Published on January 6, 2025 at 3:19 pm
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Republican City Councilman Matt Carlucci is starting the year with a policy scheme intended to rightsize the city budget.
But even having revised his pitch to increase garbage fees, the Carlucci plan still promises to disproportionately impact homeowners of modest means at the expense of others, illustrating a fallacy in thinking that goes back decades in this city with no immediate end on the horizon.
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In other words, it’s another sucker punch to the middle class and a gift to the donor class that communicates with council ex parte rather than in slim public comment segments. A Duval tradition.
The Carlucci fee hike proposes raising the fee from the current $12.65 a month to $30.40 a month, which will certainly be good news to the politically connected haulers given the deals to remove locals’ garbage.
“We cannot continue down this path of mounting debt,” said Carlucci in a press release last week. “These bills offer a sustainable solution to ensure our solid-waste services are adequately funded while addressing the needs of our most vulnerable residents.”
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The quote Carlucci gave media is flush with fiscal rectitude, but conveniently elides details such as those reported by Action News last year that draw a direct connection between personal relationships and political donations and council members’ votes to give Meridian, which handles more than half the city, more money last year.
It also sidesteps the question of just bringing these services in house if the current crony capitalist model doesn’t work fiscally for taxpayers. Why should the most cash burdened taxpayers subsidize a middleman that can’t work within budget? Isn’t that worth a study with new data reflecting the current climate?
Additionally: Why not pass the cost to JWB and other developers scooping up properties to turn owner-occupied neighborhoods into renter sectors?
Also, note the phrase “most vulnerable residents.”
That’s a term of art used by city leaders of a patrician mindset, along the lines of “underserved communities” and “servant leadership” that camouflages a ritualized soaking of a middle class hammered by inflation spiking costs of living even as they don’t find wages to match. Legacy politicians like Carlucci are so out of touch that they think people fall for it.
His proposed exemption to the fee hike would apply to just a thin layer of homeowners, “whose gross household income is at or below 150% of the current year Federal Poverty Level.”
For one person, the federal poverty level is just over $15,000 at this writing. For two: just over $20,000.
One and a half times that is not much of an exemption. While there may be some people who can afford to own a home at that income level, the Carlucci plan does nothing for the lower-middle-class and middle-class homeowners who once thrived in Jacksonville but are being squeezed out by insurance rate spikes, a property tax valuation formula that disproportionately affects lower-valued homes while cutting breaks for more expensive properties, and sales taxes that are among the highest in the state.
Those are the same working stiffs who are compelled to fund billionaire boondoggles, such as the stadium deal that benefits the Khan family disproportionately, pouring in nearly a billion dollars. Soon after the council overwhelmingly approved what will be the biggest capital spend of the century locally (move over, courthouse), I wrote this:
“The City Council and the mayor laughed off the idea of a stadium-spending ballot referendum, which likely would have happened in November after more losses in what appears to be another throwaway year for the worst NFL owner since hapless Hugh Culverhouse. And it’s arguable the public would have had no choice either when it comes to financing the stadium scheme. None of that would matter much if money weren’t finite and if one policy choice didn’t foreclose others.”
We’ve seen those words proven true in recent months. The city’s feckless enforcement of the state homeless camping ban is one example, given the ever increasing preponderance of the unhoused on sidewalks, streets, and parks in neighborhoods like Avondale, which didn’t have the problem before Donna Deegan took office.
And we’re seeing it now in Carlucci’s pass-the-buck solution to the garbage crisis, a regressive tax that will affect those hardworking people who played by the rules but don’t have generational wealth to lean on, folks in modest homes living modest lives check to check, hoping to God that the next great city reform doesn’t capsize their fiscal house of cards.
Of course, Carlucci doesn’t have to worry about that. Recall that he was recently on Shad Khan’s yacht for the holiday celebration party.
Though he admitted to the Times-Union that the “optics weren’t the greatest in the world,” he had a salient reason for being there.
“I think if I turned it down, my wife would have been very disappointed,” he said.
Ironically enough, many people’s wives (and husbands) will be “very disappointed” by giving the city a couple hundred more dollars this year if Carlucci’s plan to hose the middle class with fee increases comes to fruition.
