Liberty collapses in Jacksonville

This morning, I’ll be going on WJCT radio in Jacksonville on the show of my FloridaPolitics.com colleague Melissa Ross to talk about the collapse of a section of Liberty Street here in downtown Jacksonville. It’s an interesting news item for a number of reasons. For one, it’s a prominent local street. For another, it comes just days after President Barack Obama floated the idea of improving the nation’s infrastructure in his new budget.

Who knows how an Obama infrastructure plan might affect streets like Liberty? It certainly won’t happen in time for this particular fix; city government has to move on this in just days. Lots of things have to be done, such as finding a structure stable enough to carry the weight of an electrical transmitter for the Berkman Plaza town homes nearby, upscale new-economy digs facing an old-infrastructure issue. And no one knows, as of yet, who will pay for it. It could be state government; it could be the locals, who, despite political divisions, should be able to come together to fix a road as important as Liberty Street. Right?

Wait, perhaps I spoke too soon…

This is not the first time, something like this happened. (City spokesman David) DeCamp said another part of this same road collapsed in 2012, and that hole is still there.

“We had an incident in Liberty Street and now a new collapse. We want to make sure it’s safe,” said DeCamp.

Jacksonville is a city of multiple personas. Some we like to show the world, like Super Bowl Jacksonville, like Professional Golf Jacksonville, like the Town Center and all the new-economy glitz.

Some we don’t like to show off so much, though. We let roads like Liberty fall into neglect even as we pour more than a third of a billion dollars into the Duval County Courthouse, a jumbo-sized leviathan in a blight zone fashioned of only the finest materials — marble throughout. A beautiful courthouse goes up, even while the streets just blocks away crumble into disrepair. Council approved money to fix the 3- year-old hole on Liberty a few days ago. Let’s hope they will act in a more timely way on the new one.

Cities make decisions on how they want to spend money. Jacksonville, since before consolidation, built always outwards. Modern homes for the new arrivals went up on reclaimed marsh and timber lands. Downtown thrived once, a half century ago. A couple of decades later, the grand department stores of yesteryear were shuttered; the shopping all done in Arlington and Orange Park, which are now both no-go zones — at least, anywhere close to those malls.

Every politician running for citywide office now extols the virtues of a thriving downtown. No one running for mayor will say “these roads shouldn’t be fixed.”

That said, the collapse of Liberty speaks to a larger problem — or a series them: the problem of an infrastructure built largely in the middle part of the past century and the problem of paying for modernizing it.

In the late 1980s, Mayor Tommy Hazouri removed tolls in Jacksonville. ”We have taken a quantum leap forward in improving the quality of life for our city. Today is like New Year’s, Christmas and the Fourth of July rolled into one,” Hazouri said with characteristic understatement at the time. And yes, people were thrilled with the tolls being removed — though not thrilled enough to re-elect Hazouri two years later.

Since then, Jacksonville has been averse to revenue enhancement — which sounds really great to the Republican base — but  leads to issues like road collapses. Even as the city continues to build out and build new lanes, it doesn’t want to fix the roads it already has. Sometimes, until it absolutely can’t be avoided.

Who knows what caused the collapse of Liberty? Perhaps too much weight on it at some point, or a series of points. Perhaps a boat hit the span underneath it. Perhaps, just age, wear, and the natural deterioration attendant to man-made creations.

I talked to DeCamp last evening, and he told me how the span was considered “deficient but not obsolete.” The difference: an obsolete span is worse, but even a deficient span obviously carries some risk.

A decade ago, I wrote an editorial for the Washington Times advocating the U.S. Chamber of Commerce position that — in response to the depleted condition of the Federal Highway Trust Fund — governments needed to develop ways to figure out how much wear each type of vehicle puts on roads and then bill drivers accordingly, levying a usage fee based on actual impact created by the vehicle and its usage. That didn’t happen to any meaningful degree.

Now we find ourselves, again, dealing with calls for infrastructural improvement on the federal level that likely will not be heeded. Meanwhile, in cities such as  Jacksonville, we see roads that could have been maintained properly falling into disrepair.