Nate Monroe: Downtown will be a visible, stubborn challenge for Mayor Donna Deegan

COMMENTARY | There is a yawning gap between the ways we are told to think about downtown Jacksonville and the ways downtown Jacksonville actually looks and feels, and every single day that dissonance persists is one more day the city is wasting its most precious resource: time.

The PR tactics are glossier and more sophisticated, but the gut-punching truth cuts through it all like a waft of simmering garbage. Downtown is very clearly in distress — more vacant and less vibrant than it has been in recent memory, with little tangible evidence suggesting any imminent transformation. Friendship Fountain remains, inexplicably, closed. Kaleidoscopic renderings of flashy developments on vacant lots on the Southbank and Northbank remain as conceptual as a Pixar movie. Lush public parks are either purely theoretical or are only in their naked infancy of being built, a process that, if past is prologue, will take a geologic age to manifest into something families can actually use and enjoy.

Undergirding it all is a stunning lack of urgency and a bureaucrat's deep commitment to fighting over semantics: Is a "community redevelopment area plan" actually a true master plan for downtown? Who cares? Just build a damn park already. The refusal or inability to at least acknowledge what is right before our very eyes — to say nothing of someone, anyone, taking a scintilla of responsibility for it — became insulting long ago. Truth isn't progress, but it'll do until the progress gets here.

Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan is finally on the other side of the trial-by-fire phase of her term, when a poorly timed election cycle and the end of the fiscal year conspire to force new mayors to produce first-year budgets in just two weeks. This week, she began an effort to reshape the various citizen boards and commissions that oversee the city's independent agencies and other offices. These board and commission "purges" were controversial when Deegan's predecessor, Lenny Curry, initiated them — tradition once dictated that members appointed by previous mayors be allowed to serve out the remainder of their terms. But the logic underpinning these clean sweeps is sound enough: Give the mayor a chance to install like-minded people throughout the government. Curry ran askew by foisting his allies onto these agencies but then seeking to avoid responsibility for their actions — like when his appointees began the process of privatizing the city's public utility.

Deegan, in a recent interview, told me she'd own the performance of the agencies and the actions of her appointees, and that's as it should be. Your people, your problems. And that is all the more reason Deegan should take a hard look at the Downtown Investment Authority, a relatively new arm of city government that, particularly throughout Curry's second term, has seemed totally rudderless. Deegan will own a blasted-out downtown no matter whose appointees are in place.

Many people respect the DIA's CEO, Lori Boyer, a former member of the City Council, who has long been viewed as deeply knowledgeable about city government and its many obscure development rules. And she undeniably is. But a simple walk down Laura or Bay streets makes it clear her tenure is hardly the booming success we are often implored to believe it has been. She has, at times, managed to deeply frustrate both developers and advocates for more public park space — sentiments usually shared in private given the politically sensitive nature of downtown development. Getting those two groups to agree on anything is quite a task, indeed.

Perhaps her talents were obscured toiling under the auspices of Curry's imperious administration, one explanation her allies have offered over the years. If so, she's done an exemplary job pretending everything has been just swell.

I — and I'd imagine a great many others — am exhausted by the endless cycle of renderings and promises followed by blown deadlines and ultimately, painfully, nothing. Please stop telling me about plans and promises. In a city this full of broken ones, progress means nothing short of a development that is open and operating; anything less is vapor.

I arrived in the city a decade ago as a younger man with a real desire to spend time in a thriving downtown, and perhaps even to live in one. Those days have passed, and my own circumstances, like many of yours, are quite different. The chance I had to enjoy downtown as a young professional is gone forever, and the chance I have to enjoy it, in a very different way, as the father of a young child is fleeting — soon enough that'll be gone, too. And it's why I marvel when I hear Boyer or whoever layout a timeline for the completion of something like a park — or "plaza," in the DIA's irritating lexicon — as far out as 2028 or 2029 without a hint of awareness of what a despairing reality that is. You mean we have to wait for years more?

Poor leadership robs us all.

Deegan is a mayor intent on making things happen and making them happen quickly. This is a city with many deeply rooted problems that deserve her energy and her sense of urgency, but few will so visibly define her legacy as downtown.

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: Nate Monroe: Downtown progress will define Mayor Deegan's tenure