^Exactly. The creation of a Downtown Master Plan would typically be done by a consulting firm, with heavy involvement from DIA staff. We have one of the best firms in the country at creating these type of plans in our state in Dover Kohl. I recently worked with them to create a form-based code in my city and they are phenomenal.
As to the question of Boyer in her role. Ideally you would have someone with combined policy/legal and planning/design backgrounds in the director role, but people that have both skill sets at a high level are rare and often do not like being handcuffed by local politics. I think she can be very successful with the right staff behind her and she's been given the resources to actually create a pretty robust staff. The DIA now has:
Director of Downtown Real Estate and Development
Operations Manager-Only holdover from last administration
Contract and Regulatory Compliance Manager
Redevelopment Coordinator
Financial Analyst
Marketing and Communications Specialist
The DIA staff is made up of mostly locals, presumably people that Boyer knows well, which can have plusses and minuses. I see some possible weaknesses there, especially in the planning type roles (which Boyer could probably use the some help at). A problem Jax has is that because of consolidation, there is minimal local planning and redevelopment talent (especially at the public level). Where I work in Palm Beach County, there are 39 municipalities and there are about 25 well paid Planning Directors, Deputy Directors, and CRA Directors. Tampa Bay, Dade/Broward, and to a lesser extent Orlando all have that same situation. If Jax was in a similar situation, it would be much easier to pull planning/development talent and plug them into senior positions at DIA. Another issue Jax has is that it doesn't pay well, so you aren't going to steal anyone from Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, South Florida, etc, and the City's own Planning Department is limited.
That said, Boyer has still put together what seems like a solid staff during a time when was it tough to compete against the private sector. We should give credit to Mayor Curry and Council for giving her the money to bring in enough support staff. I've shared this story on here before, but the past staff showed up at the ICSC conference (biggest real estate development conference in Florida) with amateur marketing materials/booth and it did not reflect well on the City's redevelopment efforts. I've heard some similar anecdotes from others as well. If this current staff was in place at the beginning of the boom, I think Downtown is a little further ahead in it's redevelopment efforts.
To the original point, creating a Master Plan would help ensure redevelopment occurs, even with future staffing or political issues. Sometimes there is a negative connotation to creating master plans by people that like small government, but one thing many of them do not realize is that they are actually development friendly. They provide assurances to the development community about what will happen in the future and also let the development community know what can and will be approved (which is otherwise a risk).
With the sheer amount of publicly owned land downtown, it's pretty crazy that this article even had to be written.
