City Council committees reject plan to make it harder to change zoning

A proposed Jacksonville City Council ordinance that would further protect neighborhoods and districts with specialized zoning regulations has hit resistance, failing to pass the three committees that heard it Oct. 14 and Oct. 15.

Ordinance 2024-0373, introduced by at-large Council member Matt Carlucci, was rejected by the Council Land Use and Zoning Committee on Oct. 15 by a 5-2 vote.

Committee members Ken Amaro and Joe Carlucci voted in favor of the bill; Raul Arias, committee Chair Kevin Carrico, Rory Diamond, Reggie Gaffney Jr. and Rahman Johnson voted against the ordinance.

Matt Carlucci said he came to the LUZ meeting because he hoped he could convince Carrico to defer the vote to give representatives of neighborhood preservation organizations in St. Nicholas, Springfield, Riverside/Avondale and Downtown an opportunity to voice their opinions on the bill.

"I deferred this for three months to get the NFL negotiations and the (city) budget out of the way," Carlucci said.

After Carrico refused to defer the vote, Carlucci said he will attempt to convince Council President Randy White to defer action on the bill when it comes before the full Council.

"You may want to leave yourself some wiggle room in case I can get the Council president to defer this so the people can speak," Carlucci said at LUZ.

On Oct. 14, the Rules Committee shot down the bill 4-2 and then it fell one vote short of passage by the Neighborhoods, Community Services, Public Health and Safety Committee.

The seven-member Neighborhoods committee voted 3-2 in favor of the ordinance with two members absent, but legislation needs four votes – a majority of the committee as a whole – to be approved.

With the 3-2 vote, the bill was deferred in the Neighborhoods Committee.

Southbank self-storage battle

The ordinance would apply to the city's 11 zoning overlay districts and to the creation of any additional overlay districts. He introduced it after Council approved rezoning for the Lofts at Southbank, a mixed-use development that drew significant opposition from residents in San Marco and the Downtown Southbank for including self-storage.

Under the Downtown zoning overlay, which applies to the Lofts at Southbank site at Prudential Drive and Hendricks Avenue, self-storage was not an approved land use. Council voted 11-8 in April 2024 to rezone the property to Planned Unit Development, which provided an exception to allow self-storage.

Zoning overlays are customized sets of regulations that are applied on top of the zoning codes for the city at large. They're designed to protect the character and cohesiveness of neighborhoods by ensuring that new developments or redevelopments maintain the look and feel of surrounding properties and do not disrupt districts' economies.

What ordinance would do

Carlucci's proposed ordinance would require a two-thirds Council supermajority vote to create an overlay district or to approve a rezoning to Planned Unit Development within an existing overlay. Neighborhoods Committee member Ron Salem also opposed the Lofts at Southbank rezoning but said he thought Carlucci's bill was a step in the wrong direction. Salem voted against the bill, as did committee member Chris Miller.

"I have a concern that we will move in the direction that if there's a close vote on something, or something occurs that we don't like, we'll pass legislation to require a two-thirds vote on it," he said.

"I just think that the process is 10 votes. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose."

Miller said he was concerned that overlays could be outdated and that raising the bar for approving modifications or exceptions would protect obsolete regulations and be against the will of communities. He noted that some of the districts were established more than 20 years ago.

Council member Mike Gay, who is not on the committee but sat in on the meeting, said he supported the bill and wished that the 3-year-old overlay in his District 2 had been in place for 20-plus years.

Responding to a comment by Carlucci that "hundreds of people" supported the legislation, Salem and Miller said they had not heard from any constituents on it. Carlucci responded that out of respect for Council members' time, he had not urged supporters to contact them.

For the same reason, he said, he also deferred the bill for several months while Council faced a heavy workload on issues such as the Jacksonville Jaguars' stadium deal and the city budget.

"If you want letters, I can really make that happen quite easily," he said.

Greater protection

Carlucci said the legislation wasn't solely a response to the Lofts at Southbank rezoning, which he opposed, but was designed to protect all overlay districts. He said creation of the districts can take months of work by numerous community members, and he thought that it should require more than a simple 10-9 Council majority vote to approve a PUD rezoning with an exemption of modification of an overlay.

"I'm supporting this because I saw San Marco get burned, I saw the Northside get burned and I saw the Southbank get burned," he said.

"I just think a little more than 10 votes is needed to respect what (overlay creators) have put together and protect our neighborhoods."

Amaro, who also voted for the ordinance, agreed with Carlucci that overlays needed greater protections "so they don't get run over."

"Two-thirds doesn't seem like a high threshold to me," he said. "If the project is worthwhile, it will get two-thirds."

Salem said he also was concerned about upping the number of items that would require two-thirds votes for passage. Council already has several, including on certain budget issues such as appropriating funding out of reserve or contingency accounts.

Carlucci dismissed that concern.

"This objection of too many two-thirds votes, I know that's being pushed by several developers that like to amend PUDs with just 10 votes," he said. "I know that because they told me that."

Among the concerns expressed in the Rules Committee was that the two-thirds majority requirement for creating overlays could inhibit Council from passing sensible overlays and that while the existing overlays were established with simple-majority votes, rezoning them to PUD would require two-thirds majorities.