Nate Monroe: Laura Street Trio fight reveals downtown dysfunction, need for reform

COMMENTARY | In the latter half of Mayor Lenny Curry's second term in office, Lori Boyer's job security as the head of downtown Jacksonville's development agency was in greater jeopardy than even she may have realized. Curry had heard complaints from developers and lobbyists for months about Boyer's Downtown Investment Authority — that it was an impenetrable bureaucracy captive to Boyer's unilateral and peculiar decision making — so the then-mayor called a meeting to air out those grievances and, more crucially, to see if he'd have the political backing necessary to remove Boyer from the job.

Curry's administration had never wanted Boyer, a former member of the City Council, to head the Downtown Investment Authority, but Boyer was universally respected as a highly intelligent former council president who also had influential friends in the city's civic, business and social world. And yet the state of downtown during Boyer's tenure at the DIA remained frustratingly stagnant, with park plans and high-profile developments either stalled or in a seemingly constant state of flux. Even some downtown advocates who'd been supportive of Boyer — and who viewed her as a bulwark against Curry's administration — were beginning to harbor private doubts about her leadership of the agency. Curry's administration sensed a potential opening, but it would need political cover — particularly in the aftermath of the controversial and ultimately botched JEA privatization campaign, which included questions about the the influence Curry wielded over the city's boards and commissions.

In the fourth floor C-suite in City Hall, with Boyer and her board chairman present, as well as Curry and his top officials, the developers clammed up. Some complained more generally about downtown, or about other developers, but it seemed like no one was willing to air out a direct criticism of Boyer — except one: Steve Atkins.

Atkins, the owner of the star-crossed Laura Street Trio, let fly some pent-up grievances about the DIA. Atkins had recently completed a high-profile restoration of the Barnett Bank Building, and he'd just rolled out an expansive — albeit controversial — $1.1 billion mega-plan for Jacksonville's Northbank riverfront. It was an idea Boyer immediately and publicly threw cold water on. "I don’t want the market to get the wrong message," she said at the time. "I don’t want the market to think that all of these properties are taken out of play and are spoken for. They’re not."

That left Atkins feeling as if he'd never gotten his day in court. How, he asked, could the head of the DIA effectively kill a project without taking it to her board of directors? What is the formal process? Why do some projects in downtown seem to move with relative ease while others get caught in a doom loop? Atkins can be a divisive figure even within the development world, but some of his concerns were shared by others who have tried to build in downtown.

Still, it wasn't enough. With few others willing to put their name to a need for change at the DIA, Curry wouldn't have the public support or mandate necessary to push the DIA board to find new leadership. So Curry moved on and Boyer survived, but dissatisfaction over her leadership of the DIA, and the agency's complicated relationship with Atkins, festered.

THAT COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP exploded into public view this week when, first, Atkins and his development team presented the City Council on Thursday with a proposed $175 million deal to restore the Laura Street Trio, followed by a succession of city officials, including Boyer, who aggressively lobbied council members to reject it. The result was a characteristic Jacksonville debacle: blame to go around with no clear path forward and, most significantly, a sinking feeling the wraith-like Trio — a huddle of gorgeous but deteriorating buildings constructed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Fire — will continue to haunt downtown Jacksonville for a generation, if its crumbling pillars don't succumb to gravity first. The council asked Atkins to go back to the DIA to negotiate a finalized deal, an idea so appealing that, after the Thursday meeting, Atkins was openly wondering if demolishing the buildings might be the easiest path forward.

It makes sense that this stew of downtown personalities and problems would converge on the Trio. The temptation here is to think of those buildings as some kind of talisman, a hexed totem that brings misfortune to anyone arrogant enough to wield it, or the physical embodiment of Jacksonville's long malaise — a fading grandeur reminding us of what we've lost and are unable to reclaim. But in truth downtown is full of these kinds of objects, these intractable problems. Downtown is itself an intractable problem.

It's widely understood that restoring the Trio would activate and add density to downtown's main artery, arguably one of the most, if not the most, important pieces in the revitalization puzzle. This makes Atkins, the Trio's prideful owner, a key figure in downtown, a fact that it's also now clear the DIA wishes were otherwise. Just before Christmas, one DIA board member wondered out loud whether Atkins is "the wrong person for this project."

