Jacksonville Transportation Authority board members pushed for real remedies, not just band-aids, Wednesday at the agency’s first board meeting since it announced sweeping layoffs.
“What we can’t do is go to the citizen and say you paid all this gas tax and we can’t manage ourselves, so we’re going to take the money and have you fix the problem,” board member Daniel Vallencourt said. “We have to know several things: what happened and how it gets solved.”
The board voted unanimously to approve a motion proposed by the Jacksonville City Council to keep the cash-strapped agency funded as it faces a $39 million budget shortfall.
The deal
Under the proposal introduced in council Tuesday night, JTA would get a $30 million, zero-interest loan that doesn’t have to be paid back until 2037. The money would come from unspent local option gas tax funds. Drivers pay that tax every time they fill up, and the fund has grown to about $47 million…