Posted on July 6, 2020
The Jacksonville Port Authority will go to City Council this month for up to $70 million as the city’s share of deepening the St. Johns River, which would be the final scoop of money needed for bringing deeper water all the way to the Blount Island docks by 2023.
JaxPort says the $484 million deepening project will pump more cargo and shipping-related jobs through the state’s busiest port, but the project has faced legal challenges over protections for the river’s ecological health and contentions a deeper ship channel will worsen neighborhood flooding during storm surges.
The legislation (2020-377) for city spending on the deepening has support from Mayor Lenny Curry, City Council President Tommy Hazouri, and council Finance Committee Chairman Matt Carlucci.
“As both a candidate and as mayor, I have always been an advocate for deepening our harbor,” Curry said in a statement. “This project will generate strong economic development and job creation throughout our region.”
The bill calls for council to consider the spending as an emergency measure for a final vote on July 28, which is two weeks faster than if it went through the normal legislative cycle.
St. Johns Riverkeeper, the nonprofit that filed a federal lawsuit that unsuccessfully tried to halt the dredging, says the financial and environmental stakes are too high for City Council to designate the bill as an emergency.
“This is too important of a decision to rush it through the council, especially considering the current economic situation our city is facing and the fact that, to date, the council as a body has not publicly discussed and evaluated the pros and cons of this project,” said Jimmy Orth, executive director of Riverkeeper.
He said the dredging project has provided “virtually no mitigation” to offset consequences of deepening.
“If Jacksonville is now going to have skin in the game with taxpayers helping to fund the dredging, our elected leaders have a responsibility to protect our river and our community by ensuring sufficient mitigation is in place,” he said.
Hazouri said that while he has had concerns about the impact on the river’s ecological health, he supports the city being a financial partner in the deepening that has been underway since early 2018.
“It’s here. We have to make the best of it,” Hazouri said. “We’re going to have to give it the consideration for our commitment to finish the job. How we do it is going to have to be done very carefully.”
He said the deepening will benefit the region’s economy and if it isn’t finished, it would be like the joke about the swimmer who made it halfway across the English Channel, got tired and swam back.
Curry said his administration has been working on ways to strengthen the city’s response to coastal flooding and sea-level rise by using recommendations from the Adaptation Action Area Working Group and the Storm Resiliency and Infrastructure Development Review Committee.
“We will also continue to collaborate with the City Council Special Committee on Resiliency, chaired by Councilman Matt Carlucci, on their important work,” Curry said.
Carlucci said the port has been a mainstay of Jacksonville’s economy and deepening the river will generate much-needed jobs for people struggling to get by. He said 40 percent of Jacksonville residents hover just above, at or below the poverty line.
“We need to have as many good-paying jobs as we can get, and the port will do that,” he said. “But we can’t stick our heads in the sand and say we’re not going to have more problems with sea level rise because we are.”
Carlucci, who is a life-long freshwater fisherman, said one approach could be for the city could dredge St. Johns River tributaries back to their original depths. He said removing that build-up of silt would give the river system more capacity for holding water and also reduce the salinity levels because there would be more dilution of salty water that comes from the ocean.
Carlucci said he favors tearing down the dam on the Ocklawaha River in Putnam County, though the decision on removing the dam from that St. Johns River tributary rests with the state.
He said that by returning the Ocklawaha River to its natural state, “the amount of freshwater that would pump into the St. Johns River would be the best medicine we’ve had in a long time.”
Carlucci said taking actions on the river’s ecology and sea-level rise can be done separately from the legislation for city spending on the deepening.
“I just can’t pit one against the other,” he said.
Congress has authorized deepening 13 miles of the St. Johns River, which would cost about $700 million and drop the 40-feet depth down to 47 feet all the way to the TraPac terminal that works with Asian shipping lines. TraPac is just west of the Dames Point Bridge.
JaxPort’s funding model only covers 11 miles, taking deeper water to the Blount Island terminal, located east of the Dames Point bridge, where SSA Marine leases a portion of the terminal and serves big ships that carry cargo containers between the United States and Asia.
The deeper water isn’t needed for other JaxPort tenants such as automobile shipments, Puerto Rico trade, and cruises. But for the ocean-crossing cargo-container ships, the vessels are getting bigger, which means other Southeast ports also are deepening their harbors.
JaxPort is asking the city for up to $110 million, but $40 million of that would be a “bridge loan” that JaxPort would repay within two years as the state Department of Transportation releases funding for its share of the deepening.
For the remaining $70 million, the city would commit to $60 million in grants to JaxPort. The City Council could decide to later add another $10 million in grants based on the actual bids received by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of the deepening contracts.
The legislation seeks a vote by City Council on an emergency basis because JaxPort must provide the entire amount of local funding to the Army Corps by Aug. 20 so it can move forward with its bidding process and contract award.
JaxPort first told city leaders in 2017 it would seek city financial support in the range of $47 million to $150 million.
JaxPort said in February it would need $70 million in grants from the city and cited success at securing federal funding for the project as the reason for the city’s cost dropping from the high end of $150 million.
Orth said City Council “kicked the can down the road” in 2017 when it decided not to have any public workshops on the river deepening when JaxPort initially said it would seek city dollars.
Former City Council member Anna Brosche, who was council president at the time, said in August 2017 that JaxPort was not not requesting any city funding for the next two years and might not ask for any city money at all to deepen the harbor.
Hazouri had criticized Brosche’s decision to not call for a council workshop, saying in 2017 the council “owes it to the citizens of Jacksonville to provide the answers to their many questions regarding this mega-project.”
St. Johns Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit in April 2017 demanding the Corps not start the deepening. U.S. District Judge Marcia Howard allowed the Corps to proceed. In May of this year, she ruled against Riverkeeper.
Howard said in her ruling the Corps had complied with federal law in its study of the impact of the deepening on the river’s salinity and flooding during storm surges.
Howard said Corps’ flood models showed “only slight increases in maximum water levels” from tide and storm surge with a deeper ship channel.
“This finding does not mean that a 50-year storm would not cause flooding, and Hurricane Irma showed that indeed it would,” Howard wrote of massive flooding Jacksonville experienced in 2017. ”(T)his finding means that the project will not cause any significant increase in such flooding.”
Howard said the decision to deepen the river “in the face of Jacksonville’s existing flood risk” is up to elected officials, not a federal judge.
Source: jacksonville
