My initial understanding was that this earmark would use monies from the general revenue fund. Given the local political establishment's will to get behind this appropriation (given the powerful presence John Rood holds over local politics), I thought that this was a shoe-in.
When I later learned that they were directing Sadowski Fund monies outside of the normal appropriation process... my thought process drastically changed.
During my time on the Times Union Editorial Board, I was very pleased to have the paper publish a position to ensure that Sadowski Fund monies are used for their original intent- ensuring that working families in Florida continue to have access to workforce housing. For years, the legislature had raided Sadowski Fund revenue and diverted them to all sorts of special interest projects that had absolutely nothing to do with housing:
https://www.jacksonville.com/opinion/20190611/tuesday-editorial-desantis-should-approve-affordable-housing-billGovernor DeSantis deserves a ton of credit for not only protecting the Sadowski Fund, but ensuring that the process to access those funds are not corrupted by political whims.
To Vestcor's credit, they have been very successful at submitting successful bids for affordable housing tax credits in Jacksonville's urban core over the last 5 years. For a very long time, Jacksonville's pre-consolidated city limits (the urban core) had gotten the shaft and did not receive our fair share of those dollars.
For those interested in learning about the process for financing affordable housing projects using low-income housing tax credits, a portion of this article gives a good explanation/chart:
https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/affordable-housing-development-proposed-in-brooklyn-page-2/When The Lofts at Brooklyn break ground later this year, that will be Vestcor's sixth affordable housing project to go up in the urban core
and the fourth within DIA's boundaries, to have been constructed since 2014.
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