GREEN COVE SPRINGS— Clay County’s state lawmakers heard from local citizens during a Sept. 15 meeting at the county’s administration building.
Senator Jennifer Bradley, along with State Representatives Bobby Payne and Sam Garrison make up the Clay County delegation.
Bradley’s senate district covers all of 10 northeast Florida counties including Clay, Bradford and Union, in addition to a portion of Marion. Payne’s house district includes all of Bradford, Union and Putnam counties, in addition to the portion of Clay county south of Middleburg and Lake Asbury. Garrison’s house district covers the remainder of Clay County.
Bradley reminded the audience that the only two actions the legislature is required to accomplish during the upcoming session is drafting a balanced budget for the state and redrawing district lines for state lawmakers, based on the 2020 census.
Bradley added that delegation meetings are important for lawmakers to coordinate their efforts at the state capitol.
“We need to get the information from the community so that when we go back to Tallahassee, we can work together as a delegation and be successful in moving this community forward,” she said.
With Garrison replacing Rep. Travis Cummings and Jennifer Bradley replacing her husband Rob in the Senate, Payne is now the dean of the Clay County delegation.
He told the audience that he expects somewhat of a normal session this year, after the COVID-19 Pandemic overturned normal procedures during the 2021 session.
Water and sewer for Keystone airport
Keystone Heights Mayor Karen Lake, along with airport board chairman David Kirkland asked for state help to finance a $135,000 feasibility study for getting water and sewer lines to the facility.
“It’s a prime resource that we need at the Keystone Heights Airport,” said Kirkland of water and sewer service. “We have the high-speed internet now, but as we talk to perspective tenants, that’s one of the questions they ask: Do you have water and sewer?”
Kirkland said that now, the airport and its tenants get water from wells and uses septic tanks for wastewater. He added that the airport has been talking to the Clay County Utility Authority about water and sewer service for three years, and that the utility needs the feasibility study in order to proceed.
Kirkland also reminded the lawmakers of the airport’s request from last year about a second entrance road into the facility.
“We only have one road in and out of the airport,” he said, “and we were looking at a second road entrance.”
Kirkland added that Florida’s Department of Transportation told airport officials that the second entrance road would cost around $1.9 million.
Lake also said the city is asking for the state to upgrade the traffic signals at the intersection of state roads 100 and 21, replacing the traffic lights suspended from wires to ones mounted on a metal mast arm. She added that SR 100 is a hurricane evacuation route. The more durable mast arms would lower the risk of wind damage to the signals and the subsequent traffic tie ups caused by the damage.
Community school partnerships
Tina Baker, director of the community partnership school at Keystone Heights Junior-Senior High School explained to the lawmakers that the partnership provides students with health care and social services they might not get at home.
She added that some of the biggest needs students now face are dental services and mental health care.
Becky Couch, who is Baker’s supervisor as the area director for community partnership schools at the Children’s Home Society told the legislators that in addition to Keystone, community partnership schools are at Wilkinson Junior High in Clay Hill and at Orange Park Senior High.
“With your support, we’re changing lives and creating better, brighter futures through community partnership schools,” she told the lawmakers. “We’ve seen improved attendance, reading levels, classroom behavior and also increased graduation rates.”
Couch listed several of the partnership’s programs, including an after-school virtual tutoring program in Keystone called homework café.
“University of Florida students tutored students at the school,” she said. “This contributed to an overall increased average of 18 percentage points in either geometry or biology student grades.”
Couch asked the delegation to continue to support community partnership schools and to provide funding to expand the concept.
Reopening schools during COVID
Clay County Schools Superintendent David Broskie also cited the success of the community partnership schools in Keystone Heights, Clay Hill and Orange Park.
Broskie echoed Baker’s claim that mental health services are a growing need within schools.
“There’s no doubt that mental health has become a key issue,” he said, “both for students that we serve as well as the people that work within our district.”
Broskie said Florida led the nation in aggressively reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic and kept them open, while students in other states were forced to stay home.
“So, we’re extremely proud of the work that’s been done in Tallahassee with the opening of schools,” he said. “With that, we’re very proud of the work that’s been done in Clay County. Clay County is in the top 10 of all 67 counties in (English language) proficiency, math proficiency and science proficiency.”
Broskie added that Clay County is third in the state in civics and fifth in U.S. history.
“It’s not a competition between districts,” he said, “but I want the best for our students right here in Clay County.”
He added that local school officials are grateful for increases in teacher pay and the decreasing reliance on statewide student assessments.
The alligator closest to the kayak
Clay County Sheriff Michelle Cook began her presentation to the lawmakers by saying that license driver violators, like those who are arrested for driving with a revoked or suspended license, are taking up too much space at the jail.
“I am not an advocate of putting people in jail for basic drivers license violations,” she said. “Our jail is full, and we don’t need people in jail because they have a license violation. I’d rather have them working and supporting their families.”
Cook added that she supports finding creative ways to hold license violators accountable without using up valuable county resources.
Cook also told the delegation about overcapacity at the county’s detention facility.
“Our jail was built in 1972,” she said. “It was expanded twice, the last time in 1992. We are at capacity or above capacity almost every day. This is the alligator closest to the kayak and it’s about to bite us.”
Cook also said that recruiting and retaining law enforcement officers is a priority, not only for the sheriff’s office, but for law enforcement agencies across the state.
