Mayor Donna Deegan brought her budget town hall tour to Duncan U. Fletcher High School on Wednesday night, laying out Beaches-specific spending in her proposed $2.03 billion city budget before fielding an hour of resident questions that ranged from a silted-in Pine Creek to sharp complaints about rising property tax bills.
The stop was the third of eight budget town halls Deegan is holding across Jacksonville through late September, and the first on the Beaches. About 75 people filled Fletcher's auditorium, roughly 20 of them members of the mayor's staff, making it one of the smaller crowds Deegan has drawn at town halls addressing the Beaches.
Jacksonville Beach Mayor Christine Hoffman, Neptune Beach Mayor Cori Bylund and Jacksonville Beach City Council Member Sandy Golding attended. Deegan said Atlantic Beach Mayor Curtis Ford could not attend because of a conflicting Atlantic Beach meeting that night.
Beaches capital projects
Deegan outlined a list of capital improvement plan projects specific to the Beaches for the coming fiscal year: $338,000 for the Jacksonville Beach Pier, $3.2 million for Hopkins Creek regional stormwater improvements, just over $1 million for a roundabout at Kings Road in Neptune Beach, $380,000 for a Neptune Beach pedestrian crossing, $640,000 for Seabreeze Drive drainage improvements and $148,000 for upgrades to the Hanna Park campground.
Deegan tied the Beaches investment to a broader push in City Council districts 7, 8, 9 and 10 to make good on infrastructure commitments dating to Jacksonville's 1968 consolidation, which she said her administration is tracking through a new transparency dashboard called Promises Kept.
Budget overview
Deegan's presentation framed the roughly $2 billion budget as split between the general fund, which covers day-to-day operations such as police, fire, libraries and trash collection, and the capital improvement plan, which funds long-term infrastructure such as roads, drainage, sidewalks and septic tank removal.
She said public safety accounts for the largest share of general fund spending. The city added $13 million in additional infrastructure funding this year, on top of what she described as the most road resurfacing done in any three-year stretch in the past decade, with nearly 10,000 potholes filled since she took office.
But the vast majority of those dollars were spent in Jacksonville.
How the Beaches fit into Jacksonville's budget
Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach and Atlantic Beach are not part of Jacksonville's city government. All three, along with the Town of Baldwin, opted out of the 1968 consolidation of the city and Duval County and kept their own mayors, councils, police departments and municipal budgets, funded by their own separately set millage rates.
Neptune Beach's proposed and adopted budgets, for instance, are entirely distinct documents from the one Deegan presented at Fletcher, and the projects and tax rate in that budget are set by Mayor Bylund and the Neptune Beach City Council, not by Deegan or the Jacksonville City Council. It is the same for the other Beaches cities.
That said, the Beaches are not walled off from Jacksonville's budget, either. Beaches residents still vote for the Jacksonville mayor, for their Jacksonville City Council district representative and at-large council members, and for the Duval County School Board. The consolidated city functions as the county government for the entire county, including the Beaches cities.
As the county, Jacksonville funds services such as the constitutional officers (the sheriff, property appraiser, tax collector, supervisor of elections and clerk of courts) and the county's role in beach renourishment. Under a 1982 interlocal agreement that followed a lawsuit the Beaches cities and Baldwin filed against Jacksonville, the consolidated government and the independent municipalities also share a defined set of services and cost-sharing arrangements.
That dual structure is the reason Beaches-specific line items such as the Jacksonville Beach Pier funding and the Neptune Beach roundabout are in Deegan's $2.03 billion presentation.
Property taxes bring tension, but Deegan keeps it civil
Property taxes produced the evening's tensest moments. Two audience members pressed the mayor with pointed questions on rising assessments and city spending, including one who said she had also attended and challenged Deegan at last year's town hall. The back-and-forth grew heated at points, with the mayor and one questioner briefly talking over each other.
Deegan held her tone throughout, repeatedly steering the exchanges back toward substance. She noted that Jacksonville's property tax rate remains the lowest among major Florida cities and that the city does not control individual property valuations. She also asked attendees, more broadly, to keep the conversation respectful. “We can have a difference without yelling at each other, can we not?” she said at one point. She also told the crowd she welcomes disagreement but expects it delivered “in an honest way and a respectful way and in a kind way.”