THE DOWNTOWN INVESTMENT AUTHORITY exists in a kind of Bermuda Triangle of city policymaking. It looks like one of the city's independent agencies and it functions like one, but it's not one. It's a middle-manager bureaucracy whose power derives entirely from the City Council, and which can be revoked at any time by the council.

The council is free to follow the DIA's advice but is not bound by it. And that, in the end, is the sum total of what the DIA does: It gives the City Council advice. The DIA, in other words, can be circumvented, a weakness that has repeatedly led to policy headaches and behind-the-scenes grousing.

"I wish it was an independent authority," City Council member Jimmy Peluso, whose district includes downtown and the Trio, told me.

In the case of the Trio, it's been difficult at times to discern what, exactly, the DIA was doing and what state of negotiations Atkins' development deal was in. Last year, the DIA board took no position on a previous incentive package tied to the Trio's redevelopment, punting it — or in Boyer's bizarre formulation, "bunting" it — to the City Council. Why does the DIA exist if not to provide guidance to council members?

But Boyer continued to be deeply involved in talks among Atkins' group, city attorneys, administration officials and council members, culminating with her presentation Thursday urging the council not to sign off on the latest iteration of the development proposal. And Boyer's board, last month, decided it wanted the Trio deal back even though the justification underlying its decision to "bunt" in the first place — that the terms exceeded what city rules would allow the DIA board to sign off on — hasn't changed.

It became clear Thursday that there was no version of a development deal ready for the City Council to review and that what was before the council — an expensive and complicated proposal around which city attorneys, administration officials and the City Council auditor raised alarms — was simply not ready for any kind of vote.

It also became clear that no one — not Atkins, not Boyer, not the City Council — understood who was supposed to be negotiating and finalizing a deal with the developer. This was stated in remarkably blunt terms: "Who is representing the city in these negotiations?" asked City Council President Ron Salem.

"One of our concerns is we don't have what we consider a traditional client to run ideas by," said Michael Fackler, the city's general counsel, in response. "It's been very difficult for us to have a point person ..."

How did that happen?

THE NEGOTIATIONS ARE NOW BACK with the DIA, with whom Atkins will have to make peace if a deal is ever going to happen.

Is Atkins the right guy for this project? Well, he owns the buildings, a fact that is unlikely to change, so this question — one that is pondered a lot — is functionally moot. And there is a fallacy in the assumption, which has apparently taken hold to some degree at the DIA, that simply replacing one developer with another makes the underlying challenges of this project, a highly complex and expensive effort to restore historic buildings, any less daunting.

For years I heard gripes about Toney Sleiman, the suburban shopping center developer and former owner of The Landing, the downtown riverfront mall demolished a few years ago by the Curry administration. A lot of downtown eggheads couldn't wait to get Sleiman out of there. And what happened next? After Sleiman's exit, it's not as if developers lined up for a chance to build something there. The DIA got just one bid for a private development pad at the site (a bid that included a farcical proposal for a luxury high-rise).

Shocker: Developers want to make money and will seek any incentives they think they can get. Despite Boyer's stand against the excesses of the proposed Trio deal, the DIA has done a poor job reining in those expectations. Downtown often feels like the Wild West when it comes to public underwriting of private development. The deals have gotten bigger but downtown simply hasn't changed.

Building anything in downtown is difficult and expensive — restoring historic buildings even more so. The often perplexing bureaucratic Penrose steps that can consume projects don't help, and, unlike the ownership of the Trio buildings, that is very much something actually within the city's control. Give the DIA the independence and funding necessary to be the exclusive downtown regulator, planner and vision-maker, and give it hard, non-negotiable limits on what it can offer any developer — limits that can't be stretched by running to the mayor or council. Or get rid of the DIA. The middle-management regime now in place is the worst of both alternatives.

The Trio is a testament to the perils of time lost. Jacksonville can't afford to repeat these mistakes or it will lose a lot more than those splendid buildings.

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: Laura Street Trio fight reveals downtown dysfunction