The council voted 16-1 to move the tentative budget, which allocates more than half of its funding for public safety, forward. Councilman Rory Diamond was the only member to vote against it, as he did during last week\u2019s Finance Committee vote.<\/p>\n
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\n Affordable housing funding restoration dominates Jacksonville city budget discussion
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During Tuesday night\u2019s public hearing, residents repeatedly called on the council to restore $4.9 million for an Affordable Housing Trust Fund.<\/p>\n
The money was included in Mayor Donna Deegan\u2019s proposed budget but was among about $23 million cut by the Finance Committee last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cJacksonville\u2019s an awesome place. Let\u2019s keep people here and let them afford to live,\u201d one resident told the council.<\/p>\n
Another resident called the Affordable Housing Trust Fund \u201cvery important,\u201d and others urged council members to establish the fund as a way to address the city\u2019s affordable housing needs.<\/p>\n
Councilman Matt Carlucci held a public meeting before Tuesday night\u2019s council meeting to discuss an amendment that would restore the $4.9 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen that got cut then, it did away with hopes that many people have for workforce housing,\u201d Carlucci said. \u201cI\u2019m talking about nurses, firefighters, working folks, but they just can\u2019t quite get to that home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carlucci said he plans to bring the amendment back during the council\u2019s final budget vote Sept. 22.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019ll go a long way towards helping a lot of people and that\u2019s what we\u2019re supposed to be doing up here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Finance Committee’s proposed budget was created with the possibility of Amendment 3’s passing in mind. If the referendum is approved by Florida voters in November, homestead exemptions will go up, cutting the amount of property taxes that can be collected by local governments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Finance Chair Will Lahnen said during the Sept. 1 meeting that, if it passes, they would need to scale down the budget by about $200 million in the first year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We\u2019ve also said repeatedly, let\u2019s not start anything new, especially if it\u2019s an expense-only item with no offsetting revenue to the city,” Lahnen said. He used the Affordable Housing Trust as an example.<\/p>\n
Other council members also said Tuesday night\u2019s vote does not mean the budget is finalized.<\/p>\n
Councilman Rahman Johnson said he voted for the tentative budget, but he would still like to see some changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will be voting yes on the tentative budget but I will be making some amendments to the budget when we bring the final budget up for vote,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, it\u2019s a tentative budget, we can still make changes on council night,\u201d Councilman Jimmy Peluso said.<\/p>\n
The city will hold another public hearing before the final vote.<\/p>\n
Until then, council members can propose amendments to the tentative budget, including changes involving funding for affordable housing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Council approved a tentative budget Tuesday night, but residents are pushing to restore the $4.9 million Affordable Housing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1052219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5136],"tags":[5229,3188,723,7310,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1052218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-america","tag-fl","tag-florida","tag-jacksonville","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117239023470733400","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1052218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1052219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1052218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1052218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1052218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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