Daily Record Financial News &
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Vol. 103, No. 033 • Three Sections
35¢ www.jaxdailyrecord.com
Ready to help neighborhoods Community Foundation will study how to help
By David Chapman Staff Writer
The Community Foundation of Northeast Florida has provided more than $300 million to area programs and services since the 1960s. Next year, it plans to expand its work to support an issue needing more help: Jacksonville’s neighborhoods. The well-known philanthropic organization has hosted more than a dozen focus groups of
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donors and organizations in the past several months to determine issues within the community. “Throughout every conversation, the neighborhood thread came out,” said Nina Waters, Community Foundation president. The message was enough that the foundation’s board recently unanimously approved a push to further support Jacksonville neighborhoods. Waters said with a topic like neighborhoods, assistance could
be as narrow as helping neighborhood associations or as broad as supporting community organizing. However, details on how the organization will do so are scarce. “Now we have to dig deeper,” said Waters. That means first determining what agencies and organizations already are doing for neighborhoods and then finding a way to complement that work. Waters said she expects that effort to take six to eight months.
Board Chair Bill Brinton said it’s a topic he cares deeply about and is happy the foundation decided to pursue it. He attended one of the focus groups to listen, but declined to provide details. It isn’t the first time the Community Foundation has focused on an issue. More than a decade ago, it decided to tackle the education achievement gap through its Quality Education for All fund. Grants were administered Community continued on Page A-3
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Don’ t be distracted JTA’s social media campaign to keep drivers focused By Max Marbut Staff Writer At any given daylight moment, about 660,000 Americans are using a cellphone or other electronic device while driving. That’s according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Each day in the U.S., more than nine people are killed and nearly 1,200 are injured in vehicle accidents involving a distracted driver, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the local level, many traffic mishaps involving distracted drivers are occurring between private vehicles and buses operated by the Jacksonville Transportation Authority. From February through July, 121 collisions occurred with buses, many attributable to distracted driving. That’s a significant increase from 78 incidents reported in
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Ownership of the Westside Industrial Park expanded its holdings in West Jacksonville and expects to file plans soon for a speculative multitenant building. Atlanta-based Pattillo Industrial Real Estate, through Imeson Industrial Park Land LLC, paid $6.73 million for 115 acres along Imeson Road, adjacent to the 960acre Westside Industrial Park. That boosts its overall Jacksonville property holdings to more than 1,400 acres. It also owns the 362-acre NorthPoint Industrial Park. The Imeson Road land was sold in November by Greenfield Partners LLC, which purchased the site when it bought Liberty Property Trust’s Jacksonville property portfolio in late 2013. Most of Liberty Property Trust’s holdings were office buildings in Southside. The vacant Imeson Road land is zoned for light industrial use. Pattillo Vice President Peter Anderson said Tuesday about 80 of the 115 acres can be developed. The company plans three or four buildings totaling up to Anderson 1.3 million square feet of space. Anderson said he hopes to start seeking approvals for a 150,000-square-foot building within 30 days. Pattillo buys and develops industrial land and buildings throughout the Southeast United States. It also builds structures to suit for tenants. Anderson is in charge of acquisitions and build-to-suits in Florida and the Atlantic coastal markets. “Liberty Property did a nice job in preparing that property for development,” Anderson said.
Special to the Daily Record
Westside park adds land, plans building
Statistics don’t work. The idea was to create a visual component that social promoters would post to their followers. John Ream Developer of JTA campaign
the same period in 2014, said JTA spokeswoman Leigh Ann Rassler. “We had one Tuesday morning,” she said. “Somebody bumped into the back of a bus.” The authority provides 2,000 bus hours of service daily along 34 routes. Buses cover 9 million miles each year and often are stopped in the travel lanes of busy
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streets to pick up and drop off passengers. That makes a bus a prime target for a driver who isn’t paying complete attention to what’s in front of their vehicle. In an effort to reduce the number of mishaps between distracted motorists and buses, JTA commissioned a local marketing firm to develop a social media campaign to make people aware of the danger associated with distracted driving. The campaign also will encourage motorists to pay attention to driving instead of their cellphones. John Ream, president of The Connect Agency, said social media was selected as the best way to reach people who might be prone to texting while driving. Statistics published by the CDC in the 2013 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey indicated 31 percent of drivers ages 18-64 surveyed said they had read or sent text Distracted continued on Page A-3
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