Robert Flornoy is a Northwest Jacksonville resident who says the city of Jacksonville disenfranchised residents by turning a proposed liquor store into a small business center, against the wishes of Brentwood residents. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 28, 2025 at 6:45 pm
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Brentwood has got something to say: They are tired of being trifled with and ignored by City Hall.
Friday morning, about a dozen Jacksonville residents, a handful of whom either live or have ties to Brentwood, stood outside a building on Golfair Boulevard that has irked them for years.
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The building is where the city of Jacksonville expects to open its Jacksonville Small and Emerging Business center — known as JSEB — in May.
Recently, a sign was placed at the front of the building. The sign, residents say, was the latest example of the city’s not operating in good faith about its plans for Brentwood as well as other predominantly Black neighborhoods.
The Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association — which includes Brentwood — wants the 1,740-square-foot property to become a community center.
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“We knew nothing” about the business center, says Lydia Bell, president of the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association. “They (are) making all these decisions Downtown without our input. We used to get planning hearing notices. We got planning notices about the crematoriums — two of them. And, we went to that meeting. … Here in Jacksonville, they don’t listen to the constituents in Brentwood.”
Bell says the city has routinely ignored the desires and voices of Brentwood residents when it built a new Medical Examiner’s Office on Davis Street; the Sulzbacher Center moved its headquarters to Springfield Street; and the liquor store fight arose.
Robert Flournoy is a plumber who was a JSEB-certified minority business owner for years.
He is also the president of the Magnolia Gardens Community Development Corp. Though he does not live in Brentwood, he stands in solidarity with the residents.
Flornoy says Jacksonville’s Black communities, like Brentwood and Magnolia Gardens on the other side of Interstate 95, have been ignored by multiple mayoral administrations of both political parties.
“We are being disenfranchised,” Flornoy says. “They are coming in and they are letting these developers come in and do as they will in our community. And, we don’t want that. We want to be able to have a say about what goes on in our community. We are taxpayers and have been paying taxes for a very long time.”
Local activist Wells Todd took it a step further. He connected the lack of engagement between local government as a reverberation of redlining. Todd extended his right arm and pointed at the Interstate as proof of his point.
Interstate 95 and Interstate 10 cleaved predominantly Black neighborhoods like North Riverside, Brentwood, Durkeeville and LaVilla.
“We have to be clear: This is a systemic racist problem,” Todd said. “It’s a systemic racist issue. They are treating us like kids because they still don’t believe we are equal. That’s where the false ideology of white supremacy comes from. To say this building is going to be used for whatever they say they want to use it for is telling us ‘We are not intelligent enough to choose what comes into the community.’”
The history in Brentwood
The strife over the Brentwood property has been brewing for years.
A St. Johns County convenience store owner bought the vacant property in 2019 for $150,000 with the intention to develop it into a liquor store. Sometime between the purchase and the grand opening, a charter school opened next door.
Residents were adamantly opposed to the liquor store, especially near the school, and the city wound up buying the property for $1.8 million in 2023.
At the time, residents believed they would have some influence on how the property was used. That’s what Bell thought when she left a town hall at City Hall in May 2023 as well as another town hall in August 2023.
During the May meeting, less than 24 hours before she won the mayoral race, Deegan said: “Clearly, the community should have been notified” about plans for the property. “Those are things that need to be rectified.”
During the later town hall, Deegan and City Council member Ju’Coby Pittman met with hundreds of people inside the Legends Center in the Sherwood community — the first time in many years the sitting mayor had visited Northwest Jacksonville to listen to community insight.
Pittman promised that August that the community would have input into the future of the Golfair property. Deegan committed to the audience that she would ensure a liquor store would not open at the location, but she did not go further.
In a statement to Jacksonville Today, the city explained why the site worked best as a workforce development center.
The city said the decision was based on “the large number of small businesses in the area and the opportunity to accelerate economic growth and job opportunities for Brentwood.”
The city said it is open to explore how the building could be utilized outside of JSEB activities.
City officials state that the size of the Golfair property — about one-tenth of what the city prefers for a community center — as well as the proximity of the Brentwood Branch of the Jacksonville Public Library were among the factors it considered.
Some speakers Friday were frustrated because they believed the Deegan administration would be different from some of the previous promises politicos made to Black communities and residents.
While there may not be much that can be done to thwart the opening of the new Medical Examiner’s Office, Brentwood residents are speaking out about the morgue and JSEB building together to highlight their annoyance at the current administration’s community engagement.
“The same way we had to get out here and stop that liquor store, we are prepared to picket this store, again, until they have a meeting with us, so we can have a discussion,” Bell says. “They know what it is, but we don’t know what it is.”
