damage to the discs in his vertebrae, coming away with an even more passionate commitment to lobbying the city to make its streets safer for bicyclists and pedestrians.
In 2011, the Jacksonville City Council adopted a new development impact fee formula that will fund bike paths throughout the city and provide money to fill in gaps on streets like Riverside Avenue. The fee is designed to halt sprawl, decrease the cost of downtown and urban development and offer developers savings if they build bike paths, multi-use developments, add affordable housing or redevelop old behemoths like Arlington’s Town & Country Shopping Center on University Boulevard.
The plan divides the city into 10 zones and five regional areas and lists priority projects for each zone, paid for with transportation fees from development in that area. In Riverside Avondale, mobility fees will help fund a streetcar ($50 million). In Arlington, it will build a pedestrian overpass across the Arlington Expressway ($3 million).
But a month after City Council adopted the 2030 Mobility Plan in September 2011, it voted unanimously to suspend the new transportation impact fee for a year, to spur new development and economic recovery. The moratorium will expire on Oct. 12, unless the Council extends it. Mukherjee and other city residents are educating themselves on the Mobility Plan and advocating that City Council allow the moratorium to expire.
“Any funding toward transportation issues will create a different mentality in the city by giving cyclists the importance and respect of automobiles [in transportation planning],” Mukherjee said. “That will change the culture long term.”
During the year that the mobility fee moratorium has been in place, the city has issued 19 building permits — from Oct. 20, 2011 through Aug. 15, 2012 — in which the mobility fee was waived, according to figures provided by the city’s Concurrency & Mobility Management System Office. At the most, those developers would have paid the city $2 million in mobility fees. Since the money wasn’t collected, projects outlined in the 2030 Mobility Plan weren’t funded, and they weren’t built. Unless the moratorium is lifted, taxpayers will pay for those projects or they won’t get done, said landscape architect Lad Hawkins, who is president of the Greater Arlington Civic Association. The total cost the 2030 plan in 2010 dollars was $444 million.
“This is the only good tool we have right now for planning purposes and this is the only source of money we have for dealing with all of these issues,” Hawkins said, “like the need for a new bus stop or a new bicycle connection. This money can be used for all those things. Waive this thing for another year, and we are going to end up having another year’s worth of money thrown down the drain.”
Under the old fair share schema, the city charged a developer for a portion of the road improvements needed to accommodate new development. If the roads could accommodate added traffic from a new development, the developer wouldn’t be required to pay any impact fees. By contrast, most roads in densely developed areas are already over capacity. In those areas, a developer would pay a portion of the cost of upgrading the road to handle the traffic already on it, as well as new traffic from the new development. Fair share wasn’t fair.
“What we had was a system that subsidizes development on the fringes,” said planner Ennis Davis, who writes about planning on the blog MetroJacksonville.com and who worked for the planning company that helped develop the 2030 Mobility Plan.
“It was easier and cheaper to build in a cow pasture 10 miles out and have the state or the city help fund the widening of the road,” Davis said.
After the state of Florida ended fair share assessments for transportation in 2009, Jacksonville’s former Planning & Development Department chief Bill Killingsworth undertook the creation of a new development impact fee based on a smart growth planning policy. The Florida Chapter of the American Planning Association gave Killingsworth an award for his plan.
The Jacksonville City Council hoped to stimulate development by waiving the mobility fee. City Council president Bill Bishop said he has not heard from developers who want the moratorium extended, and he said it might just expire. Bishop said if someone demonstrated to him that the moratorium had triggered specific development, he might be convinced to extend it.
Commercial real estate attorney Brenda Ezell said she would like to see it extended for at least another six months. She said the moratorium is an incentive because it reduces costs. She couldn’t name a project that went forward because of the moratorium, but she said that any incentive influences development decisions. She served on the city’s Mobility Plan Task Force, which developed the plan. If the city helps developers recover, she said it will mean more money for mobility projects. “This is not money that we would get but for a project in the first place,” she said. “If a project doesn’t get done, there is no fee to collect.”
New development increased in 2011-’12, but advocates for doing away with the moratorium don’t believe it helped. In St. Johns County, commissioners cut the transportation impact fee by half for commercial development, but kept the residential impact fee in place. Assistant county administrator Jerry Cameron said residential starts in St. Johns County top all the counties it borders — Clay, Putnam, Flagler and Duval counties — combined. Riverside resident Linda Bremer said there’s been an uptick in development in most places. Jacksonville’s moratorium on fees didn’t make it stand out.
“If you look at the entire state and the United States, the housing industry has improved. Jacksonville isn’t a model of growth because they did away with the mobility fee,” said Bremer, who is a local Sierra Club member and serves on the national Sierra Club Green Transportation Campaign.
University of North Florida biologist John Hatle commutes on Beach Boulevard to UNF by bicycle, in part, he said, as a protest against urban sprawl. He said his family also saves $3,000 to 4,000 a year on a second car. There is a right-of-way along Beach Boulevard that cushions him from traffic, but he said at least once a week, a driver will cut him off. He’s been commuting to UNF since 2004 and welcomes any bicycling improvements, but he said he hadn’t heard of the 2030 Mobility Plan.
Jacksonville Bicycle Coalition member Mukherjee and other advocates of the Mobility Plan realize the public doesn’t know much about it. They hope to educate residents about its advantages and urge them to contact the City Council to let the moratorium expire.
“The mobility fee funds more sidewalks, more bike facilities,” Davis said. “It will fund a streetcar in Riverside, so that one day, you can walk out of Kickbacks, hop on a streetcar and take it all the way to Bay Street downtown. Instead of arguing whether Mellow Mushroom should tear down a building for a parking lot or build a parking garage, they can pay into a fee that will fund a streetcar.
“That’s thinking long term.”
Susan Cooper E
sceastman@folioweekly.c
Follow FOLIO!