She lauded the governor’s initiative to recruit police officers from other states and added that increasing deputy pay is her top priority now.
Making a stand at Wells Road
Cook told commissioners that even though overall crime in Clay County is down, incidents along the county’s northern border with Jacksonville are increasing. She said the criminal element in Duval County is creeping south, crossing Interstate 295 and increasing incidents along Wells Road. The road is Orange Park’s northern most commercial thoroughfare, anchored by the Orange Park Mall at Blanding Boulevard (SR 21) and a half dozen hotels on or near Park Avenue (U.S. 17) to the east.
“We are starting an initiative called Gateway to Clay,” she said, “and what we are doing in cooperation with the county is looking at a holistic approach to include education and enforcement between Blanding and 17 along Wells Road.”
Cook added that she grew up on Wells Road and has seen a visible decline in the area lately.
“We have resolved ourselves to make a stand and reclaim Wells Road,” she said. “I think you know setting that tone of what’s going to be allowable behavior in Clay County starts at the Wells Road corridor.”
Garrison told Cook he agreed with her assessment of the Wells Road area, adding he has talked to several business owners in the area that have expressed concern over increasing crime.
He also said aging buildings and infrastructure in the northern Orange Park-area is a disturbing trend.
“(We need) to make sure that we don’t go down the road Jacksonville went down,” he said, “and have that part of our county turn into Arlington 2.0. I don’t want that.”
Corporate challenges to property assessments
County Commissioner Wayne Bolla, representing the board of county commissioners, thanked the delegation for past state support for juvenile detention, upgrades at the fairgrounds, and improvements to the county’s greenways and trails.
He repeated Cook’s request for any state help in what he saw as two of the county’s most pressing needs: deputy pay and jail expansion.
He also said broadband internet access is a problem,
“We have an issue with that,” he said. “We have areas of the county where there is none, and when we have to have our kids dial in, it gets to be a real problem.”
Bolla added that Commissioner Betsy Condon is the county’s point person for finding more broadband internet access.
Bolla told lawmakers that a bike and walking trail already exists from Keystone Heights to the Mike Roess Gold head State Park.
He said the county plans on using $500,000 for engineering and design to extend a unified trail system northward to the Duval County line.
Bolla concluded by addressing the growing proliferation of corporate challenges to property assessments.
Every year, Florida’s county property appraisers value the real estate within Florida and property owners pay taxes based on those values.
Property owners who think their real estate has been overvalued may appeal the assessments to county value adjustment boards.
“We are having a problem with corporations loading us up with value adjustment claims at the very last minute,” he told the delegation. “The clerk was here last night. She said in five hours she got about 500 claims dumped on us, and those are mainly from corporations.”
Bolla added that the $15 fee for filing a value adjustment claim has not been changed since 1983 and that now might be a good time to consider raising it.
Other speakers
Clerk of Court Tara Green thanked Bradley on her work last year in reforming Florida’s guardianship laws. She said continued improvement in that area is necessary because of the state’s aging population.
She also said state lawmakers should continue to address a sustainable revenue model for Florida’s 67 county clerks.
Green said the COVID-19 Pandemic resulted in fewer traffic citations and a corresponding drop in revenue to the clerks.
“I don’t think any clerk would want to stand up here and ask for more citations to be written by law enforcement,” she said, adding that legislators should instead reevaluate how traffic fines are distributed between the state, law enforcement agencies and local jurisdictions.
Orange Park Town Manager Sarah Campbell said she hopes large scale grants, which were suspended last year due to the pandemic, will be restored in 2022.
She also said that she and Police Chief Gary Goble support a bill that would treat dispatchers as first responders for purposes of workers compensation and require one hour per year of continuing education for the dispatchers, focusing on mental health.
Campbell also argued for home rule: the ability of local governments to make decisions about local issues, instead of the legislature preempting them.
“The decisions that are right for Orange Park aren’t necessarily the decisions that are right for Keystone Heights,” she said. “When we have that flexibility to make those decisions ourselves, it makes everybody’s life a lot easier.”
Green Cove Springs Mayor Edward Gaw asked for funding to increase public access to the St. Johns River and more public safety resources for the waterway. He said the Governor’s Creek Boat Ramp is at capacity on most weekends and on holidays.
“There is parking across the streets of many of those ramps and people are hustling coolers across either U.S. 17 or any other major highway adjacent to a boat ramp,” he said.
Gaw added that Boater Skip Day, an unofficial holiday in early June in which boaters skip work to enjoy a day on the water, draws over 2,000 boats to the St. Johns River near the city and that law enforcement and fire-rescue resources are inadequate to handle the influx of the watercraft.
Clay County Utility Authority Executive Director Jeremy Johnston said he appreciated the legislature extending the deadline from five years to 10 years for utilities to eliminate non-beneficial wastewater discharges.
The original legislation, popularly dubbed toilet-to-tap, required utilities to develop technologies within five years that will recycle wastewater, including sewage into clean drinking water.
Caroline Tingle, vice president for development and external affairs at St. Johns River State College, told the delegation that the school recently completed an $18 million renovation project at its Orange Park campus.
She added that the college has a robust workforce program with students in engineering, technology, nursing, nursing assistant, EMT, paramedic and network systems technology.
Tingle said the college is now developing a physical therapy assistant program.
