Jacksonville tries to catch up on huge $250 million backlog in projects, repairs

The worn-out tennis court at Whitehouse Park is so riddled with cracks that thick weeds run rampant among the zig-zag fractures. The metal posts holding up the nets were rotting, so the parks department took them down a few weeks ago. The court is unplayable.

Tucked at the back of Whitehouse Park on Jacksonville's Westside, the tennis court seems to suffer from a bad case of out of sight, out of mind, said John Pittman, chairman of the Northwest Citizen Planning Advisory Committee, which represents neighborhood groups in meetings with city officials.

"It's been forgotten," Pittman said as he surveyed the deteriorating court.

Actually, it hasn't been entirely forgotten, appearances notwithstanding. The tennis court is one of several dozen park facilities the parks and recreation department identified as being in need of maintenance, in varying degrees.

Getting the money to catch up on that backlog has been one of the biggest problems facing City Hall - not only for parks, but for a host of everyday repairs and upkeep.

The Public Works Department has estimated the backlog of projects awaiting action is in the vicinity of $250 million for projects under its oversight - streets and bridges, sidewalks, drainage, environmental cleanup, government buildings, traffic signals, roadway striping, and Americans with Disabilities Act compliance.

Mayor Lenny Curry's proposed 2015-16 budget would make some headway in boosting spending on roads, sidewalks, public buildings, and drainage. Curry wants City Council to approve a $71 million capital improvements program, compared to the $20 million budget council enacted last year.

"We have worked diligently to craft a proposed budget which begins to address the capital improvements backlog, which was neglected so terribly by the Brown administration," mayoral spokesman Bill Spann said, referring to Mayor Alvin Brown.

Brown proposed a $179 million capital improvement program last year. But City Council scaled back his entire budget, saying it would add too much debt and drain almost $17 million from city reserves.

A special City Council then spent months digging into how the city selects, finances and executes the kind of long-lasting construction projects that represent the way most people come in contact - for better or worse - with city government.

City Council member Lori Boyer, who headed the review by that special council committee, said Curry's budget represents a good start.

"It's a recognition of what we uncovered regarding both backlogs and just the need for maintenance - if we're not keeping up, then the backlog grows," she said.

City Council President Greg Anderson said Curry's proposed budget "would be a huge step forward just in terms of our infrastructure. I think that's a very positive sign."

Anderson said the city has struggled over the past four years to maintain facilities such as roads and sidewalks. Curry's budget calls for $9.5 million for road resurfacing, compared to less than $3 million this year.

Curry's budget also seeks $1.5 million for sidewalk repairs and construction, triple the $500,000 amount approved last year by council.

The city has a long way to go to catch up. The most obvious case of damage is in downtown where parts of Liberty Street collapsed into the St. Johns River, leaving a gaping hole behind barricades.

Other symptoms of worn-out infrastructure aren't so dramatic, but the signs are present around the city.

The city has a $5 million backlog in striping roads for traffic safety. For example, at the heavily-traveled entrances to St. Johns Town Center on the Southside, the white lines are barely visible to guide drivers using the two left-hand turn lanes in and out of the shopping center at Town Center Parkway.

There's a $3.6 million backlog for sidewalk repairs covering 460 places across the city. The to-do list for sidewalk repairs dates back to requests made by residents in 2012.

Mandarin resident Louis Menefee, a retiree, recently learned the hard way what happens when sidewalks have problems. The retiree doesn't drive because of his poor vision, so he uses a three-wheeled scooter to get around. He was coming back from church when the scooter hit a bad spot in a sidewalk along Old St. Augustine Road, causing the scooter to topple.

"Thank goodness I didn't go into the street, but my elbow went right along the top of the curb along the street," said Menefee. "A guy in a pickup truck stopped and helped get me upright. I was just bloody, but I got upright and I was able to come on home."

He wrote a letter to Curry asking him to expedite repairs to the sidewalk.

Typically, the long list of sidewalk repairs means people have to wait a long time for results.

Boyer said it's "very disheartening" that when people call the city's complaint line about sidewalks, the response they get is, "'Yes, we've logged your complaint, we have put out a barricade and we will fix it in 2017.' That is what we're telling people. We're two years out on many, many, many of these items."

In response to questions from Boyer's committee, the Public Works Department has estimated the city faces a backlog of about $150 million to cover items such as street resurfacing, repairing and constructing sidewalks, rebuilding drainage systems, taking care of public buildings, repairing and replacing bridges, improving traffic conditions at intersections, upgrading traffic signals, striping pavement markings, and rebuilding shoreline bulkheads.

In addition, the overview estimated another $108 million to $123 million would be needed to get some long-standing problems eliminated, such as cleaning up old ash incinerator sites, complying with environmental regulations, and bringing public buildings and sidewalks into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In northwest Jacksonville, neighborhood leader Larry Solomon said the city needs to finally get the contaminated area of Lonnie Miller Park cleaned up. A long fence blocks off a chunk of the park that is located on a former garbage incinerator site. In a 2008 settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the city agreed to clean up several ash sites around town, including at Lonnie Miller.

"How long must you wait for something like that to come about?" Solomon said.

Boyer said she views next year as a transitional year to start reducing the backlog and come up with a realistic, multi-year financial plan that locks in what the city will do and how to pay for it.

She said that's not something the 2015-16 budget can resolve because Curry just took office July 1. But she said the city must start thinking about "what do we do going forward."

At a recent meeting of the Infrastructure Sub-Committee of Curry's transition committee, Boyer told the committee members that rebuilding the city's infrastructure is crucial in a growing number of older neighborhoods.

"We don't want to see the city decay from the inside out," she said, "and all the growth occur in our surrounding counties."

David Bauerlein: (904) 359-4581