Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association President Lydia Bell announces a lawsuit against the city to stop construction of a new medical examiner's office in Brentwood. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 20, 2024 at 3:17 pm
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Just over a year after they successfully stopped a liquor store from going into their neighborhood, members of the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association have filed suit against the city to stop a multimillion-dollar medical examiner’s office next door.
They say they want the $62.84 million North Davis Street facility stopped, despite its being under construction for over a year. The 18 residents also seek damages in the suit filed Thursday.
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Neighborhood association President Lydia Bell pointed out that the medical examiner’s office is across Davis Street from the KIPP Voice Academy and right behind what was to be a liquor store. She said residents tried to tell city officials how much they opposed it, “but no one hears; no one listened,” she said.
“They are only putting it in the Black community,” she said during a news conference Thursday. “If they did the traffic study, that would have stopped that alone. But all that traffic coming up around children? Plus, it’s morbid. No one wants to live around dead bodies. We are not a cemetery — Brentwood is not a cemetery. There should be no morgue in anybody’s neighborhood.”
City officials did not respond to a request for comment about the suit. Association attorney Neil Henrichsen alleged that the city broke laws in building in Brentwood, a block off Golfair Boulevard.
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“Zoning laws were broken. The work commenced while the property was zoned for commercial use, not public use,” Henrichsen said. “Second, the size of the property was over 40,000 square feet and the planning was for 51,000 square feet. That was not approved at the time the work commenced.
“There has been a pattern of disregard by the city with regard to the Neighborhood Bill of Rights. This is a perfect example,” he said. “Not one community in this city would say. ‘Yes, please bring a morgue into my community.'”
City officials broke ground 13 months ago on the new medical examiner’s office, which will replace a facility whose structural bones date to 1968.
The current facility can handle a maximum of 45 bodies but has been at capacity several times in recent months, city documents show. The facility on North Jefferson Street also has dealt with an average of 2,000 autopsies a year and faces increasing numbers of autopsies due to opioid overdoses and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, city officials said at a groundbreaking in May 2023.
The new two-story medical examiner’s office, just over a mile north of the current office, is visible from nearby Interstate 95 as well as Golfair Boulevard, as well as KIPP school students and numerous homes across Davis Street and Castlewood Drive West.
The residents’ lawsuit states that the facility will have room for up to 300 bodies and operate 24 hours a day, and “will directly harm each of the resident plaintiffs.” It also is “hazardous, unsightly and entirely out of character” with the adjacent residential community, and will decrease property values, the suit says.
What really angers Bell is that no one in her community ever knew about the site being chosen until construction had begun. Brentwood was never on the initial list of 38 sites under consideration in 2016 and was selected only in early 2023, she and the attorney said. Then the city never sought a zoning exception for it until after that construction began, Bell said.
“They just started building, just started pulling trees out by people’s homes, across from an elementary school — 32 feet away,” Bell said. “It is the laws that are already on the books that they need to enforce; that’s what would stop it. But they are breaking every law on the book, and that is anarchy.”
The suit comes after Brentwood spent months fighting the proposed package store on adjacent land along Golfair Boulevard.
A developer had bought the former gas station in 2019, and the Planning Commission recommended its use as a liquor store despite vocal protest.
In September, Council Member Ju’Coby Pittman told residents the city would buy the property, which is less than 200 feet from the KIPP Voice Academy. And in late March, Mayor Donna Deegan said the former liquor store will be repurposed as a small-business support center.
