Brentwood battle exposes gaps in Jacksonville's pledge to empower neighborhood leaders

Jacksonville's Neighborhood Bill of Rights is supposed to give neighborhood organizations a seat at the table in designing taxpayer-financed construction projects, but that didn't happen when the city decided to build a two-story Medical Examiner's Office directly across the street from a subdivision in Brentwood.

The city began planning in 2016 for the 50,000 square foot building with capacity for up to 300 bodies in its morgue, but the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association didn't learn about it until this year after the city had already sunk millions of dollars into the project and was moving forward with construction.

Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association President Lydia Bell said Brentwood residents were shocked and would have fought against the project if they'd known about it when it was still on the drawing board.

"The name of our organization is Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association," she said. "Not Stupid Gardens Neighborhood Association, and that's how they've played us."

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She said no neighborhood group in Jacksonville would accept such a project across the street from an existing subdivision and a grade school, but the city decided to put it in a predominantly Black part of Jacksonville without giving residents advance notice of the plan.

"What you all voted for is the continued pattern of abuse in the Black community," she told City Council in September after it approved a rezoning of the site.

The city's Neighborhood Bill of Rights contains a provision calling for involvement by neighborhood groups in the planning stage of taxpayer funded public projects. But the Bill of Rights has faced criticism by the Jacksonville Urban League for being toothless when it comes to holding City Hall accountable.

Jacksonville Urban League President Richard Danford said the construction of the Medical Examiner's Office in Brentwood is the latest case of the gap between what the Neighborhood Bill of Rights pledges the city will do versus what the city actually delivers.

"This is just one example where the damage has already been done," Danford said. "The neighborhood gets up in arms and they try to do something about it, but they can't do anything about it because the city has already inked the deal."

He said the the provisions in the Neighborhood Bill of Rights are crucial for neighborhoods such as Brentwood that don't have wealthy residents with political connections to City Hall. He said those neighborhoods overlap places where a large share of Black residents live and have been left behind by the city's growth.

"It's not working for the underserved population in this city," Danford said. "If there's no input, then you're on the outside, which means you can't improve your life if you live in some of these areas."

Medical Examiner's Office needs more space to serve region

The existing Medical Examiner's Office at 2100 N. Jefferson St. is part of the medical campus anchored by UF Health Jacksonville. The building, which dates back to 1968, does not border any residential development, but it is aging and faces a space crunch for serving a region that covers Duval, Clay and Nassau counties, plus additional agreements with Hamilton and Columbia counties.

The 4-acre site for the new building at 4368 N. Davis Street is bounded by Golfair Boulevard to the south and the on-ramp from Golfair Boulevard to Interstate 95 on the west. The north and east sides of the site are bordered by two-lane Davis Street, which comes off Golfair Boulevard and winds back to Golfair Manor, a subdivision built in the 1950s with dozens of homes immediately north of where the new facility will go.

The two-story building will be visible from the front yards of some Golfair Manor homes. Immediately west of the site, the KIPP Jax Voice Academy charter school that opened in 2021 is located across Davis Street.

The location of the new Medical Examiner's Office is the kind of scenario envisioned by the Neighborhood Bill of Rights for engaging residents. Enacted in 1995, the Bill of Rights was established to be "part of the standard operating procedures of all city offices and agencies, and shall be observed to the greatest extent possible," according to that legislation.

The Bill of Rights says "every organized, officially recognized neighborhood in the city of Jacksonville has the right to expect and receive" various kinds of information and opportunities for influencing city policies and spending.

That includes "the opportunity to participate in the design of publicly-funded projects within or adjacent to the neighborhood, including the opportunity early in the planning process to express neighborhood preferences about choice of location, materials, orientation, size, land use intensity, and other features."

The Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association, which seeks to represent the entire Brentwood community, is officially recognized by the city. The Medical Examiner's Office in Brentwood is a publicly funded project. But Bell said the city didn't notify her group about the project until after a ground-breaking ceremony for it.

Golfair Manor subdivision residents said they were disgusted to see bulldozers clearing what had been a heavily wooded piece of land to make way for the new building.

"We do not need that in our neighborhood," Katrina Spencer told the City Council's Land Use and Zoning Committee on Sept.19. "I don't want to wake up thinking about dead people in a building not even 200 feet from my home."

The city's annual budgets have included the new Medical Examiner's Office in the capital improvements plan. However, the capital improvements plans left blank the address line for where the Medical Examiner's Office would be built.

Earlier this year, Mayor Lenny Curry's administration asked City Council on March 28 to approve $62.8 million in borrowing to get construction started.

City Council agreed with Curry's request to take up the legislation on an emergency basis because of the current facility's condition and unanimously approved the funding on April 11. The legislation did not say where the new facility would go, but a separate legislative summary showed it would be "on Golfair Boulevard at I-95."

