JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Some Brentwood residents are incensed over the construction of a huge city morgue and forensic lab in their neighborhood, claiming the city moved the project forward in secret.
On Thursday, that group of residents filed a lawsuit seeking damages.
Construction on the new mortuary facility is well underway. It’s located on North Davis Street, near the intersection of Golfair Blvd. and I-95, and will be about 50,000 square feet.
A city spokesperson told News4JAX the location for the new morgue was chosen years ago, but residents said the city violated their rights by not informing of them of the project until after construction began in 2023.
For years, Jacksonville city leaders have been planning to replace the aging medical examiner’s office in downtown Jacksonville. At one point, the I-TEAM reported it was so overcrowded, a body had to be placed on the floor.
READ | New $62 million medical examiner’s office proposed to help deal with overcrowding issues
A city spokesperson told News4JAX the site in the Brentwood neighborhood was chosen for the new morgue by 2016 out of 25 other potential city-owned sites, and it fit the necessary criteria.
However, it’s not clear what that process looked like.
Residents say they didn’t know about the morgue construction until it was too late.
“Our elected officials who have chosen to break every law in the book to place a 300-body, medical examiner’s office and a forensic lab in our neighborhood without our knowledge,” Lydia Bell, who’s the president of the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association, said.
An emergency ordinance appropriating nearly $63 million for the project was introduced to City Council last March. Two weeks later, it was approved unanimously.
“The bill that’s drafted says the nature of the emergency is that the existing facility is outdated and overburdened,” Phillip Peterson with the Council Auditor’s Office said at a City Council meeting meeting last April.
At that same meeting, Brian Hughes with the mayor’s office said, “The emergency also is because the construction is ready to go.” He noted the project was part of an approved capital improvement plan and that costs were only going up.
Groundbreaking was in mid-May, about a month after the emergency funding was approved.
A few weeks later, a proposal to rezone the property was introduced to City Council, and the city said residents were notified about that proposal, as required.
“They started building on land that was not zoned for a morgue,” Bell said.
At a zoning committee meeting in September, city staff said the site’s zoning as general commercial community was okay for the construction of the morgue, but they sought to change it to zoning for public buildings, which they said is preferred for government-owned sites.
The city’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Brittany Norris addressed the costs already expended on the project at a City Council zoning committee meeting in September.
“The city so far has invested about $5 million into this project. To halt the project or to demobilize could cost us up to $10 million or more,” Norris said. “It would also put the medical examiner’s office five years behind in this process of creating a new facility to meet the demand of northeast Florida.”
But resident Deloris Robinson did not hesitate to respond to Norris during that meeting.
“The amount of money that you spent, you shouldn’t have, but you did,” Robinson said. “And you want to act like it’s our fault that you spent the money.”
Robinson and Bell are among the Brentwood residents suing.
In the lawsuit, they say they should have been notified about the choice to build the morgue in their neighborhood under the city’s Neighborhood Bill of Rights, which requires neighborhoods to have “The opportunity to participate in the design of publicly‐funded projects within or adjacent to the neighborhood, including the opportunity early in the planning process to express neighborhood preferences about choice of location, materials, orientation, size, land use intensity, and other features.”
A city spokesperson told News4JAX they cannot comment on pending litigation.