FOLIOFinally, someone gets it. Someone, that is, beyond the myriad economists and journalists who have laid bare this scam in cities all over this nation of ours time and time again. Someone actually in office, a chairman of a powerful state legislative committee in fact, with the authority to actually do something about it, to put an end to billionaire sports team owners bullying municipal and state governments to cough up hundreds of millions of public dollars for new stadiums to replace perfectly usable but not sufficiently profitable stadiums, with the implicit — and often explicit — threat that if they don’t, well, there are other cities and states that will. And so it is, for example, that under Florida law, tourism taxes can be used to build palatial playgrounds for millionaire athletes — or, in Jacksonville, the world’s largest scoreboards — but not police to patrol their parking lots or teachers to educate the children who live nearby.
State Rep. Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’ Lakes (that’s in Pasco County, by the way), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, understands how screwed up all this is. “This is a reversed, perverse Robin Hood,” he told the News Service of Florida last week. “We’re going to take from hard-working taxpayers and give it to the rich people. I don’t understand that logic at all. Every economist, every study shows there is not any economic development to these proposals.”
The specific issue the Legislature will address this session, which opens March 3, is how to divvy up the $7 million in sales-tax money lawmakers approved last year for stadium projects. (Corcoran will vote against all of this funding, and good on him for that. Unfortunately, he’ll be in the minority.) There are four competing projects lobbying for these funds: The Daytona International Speedway and Sun Life Stadium in South Florida, which each want $3 million a year for the next 30 years; the city of Orlando, which wants $2 million a year over the next three decades for its under-construction Major League Soccer stadium; and EverBank Field, which has asked the state for $1 million a year every year for the next three decades, on top of the $43 million the Jaguars procured for the stadium in 2013 from Duval County’s tourism-tax coffers.
The Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research ranked the EverBank project second, behind Orlando’s stadium. The Jaguars responded by saying that if they didn’t get their way, they would take their ball and go home. “We won’t go forward” with EverBank’s in-progress $100 million upgrade, Jaguars lobbyist Paul Harden told the News Service.
Or maybe they’ll just hit up City Council for another check: “We’ll look for alternative sources, if they’re there. This is a publicly owned building. It’s the city of Jacksonville’s decisions.”
When Is Late Too Late?
By Friday, the draft report was already a week late, and no one in the city seemed to have any idea where it was or when it had come in. Earlier that week I’d been told that Herbert M. Barber, the consultant the city of Jacksonville’s Port Task Force hired to evaluate the economics of deepening the port to 47 feet — and who, as I first reported [The Flog, “Meet The Jax Port Task Force’s New $60K Consultant, Who Believes Obama Is More Anti-American than Terrorists,” Feb. 11], possesses some rather radical right-wing political views — would get it in pretty much any day now, but here we were, end of the work week, and nothing.
And this got me thinking: Mayor Alvin Brown had already condemned Barber’s commentary and voiced concerns about his credibility. There were even hints that the city may well have pulled out of the contract — as is its right — except for the fact that it would have had to pay for most of it anyway. But Barber had blown, and as of Tuesday morning is still blowing, an unambiguous deadline. (“CONTRACTOR shall provide a draft of the final report no later than February 13, 2015,” the contract states. The final report is due March 2.) At which point would the city take the opportunity to call this a material breach of contract and rid itself of this festering embarrassment (which, after I broke the story, had drawn withering criticism from Times-Union columnists Ron Littlepage and especially Mark Woods, who pointed to passages in Barber’s book that railed against racial integration and intermarriage)?
“Generally we do not discuss legal strategy,” communications director David DeCamp told me in an email Friday. “However, the City would have to declare that a breach occurred. So far, that determination has not been made.”
The key phrase in that sentence is “so far.”
On a related note, if you’re interested in learning more about the pros and cons of dredging the river, the University of North Florida is hosting a town hall at 6 p.m. March 9 at the Adam W. Herbert University Center, Building 43, Room 1058.
Won’t Be Ignored
A couple of years ago, the expansion of a more inclusive human rights ordinance failed by one vote. It failed because of a lack of courage, and it failed because too many of our elected officials cling to prudish, anachronistic values. But it also failed because there wasn’t enough pressure on politicians to do the right thing.
“We understand that one of the reasons the HRO failed is that politicians do not believe LGBT [individuals] as a group are politically powerful,” says local attorney Carrington “Rusty” Mead, a longtime champion of Northeast Florida’s LGBT community. “We saw what happened then. We realized that we had to morph ourselves into something that couldn’t be ignored.”
That something is the newly formed Northeast Florida LGBT Leadership PAC, of which Mead is president. The group will raise money for candidates who share its values, to bridge “the desert between the haves and the have nots” of the political world, as Mead puts it, and to use that money “to drive the issues forward.”
It goes beyond the HRO, although that is a first priority, and the candidates the PAC endorsed at its coming-out party, a press conference Tuesday afternoon on the steps of City Hall — Bill Bishop for mayor; Anna Brosche, John Crescimbini, Tommy Hazouri, Greg Anderson, and Ju’Coby Pittman and Michelle Tappouni for the at-large City Council seats; and Tracie Davis for supervisor of elections, to name the citywide candidates — have all committed to making the expanded HRO a reality.
More broadly, though, it’s about empowering diversity, about ensuring that our leaders have to take notice of all members of our community, or else there will be a price to pay.
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