On May 15, officials gathered for a groundbreaking ceremony for the new building. The city then had public meetings and hearings in the summer about the project because even as site-clearing took place, the city was applying to rezone the property from the commercial community/general designation to the public buildings and facilities category.

City lawyers said the change in zoning was to be consistent with how the city handles other city-owned property where public buildings are located. The city's attorneys said even if City Council refused to make the change, the commercial community zoning still would allow construction of the Medical Examiner's Office.

Mayor Donna Deegan, who took office July 1, supported continuing construction of the Medical Examiner's Office. The city has spent $5 million on the project and if it pulled the plug at this point, the cost of demobilizing construction would bring that expense to $10 million while setting back work on replacing the current cramped facility by five years, a mayoral staff member told City Council.

"The frustrating news is we are inheriting this project from the past administration and due to the amount of money and work that has already gone into this, the fact the M.E.'s office is behind schedule in getting a new building, we're pretty hesitant to stop this process," Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Brittany Norris said.

She said Jacksonville only has a limited number of sites that fit the bill for the Medical Examiner's Office. The building at Davis Street will be well-designed with a wall providing a level of privacy for both residents and the medical examiner's office, Norris said.

"We're putting in a very expensive, very nice new building which from I-95 will look very good," she said. 'We believe there might even be a bit of a boost for the neighborhood. This brings in working professionals who can patronize local businesses and highlights Brentwood, I think, actually in a decently good way."

One more zoning fight to go in battle over new building

The need to build the new facility ended up tipping the scales for City Council support.

"Here's the bottom line," City Council member Ken Amaro said. "The city dropped the ball — disappointment. The city failed to communicate well with the community — disappointment. The condition of the current Medical Examiner's Office — disappointment. Disappointments all around."

City Council voted 17-1 on Sept. 26 for the rezoning with Reggie Gaffney Jr. casting the "no" vote. But that's not the final word on it. The Medical Examiner's Office will be nearly 50,000 square feet in size. The public buildings zoning category approved by council only allows a building that is up to 40,000 square feet, so the city will go to the Planning Commission on Nov. 9 seeking a zoning exception that would allow the bigger building.

Bell and other Brentwood residents intend to be back at City Hall arguing against granting the exception. Norris told City Council that there is no environmental contamination at the site and the Medical Examiner's Office won't create traffic problems. Bell said the association wants to do soil testing and have a traffic study.

At a meeting Monday night at the Emmett Reed Community Center, Bell urged others to turn out at the Planning Commission, saying her organization faced plenty of skeptics when it successfully fought against a liquor store opening at the corner of Golfair Boulevard and Davis Street.

The city's planning department staff recommended in 2020 against allowing the liquor store in an existing building because the KIPP school was coming to the other side of the street. But the city Planning Commission decided to allow the liquor store.

The Neighborhood Bill of Rights says neighborhood organizations should get notification by the city of such liquor store applications. Bell said city officials insist the city sent a notice to her organization about the application, but she said that didn't happen. She said she found out about it earlier this year when children walking home from school happened to see work taking place at the vacant building.

While Bell, 73, and others marched with pickets in protest, they learned the land next to the planned liquor store would become the site of the Medical Examiner's Office with its morgue and forensic laboratory. That widened their fight to take on the Medical Examiner's Office, too.

"A soldier's work is never done in Brentwood," Bell said.

Council member: Bill of Rights needs strengthening

City Council member Rahman Johnson said that based on what happened in Brentwood, he thinks it time for the city to revisit the Neighborhood Bill of Rights and find a way to strengthen it. Johnson voted for the rezoning for the Medical Examiner's Office and said the city did not violate any ordinances, but that doesn't mean it did right by the community.

"Should they have talked with the community and gotten more community involvement? Absolutely," he said at the neighborhood association's meeting on Monday. "But that's not violating the law."

Even after enacting the Neighborhood Bill of Rights in 1995, the city didn't put it into its ordinance code. In 1999, City Council decided to take one of the "rights" for notification about zoning matters and put it into the ordinance code, but that section of the code also says if a neighborhood group doesn't get a notice, it won't invalidate action taken by the city.

The Jacksonville Urban League says Jacksonville should codify the entire Neighborhood Bill of Rights the same way St. Johns County did for its document, along with enforcement provisions holding city officials accountable.

"Certainly, immediately codifying the Neighborhood Bill of Rights would go a very long way towards citizen engagement and participation," Danford said.

Johnson said he thinks the provisions "need some teeth" to ensure neighborhood organizations truly are empowered.

"I haven't figured out what it's going to look like, but I'd love to have City Council take another stab at it," he said. "I'm very optimistic it's something where we can all come together and make sure neighborhoods are included so we don't end up again in a situation like we're in right now."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Medical examiner office battle Jacksonville neighborhood