City Council Members Have Questions About JaxPort Dredging; Timetable Frustrates Some

City Council members have raised pointed questions during closed-door talks with the Jacksonville Port Authority about its $484 million river dredging project. Some council members say the process has sidelined them from having a say on one of the most costly projects in city history.

But no council member has come out flatly against the dredging, which the Jacksonville Port Authority’s board has green-lighted to start by early 2018.

JaxPort has said it will seek $47 million to $150 million from the city to complete the dredge. Whether the city will agree to support the dredging is beyond the current council’s control because JaxPort won’t make an official request for any city dollars for another two years.

“They’ve orchestrated it in a way that we’re not engaged until some point in the future,” Councilman Bill Gulliford said. “We don’t know what the actual number will be.”

City Council has not conducted any public meetings to hear JaxPort’s case for the city funding or examine how the city would pay its share of the cost.

Instead, the port authority has met individually with council members in private sessions over the past two months, resulting in a kind of shadow-boxing contest with the St. Johns Riverkeeper, which is likewise meeting with council members to argue the river deepening will waste taxpayer dollars and harm the river.

City Council President Anna Brosche invited St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman and JaxPort interim CEO Eric Green to her office for a discussion Aug. 1.

“We had a good debate for about an hour,” Rinaman said, calling the session a “good first step.” She has urged City Council to have public meetings about the dredging after JaxPort disclosed two months ago how much it would seek from the city.

City Councilman John Crescimbeni said sorting through all the information is daunting.

“At this point, I’m probably in the category of one confused council member,” Crescimbeni said. “My comfort level is not great, and it’s a very complicated issue because of all the different numbers and figures that are being bandied about by a variety of sources. I think I need to hire my own forensic accountant to try to reconcile everything down to two files — fact and fiction.”

The Times-Union reached out to all 19 council members for their positions on the harbor deepening.

Of those who responded, Councilman Aaron Bowman is the most rock-solid advocate for the project.

“It would be nice to have everything wrapped up in a nice package now and know exactly what the city is going to be responsible for and how we’re going to pay for it, but we’re also in a time-critical mode that other ports are going to get ahead of us and start stealing (cargo business) from us,” Bowman said.

He said in his role as an executive at the Jax Chamber, companies that do global trade always bring up the port when considering Jacksonville. He said with cargo ships getting bigger, Jacksonville risks sliding into a pass-by port for those ships if it doesn’t get deeper water.

“It’s not a question of if we do it,” Bowman said. “We’ve got to do it, so we’re going to have to figure out how to pay for it.”

City Councilman Lori Boyer said it’s frustrating council has no say-so in the decision to start the dredge. The port authority, which is an independent entity with its own board, already has enough federal and state funding to start the first phase of the project.

“I am disappointed that they have chosen to phase this process in such a way that they’re not coming to the city for any approval prior to starting the project,” Boyer said. “That’s clearly the frustrating part.”

She said she’s not convinced the river’s 40-foot depth needs to be dredged to 47 feet. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that in terms of the national interest, the most cost-effective depth would be 45 feet, but the JaxPort board decided the added expense of going to 47 feet is essential to compete with other Southeast ports.

City Councilman Greg Anderson said he thinks JaxPort has a viable plan to pull funding from local, state and federal sources for the dredging, but the downside is council won’t vote on it until after the project is under way. “That is a financial risk, in my opinion, because who can say what a future council will do,” he said.

He said he is weighing the environmental impact and the economic benefits of deepening the ship channel.

“The piece that we’ve not heard enough about is the economic benefit,” Anderson said. “We need to have a compelling case that says we should spend this money to get enough of a return. That’s the part of the equation that I still have more questions about.”

Councilman Matt Schellenberg said he doesn’t object to JaxPort starting the project, but he wants to see a bigger benefit from dredging for him to support city spending on it.” Right now, I’m undecided,” he said.

City Councilman Tommy Hazouri said he supports the deepening as a way to generate jobs, but he doesn’t think the $3 million amount for environmental mitigation — a figure that comes from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study of the dredging — is enough to protect the “health, safety and welfare of our St. Johns River, which is our national treasure.”

“No one is trying to stop it, but what I want to do is prevent a serious environmental impact on our river and tributaries and streams so as they dig, they’re not digging themselves into a deeper hole with the quality of our river,” he said.

He wants JaxPort to give quarterly reports on environmental monitoring and financial costs during the dredging.

City Councilman Jim Love said job projections as a result of river deepening are debatable, but it’s “common sense” that if Jacksonville doesn’t have a deeper ship channel, it will lose current port-related jobs.

“To me, that’s almost enough reason to do it, as long as we do it responsibly,” he said. “I want to make sure they put aside enough money for any (environmental) mitigation that may be needed in the event it causes a problem.”

Brosche said she supports the deepening because the port “is one of our assets, and I would like to make sure we remain in a good position to ensure it continues to grow and thrive.”

She said she’s not committing, however, to a “blank check” for whatever amount JaxPort requests, and it might end up being an amount that doesn’t have a significant impact on the city’s own budget.

Garrett Dennis, chairman of the council’s Finance Committee, said JaxPort officials told him that when existing debt is paid off in a couple of years, money going toward those debt payments would be available for dredging.

“If it isn’t an impact to the (city’s) budget, I’m open to that,” Dennis said. “We have to invest to grow. We can’t continue to want to be a world-class city and not make the investments we need to be that world-class city.”

Mayor Lenny Curry, who supports the river deepening, also referred recently to money that would be available after debt gets paid off.

“Here is what the city is prepared to do,” Curry said in a recent meeting with the Times-Union editorial board. “We are prepared to be part of the plan for funding, and we have identified a way to do that at a certain time. It will not put any strain on our existing budget and our existing resources.”

Chief Administrative Officer Sam Mousa said the city would use money that is already going to the port.

The city contributes almost $10 million annually to the port. About $7.5 million of that funding goes to paying off bonds issued years ago for port improvements. That debt will be retired around 2020, so that funding could be used for other port-related work.

Boyer said she’s heard that could be a funding source for dredging, but she doesn’t know if it’s enough, particularly when large-scale investments are needed at the cargo terminals.

“I think we need to look at it globally to understand how all those numbers work, and where we fit into the picture,” she said.

Source: jacksonville.com