Dog Without A Bone – JTA’S Great Greyhound Deception

Downtown Jacksonville convention center conversation resurfaces
Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Jacksonville Business Journal

The on-again, off-again push to build a convention center is on again.

City Councilman Richard Clark in mid-January introduced a bill to fund a $60,000 study to update a 2007 study on the feasibility of a convention center. The update would be funded from the executive operating reserve joint account to contract directly with Conventions, Sports and Leisure International LLC, which completed the original study...

...“If they call and ask and think they can find another option, I have no issue,” Clark said. “I want to work with them on things like this.”
Mayoral spokesman David DeCamp said the administration was reviewing the source of the funding.

“It’s not a question of supporting an update, it’s finding a good funding source for it,” DeCamp said, “but we’re comfortable we’ll be able to find it.”

Paul Astleford, CEO of Visit Jacksonville, said a new convention center would be a “major step forward” for the city.
http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2014/02/19/downtown-jacksonville-convention.html

Plans for new Greyhound station hit a roadblock: JTA, Greyhound no longer see eye-to-eye on the project

Plans to construct a long-awaited $6 million bus terminal for Greyhound near the Prime Osborn Convention Center appear to have hit a roadblock.

State Transportation Department officials say they are ready to release federal money that would fully finance the project, but they are waiting for the Jacksonville Transportation Authority and Greyhound to complete negotiations on the project.

“We’re ready to go anytime,” said James Bennett, the transportation department’s urban transportation development manager for Northeast Florida. “We’re just waiting for them to … give us the go-ahead to move with this.”

JTA had initially wanted to break ground in the summer on land near the convention center that would house the new bus terminal, opening the way for Greyhound to vacate and sell its current space in the downtown core — a move city officials have talked about for more than a decade as part of revitalization efforts.

In February, Greyhound signed a 40-year lease to use the future building at a rental rate of $46,000 per year, and in August, the JTA board awarded a $5 million contract to Core Construction Co.

Officials had hoped the terminal would be complete sometime this year.

To date, however, work crews have only completed preliminary site work on the land, leaving the one-year construction project essentially untouched.

And now, it appears JTA and Greyhound no longer see eye-to-eye.

In a statement, a Greyhound spokeswoman said the company will move into the new terminal only after construction is complete on it as well as an adjacent “multimodal facility” that JTA officials had originally envisioned to be a major transportation hub.

But JTA dropped immediate efforts to build that hub — estimated to cost $180 million — in 2011 after Mayor Alvin Brown and other city officials wanted more time to review the idea and expressed concern about aspects of the project.

The ambitious plan called for a campus of buildings for a regional traffic management center, Greyhound, a relocated Amtrak station and a hub for a citywide rapid transit system of express buses.

JTA still has no immediate plan to begin construction on that project, according to John Finotti, an authority spokesman.

“The multimodal facility is a primary and very important part of this project and Greyhound will plan its move to the new terminal around the completion of the multimodal facility,” said Lanesha Gipson, a Greyhound spokeswoman. “We do not plan to move into the terminal prior to its completion since interacting with other modes of transportation would provide customers with a seamless, more convenient travel experience.”

The authority says it expects Greyhound to honor the terms of the 40-year lease it signed in February.