J20/20 looks for direction

Jacksonville Progress

May 06, 2008 07:56 am

— By Kelly Young
kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com
Despite months of seeming inactivity, the Jacksonville 20/20 community improvement initiative is still alive-and-well, said Mayor Robert Haberle.
While the group’s leadership committee, compromised of the chairpersons from each of J20/20’s 12 subcommittees, has not officially met since Dec. 13 of last year, Haberle said some of the smaller groups have continued to meet and work towards the effort’s goals.
“We are currently looking for a Saturday in June when we can all get together and discuss our alternatives regarding what direction we want to go in from here,” Haberle said. “A number of the leaders of the group have been having conversations in the past few months, but we haven’t all been able to get together and get on the same page for a while.”
The leadership of the initiative, Haberle and Lon Morris College President Miles McCall, decided at J20/20’s last meeting to take a few months off, and to regroup in March — but they have been unable to establish a mutually acceptable meeting time since that hiatus.
According to Haberle, some of the group’s subcommittees have regrettably stopped meeting and have ceased to make progress on their particular areas of focus.
“There are some of the committees that have slowed down and ground to a halt, but some are still going strong. For example, Phil and Marlene Jowell — Phil is the head of the environment committee — have been attending all kinds of conferences and meetings, and have gathered a lot of great ideas on how we can increase the environmental appeal of the Jacksonville community,” he said. “In order to get everyone involved again, we just need to get everyone back together and create a larger vision for the project.”
Haberle said one of the action items J20/20 will be working on is the possible creation of a master plan for the city of Jacksonville.
“This is something that several of us are interested in doing, so it’s just a matter of how we want to go about doing it. I think we will be aiming toward a reasonably comprehensive, but changeable, document,” Haberle said.
According to the mayor, between 60 and 100 community members are still participating in the project which began 14 months ago.
“We’ve reached the point where we have compiled all the information we could need, now it’s time to turn it into something,” he said. “I’m not worried about Jacksonville 20/20 dying; we are intent on seeing an end product come through out of this; we just need to iron out a direction and go from there.”