A.G. Gancarski
Before Tuesday night’s Jacksonville City Council meeting, there was a scene that was curiously touching.
Former District 7 Councilman Johnny Gaffney showed his brother, just-elected Councilman Reggie Gaffney, where he’d be sitting. You probably wouldn’t have seen that had George Spencer beaten Reggie in the election. In that moment, you could see how Johnny might have taught Reggie other things along the way also. Johnny, the patient older brother; Reggie, eager to learn.
It was a cute scene, as those things go. An affecting beginning to a city council meeting that went more than five hoursg, driven by a single issue. It was an extended public hearing on 2015-360, an Avondale river access point that some call a pocket park and others characterize as a den of iniquity worthy of a Jack Chick Bible Tract.
Before we get into that drama, though, Reggie Gaffney was sworn in, and as is typical with him, his humility was his defining characteristic. He thanked God and claimed to be on a “mission to move Jacksonville to another level.”
Then, waiting in the wings, was Mayor-elect Lenny Curry.
Curry offered a simple message. He wanted to thank those who have served, and wants to draw on the institutional knowledge of those leaving the council. He also wanted to put the “campaign behind us,” working toward one Jacksonville.
He has the institutional buy-in from at least one important stakeholder. School Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, in attempting to get council to authorize $544,000 for 1,440 at-risk kids to attend nonprofit summer camps that would keep them off the streets and out of trouble, said he was “very optimistic” about Curry and Sheriff-elect Mike Williams when it comes to the public safety question, which both Republicans ran on in the just concluded election.
The public safety issue dominated the balance of public comment throughout the meeting, but not for expected reasons.
One resolution being discussed, introduced by Councilman Warren Jones, was intended to stop the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from issuing Section 8 vouchers for use in the crime-ridden Eureka Gardens apartment complex on Jacksonville’s Westside. He wants the vouchers stopped until the owner and management take steps to improve security at the 400-unit complex by installing fencing and monitoring entry and exit.
Jones introduced the same resolution but withdrew it in 2011. On Tuesday, one person, Mona Lisa Arnold, spoke about the resolution.
“We feel threatened for our life with bullets flying through the air,” Arnold said about conditions in the complex, where “we need some help” and some “hope” with mental health issues, the elderly, and the disabled.
Arnold, who is neither elderly nor disabled, said, “I feel like I need a Purple Heart” for living in Eureka Gardens, and said she feels like she has PTSD.
Arnold, who has lived there since 2006, said she sent Mayor Alvin Brown a letter in 2013 about the conditions, but he didn’t respond.
“At this project in the heart of the ghetto, no one came to my aid.”
Councilman Bill Gulliford read reviews from ApartmentRatings.com, mentioning “hoodrats” and police sirens that are so soothing, they help residents to sleep at night, and “weed and alcohol on every corner and in every doorway.”
Jones added that council is not trying to close the complex, just improve accountability among those who are running it and receiving federal funding.
The other big issue on the docket, 2015-360, was a measure designed to close a river access point in Avondale, a neighborhood just a few miles from Eureka Gardens where property values can reach the millions. Two property owners seek to have the public river access closed, given a long history of minor lawbreaking (beer drinking, casual sex, graffiti, and alleged weed smoking) and one incidence of a home invasion robbery staged from the bulkhead.
The first speaker in favor of the measure: powerful Jacksonville lawyer Paul Harden, which was no surprise to insiders given that Councilman Richard Clark introduced the bill. Harden distilled the case made by many subsequent supporters of the measure, many of whom shared the same surname as the owners of the adjacent properties who would get free riverfront property from the city if the measure goes through.
Harden contended that they have requested the city clean up the property for two decades. Nothing was done by public works, he said, leading to the robbery, “beer cans by the thousands,” and a JSO suggestion that the property be closed.
“Only now has someone said the city should do something,” Harden said.
Councilman Jim Love, whose district contains the river-access point, suggested that the city make the 450-by-60-foot space a park, to which Harden seemed somewhat amenable.
Then he posed a Socratic question: “Do you think that access to the river is important to the community?”
Speakers followed, debating that point and a penumbra of corollary points.
The people opposing the measure, including local historian and Hemming Park revivalist Wayne Wood, Riverside Avondale Preservation’s Carmen Godwin, and a couple of dozen others, extolled the space’s unique virtues. They ranged from its utility for launching a kayak or letting kids play “Pirates” or for teaching them to fish or for quiet contemplation in a magical, bucolic setting that has no direct counterpart in the area, where the vast majority of river access points are privately owned.
The measure’s proponents, meanwhile, cited safety concerns. Claims that children are yelled at by vagrants lingering in the space, of people parking there until all hours and blocking the neighborhood residents’ ability to see what’s going on down there, and so on.
This narrative gap was described by one speaker as a “tale of two parks.” As an Avondale resident, I can attest that people in the neighborhood value public safety for real reasons. To the west and to the north both are neighborhoods that brim with violent crime, which sometimes overflows into Avondale itself.
It seemed that every resident of Avondale was there; while that’s not strictly true, there was close to three hours of discussion on the fate of the pocket park, which includes a bulkhead that is in need of repair.
In a sense, the condition of the river access point is an indictment of previous mayoral administrations that could have devoted the resources for maintenance and repair that went into boondoggles like the scoreboards at EverBank Field. One serious question the Curry administration and the new Council will deal with over the next four years is how to upgrade infrastructure amidst a macroeconomic climate that certainly will see interest rate hikes and the tightening of the loose credit local and state governments have benefited from in recent years.
Despite the spirited discussion, though, it was clear people on both sides of the issue are friends who consider themselves neighbors with a prevailing interest in a spirited debate about community standards.
If only Eureka Gardens had such advocacy.
The end of the council meeting, which came just after the 10 o’clock hour (“It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your councilpeople are?”) came with a joke that rewarded the handful of people still remaining.
Asked to speak, Gaffney said, “Mama always taught me that if you’re learning, be quiet.”
That explanation of his first-day reticence amused Gulliford, who told him that “if you’re using a temporary nameplate, you can still get out,” and then advised him to ask his brother about that.
Jacksonville City Council meets next on June 9.
