A.G. Gancarski
Throughout Jacksonville, there are serious issues that require immediate attention and remedy. From an overstretched police force dealing with an epidemic of violence to the still-not-even-close-to-repaired span of Liberty Street, Jacksonville has many pressing issues facing it.
You wouldn’t know that if you read Wednesday’s Times-Union, however, which trumpeted the Alvin Brown administration making yet one more attempt to subsidize Jacksonville’s failing local water taxi concern.
“The bill (2015-397) would set aside a total of $240,000 for use over two years that water taxi operator Lakeshore Marine Services would have to match dollar-for-dollar with donations from private supporters before it could get the city money,” the article states.
“Since the execution of the River Taxi Service Agreement, the River Taxi Service ridership levels are consistently low during the week making it difficult for Operator to sustain the River Taxi Service under the River Taxi Service Agreement.”
Ridership is 54 percent of what the company had been led to believe, said the article, which discloses that the Times-Union was a “founding partner” in this effort, pledging “either cash or in-kind support worth $30,000 per year for two years.”
The idea is that the water taxis denote a thriving downtown. The problem? These taxis are not financially solvent on their own. Despite corporate money, city money, the investment of political capital by the Brown administration, and so forth, there is insufficient consumer demand for these taxis.
This water taxi gimmick is being pushed elsewhere, such as in Detroit, a city where large swaths of urban land have been allowed to revert to brush because of insufficient population density. A cynic would say that water taxis are seemingly harmless boondoggles, dangled in front of gullible populations instead of doing decidedly less headline-grabbing things like fixing the roads or improving public safety.
Despite seemingly every ambitious urban planner in the country pushing for these contrivances, there is no assurance of success. In Lake Tahoe, a three-year attempt at water taxi service was grounded because it cost more than projected and drew less consumer interest than expected.
Lake Tahoe’s service was performing more disastrously than Jacksonville’s, granted. But the question remains: Given the inability of the operator to create a profitable business model, why is it in the city’s interest to double down on economic inefficiency?
There’s so much talk about fiscal conservatism in Jacksonville government, and so little about crony capitalism, which is what seems to prevail in this case. Like the EverBank Field scoreboards and the proposed Shipyards project and so many other deals besides, the prevailing principle seems to be one of “privatized profit, socialized cost.”
