Residents in the Brentwood neighborhood are protesting the construction of a medical examiner's office and morgue on Golfair Boulevard Saturday afternoon.
Jacksonville's Neighborhood Bill of Rights is supposed to give neighborhood organizations a seat at the table in designing taxpayer-financed construction projects, but that didn't happen when the city decided to build a two-storyThe city began planning in 2016 for the 50,000-square-foot building with a capacity for up to 300 bodies in its morgue, but the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association didn't learn about it until this year after the city had already sunk millions of dollars...
"What you all voted for is the continued pattern of abuse in the Black community," she told City Council in September after it approved a rezoning of the site.Brentwood resident and activist Lydia Bell stands outside the construction site of the new Medical Examiner's Office off I-95 near Golfair Boulevard.contains a provision calling for involvement by neighborhood groups in the planning stage of taxpayer funded public projects.
The 4-acre site for the new building at 4368 N. Davis Street is bounded by Golfair Boulevard to the south and the on-ramp from Golfair Boulevard to Interstate 95 on the west. The north and east sides of the site are bordered by two-lane Davis Street, which comes off Golfair Boulevard and winds back to Golfair Manor, a subdivision built in the 1950s with dozens of homes immediately north of where the new facility will go.
That includes"the opportunity to participate in the design of publicly-funded projects within or adjacent to the neighborhood, including the opportunity early in the planning process to express neighborhood preferences about choice of location, materials, orientation, size, land use intensity, and other features."
The city's annual budgets have included the new Medical Examiner's Office in the capital improvements plan. However, the capital improvement plans left blank the address line for where the Medical Examiner's Office would be built. City lawyers said the change in zoning was to be consistent with how the city handles other city-owned property where public buildings are located. The city's attorneys said even if City Council refused to make the change, the commercial community zoning still would allow construction of the Medical Examiner's Office., who took office July 1, supported continuing construction of the Medical Examiner's Office.
City Council voted 17-1 on Sept. 26 for the rezoning with Reggie Gaffney Jr. casting the"no" vote. But that's not the final word on it. The Medical Examiner's Office will be nearly 50,000 square feet in size. The public buildings zoning category approved by the council only allows a building that is up to 40,000 square feet, so the city will go to the Planning Commission on Nov. 9 seeking a zoning exception that would allow the bigger building.
The Neighborhood Bill of Rights says neighborhood organizations should get notification from the city of such liquor store applications. Bell said city officials insisted the city sent a notice to her organization about the application, but she said that didn't happen. She said she found out about it earlier this year when children walking home from school happened to see work taking place at the vacant building.
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