JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Action News Jax Investigates uncovered a plan to populate the JTA NAVI using the taxpayers’ dime. The NAVI is JTA’s pseudo-autonomous downtown shuttle launched this summer.
Investigator Emily Turner has been covering the embattled $66-million-dollar project for more than a year, exposing everything from cost overruns to safety concerns.
Now, she’s found JTA employees have been paid to ride the shuttles, raising new questions about their already low ridership numbers.
Turner found employees spent working hours riding around the NAVI rather than at their desks doing their actual job. The taxpayer covered the cost while increasing JTA’s reported ridership numbers. JTA calls it an “ambassador” program. Critics call it far worse.
The Jacksonville Transportation Authority says the NAVI is the transportation of the future. City councilman Rory Diamond doesn’t. “This thing cost $65 million,” he says, “you could do 6.5 million Uber or taxi rides for that. We’ve got to pull the plug.”
Action News Jax reached out to each DOGE committee member for an interview. Only Diamond agreed. Ron Salem, the chair, initially signed up but cancelled shortly after until he could “review all the information.”
When we informed Diamond of an August 4th internal JTA email, he was shocked. It’s addressed to a group of JTA employees, setting up a calendar and asking them to “sign up and ride (the NAVI) tomorrow and beyond” because “we are in dire need of riders. [frownie face emoji.]”
At that point, all the way up until October 1st, the NAVI was still free.
Diamond says, “I was so disappointed. I mean, this is already a boondoggle. Everyone knows I don’t like it, but to then come along and fluff and fake the numbers, it’s just an outrage. People should be really mad about this.”
We reached out to JTA to explain the employee ridership program. They sent this statement: “At no time did the Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) recruit employees to “boost ridership.” During peak hours, a limited number of JTA employees serve as NAVI ambassadors to help riders become familiar with the service and technology, and to gather feedback to inform future updates and enhancements."
Yet JTA stated in a document sent to city council members that the employee ridership numbers were included in their daily passenger count.
Turner requested the SharePoint calendar that internal email referenced- and did the math. The calendar starts in August and ends the day JTA received Action News’ public records request for it, covering 50 days of operation.
The records revealed more than 50 employees, consultants and interns signed up to ride at least one two-and-a-half-hour shift. Some signed up for more than a dozen.
Each of those shifts counts as at least one rider, so more than 330 of JTA’s reported numbers are their own people working a shift. That averages to six of its 89 riders a day during the time period in question, almost seven percent of its reported numbers.
While that may not seem like a lot, taxpayers did pay a lot for them to ride it. Turner requested the salary of one employee riding one of the most shifts. Based on the hourly break down of his almost 150 thousand dollar salary-- ($149,497.92) … tax payers shelled out more than 3 thousand dollars ($3114.40) for him to ride around the Bay Street Corridor for the equivalent of an entire work week (40 hours.)
Each of the fifty employees is paid at a different rate and rode a different number of shifts, but cumulatively they spent more than 840 taxpayer funded hours riding the NAVI. However it’s sliced, it totals in the thousands, if not far more for riding a shuttle.
“This is just insane,” Diamond says, “you mean 800 hours? They’re supposed to be making sure the busses work and that people can get to work and get to school on time, not doing this kind of stuff.”
JTA did not sit down for an interview with us, but they did reach out to council members after Turner’s email for interviews went out. Their email saying, “I understand you may have received a media inquiry regarding the NAVI service and our ridership numbers.”
In that email, JTA admits the average ridership is only about 89 people a day, far fewer than the 250- 300 they promised when pitching the project and something FDOT engineers called into question years ago.
The email does say JTA hopes to hit that target number by 2035. Duval DOGE takes on the NAVI and JTA at its meeting Tuesday to answer the list of 17 questions Diamond presented for them to defend the project.
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