JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. — For some beaches residents, the question of whether the Atlantic, Jacksonville, and Neptune beaches should form their own county separate from Duval is a complex one without a clear answer.
“It’d be tricky separating everything, getting your own police department – or, we have our own - fire department, things like that,” Atlantic Beach resident Mary Cloutier acknowledged Tuesday.
That complexity is shown in the results of a new University of North Florida public opinion poll, which found Duval voters deadlocked on the debate, with 48% for the separation of the beaches and Duval and 48% against.
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However, Jacksonville City Councilman Rory Diamond, who represents Jacksonville’s beaches communities, says those results may be unreliable, skewed by the opinions of voters not living in or representing the beaches cities at large.
“Jacksonville says [they’re] 50-50 but the beaches would love to be gone,” Diamond argued Tuesday. “There’s a huge pipeline of taxpayer cash that comes here to Downtown [Jacksonville], and the people at the beaches get no benefit from it. They don’t want skyways to nowhere, they don’t care about all this stuff. But they have to pay for it. So, if the beaches weren’t part of Jacksonville, they’d have the best school district in the country, they would have the lowest taxes and high-quality city services, it’d be great.”
In a statement sent to Action News Jax, however, Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan’s office said, “Consolidated government has worked for our community since 1968. This idea has come up many times over the years, yet no one has been able to truly show how it would make sense for any of the communities involved.”
Nonetheless, many residents Action News Jax spoke with at the beaches Tuesday said they feel it could be time for a change.
“We have our interests. We’re better able to develop our own solutions to the problems,” argued beaches resident John Hayes.
“I really did always think that the beaches was a different county than Duval county,” beaches native Tara Anthony-Robertson added. “But once I moved Downtown, I saw that it was all Duval county. So, I would be for [it.]”
Diamond told Action News Jax that separation would require a majority of beaches voters to approve the measure. Then it would also need approval from the state legislature.
Action News Jax reached out to Neptune Beach and Atlantic Beach leaders about their thoughts on such a split, but has yet to hear back.
Jacksonville Beach Mayor Chris Hoffman declined to comment at this time.
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