4. Long term coordination and vision always wins. Don’t plan in a vacuum
The Prime Osborn Convention Center is housed in the former Jacksonville Terminal passenger rail station. When completed in 1919, it was the largest passenger rail terminal in the country south of Washington, DC. It is located along the railroad that Virgin Trains USA has the rights to provide passenger rail service on.
While Jacksonville may be putting its convention center dilemma on hold for the foreseeable future, that doesn’t mean the world around it will go on pause. No one will argue that the Prime Osborn Convention Center isn’t dingy, dated, isolated, too small and struggles to compete with similar facilities across the country for destination events. Few would argue that a better use of that space would be converting it back into the grand passenger railroad terminal and gateway to Jacksonville’s urban core that it once was. In fact, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority has flirted with the idea of brining the city’s Amtrak station back to the historic downtown terminal for nearly two decades now.
A Brightline (now Virgin Train USA) train heading into Downtown Miami’s station in October 2018.
In the meantime, 2018 saw Brightline, America’s first new major private passenger railroad in over a century, launched between Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Now that company has formed a strategic partnership with Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and is moving forward to expand its Florida rail line to Orlando and Tampa. Now known as Virgin Trains USA, a link with Jacksonville is included in its November 2018 IPO filing with the SEC. Virgin Trains USA already has secured the rights to use the railroad through Downtown to eventually extend its service into Jacksonville. By using existing infrastructure, it believes it can plan, permit and build new rail service significantly faster and cheaper than alternative express passenger rail projects between highly populated cities separated by distances of 200 to 300 miles. A major component of Virgin Trains USA’s ability to succeed involves the associated creation of transit oriented development around its stations. Currently, this includes approximately 1.5 million square feet of mixed-use office, residential, retail and parking facilities under construction at and around its South Florida stations.
Transit oriented development at West Palm Beach’s Virgin Trains USA (formerly Brightline) station. The West Palm Beach station is within walking distance of the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
For Jacksonville, the potential of taking advantage of private sector projects such as Virgin Trains USA means developing a future downtown vision now, and incrementally implementing it over time. Not immediately addressing or coming up with a specific plan for the convention center’s future simply leaves the existing Prime Osborn Convention Center in place and Jacksonville’s ability to take short term advantage of another major economic opportunity in doubt. Having a follow-up RFP for the courthouse site that doesn’t include the option of an Elbow/Hyatt/Exhibition Hall addition as a potential future use of that site is also shortsighted, given the existing development in place and the new “things to do” developments already in the works within walkable distance. With this in mind, additional thought, planning and coordination is required to make sure all of downtown’s projects from the Shipyards, the District, and old county courthouse sites to the Northbank core, Brooklyn and LaVilla are implemented to maximize the potential of each site without causing detriment to other locations and investments.
Editorial by Ennis Davis, AICP. Contact Ennis at edavis@moderncities.com