Times Union: Maintenance feuds turn Jacksonville beautification ugly

[Patricia M. McBride]

Who should provide needed upkeep for neighborhood projects is a sore point.

JOHN PEMBERTON/The Times-Union

A few dozen people attended the groundbreaking of the Stockton Street Town Center on Wednesday. The town

Neighborhoods

These town center projects are completed or under construction:

- Laura Street downtown
- Stockton Street in Riverside
- St. Nicholas
- Park and King streets in Riverside
- Five Points
- San Marco
- Murray Hill
- North Main Street
- Arlington Road
- Mayport Road
- McDuff Avenue
- Myrtle Avenue/Moncrief Road
- Oceanway
- Rogero Road in Arlington
- Avondale
- 103rd Street in the Westside
- Venetia

Source: City of Jacksonville

 

Posted: January 20, 2011 - 12:00am

By Steve Patterson

Riverside's Stockton Street and Arlington's Rogero Road evoke different eras and senses of neighborhood, but people on both streets want to burnish their local images.

At both, neighbors locked up cash from Jacksonville City Hall to beautify their streets, then worked with city employees designing "town centers" boasting new medians, trees and flowers.

But while people on century-old Stockton Street celebrated Wednesday as ground was broken for their project, neighbors along 1950s-vintage Rogero fumed with frustration about their road's appearance.

"Arlington looks worse now than it did before we had the town center," said Roberta Thomas, part of a committee that championed the Rogero project for most of a decade.

Since summer, she has angrily e-mailed City Hall about weeds that have overrun carefully landscaped medians, sometimes sprouting bushy stalks that grew over people's heads. Neighbors and city employees each insisted the other was responsible for maintaining the 2.3 miles of re-made roadway.

'Blight ... and no pride'

The taxpayer-funded project, part of a 2002 bond issue, was meant to buoy the area.

It is "working the complete opposite," Thomas said. "It's showing we have blight, we have no pride and the city doesn't care about us."

The recriminations highlight a challenge that residents and city workers have faced: keeping expectations clear in town center projects touted as public-private partnerships.

"The city isn't always easy to deal with. And we're not always easy to deal with, because we want what we want," said Kay Ehas, chair of the nonprofit Riverside-Avondale Preservation Inc. and an early advocate for the work on Stockton.

RAP and the city firefighters union have both been approached by the city about maintaining medians and roadsides where new trees and flowers like African irises are to be planted, roughly between Post Street and Phyllis Street. Another group that was expected to maintain the area had to withdraw.

There was no agreement by the time the first ceremonial shovels of dirt were tossed Wednesday, though Ehas said she expected it would be settled quickly.

"Do we agree that neighborhood groups should have to maintain rights of way? No, we think the city should do it," she said. "But, it is what it is."

Public Works Department crews mow grass along city roads and do edging when needed. But they say plainly they don't have time or resources to weed flower beds or police up fancier landscaping, said Kenny Logsdon, a senior planner who manages town center projects for the Housing and Neighborhoods Department.

That leaves Logsdon's office looking for someone else to step up.

"Public Works has pretty much already told me we're not going to build it unless we have that agreement," Logsdon said about the $570,000 Stockton project. He said one project in North Jacksonville was actually stopped briefly because of a disagreement about who would handle the upkeep.

Nineteen town center projects were sketched with part of a $12 million allotment for town centers. Two of those probably won't be built anytime soon because no more money is available, Logsdon said.

Who should maintain it?

The city requires maintenance contracts on projects that start now but didn't when the Rogero project wrapped up in 2009. And no one realized there was a problem until the company contracted to landscape the project completed a one-year maintenance commitment.

"I get this strange phone call, and it comes from the city's project overseer," said Thomas, president of the Fort Caroline Club Estates South Civic Association.

"He says, 'Well ... [the contractor] has finished up, now you can start.' I said, 'What do you mean?' " she recalled. "He says, 'Well, they told us you were going to take over.' "

Thomas points out a 2010 city record says the city budgeted more than $17,000 to maintain town center plantings in Mayport, and smaller sums for St. Nicholas and San Marco.

Thomas and others from a committee that promoted the Rogero town center said they never agreed to maintain anything. She said she asked if the city was going to maintain the medians, and was told yes. She said there was no way her association would have been able to take care of a two-mile project.

"Our people are 70 and 80 years old," she said. "They don't weed their own yards."

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