***** The key to bringing an NFL team to town was a new stadium.
The city agreed to renovate the old Gator Bowl, transforming it into an NFL-quality facility. After making this pledge, the first thing the city did was divest itself of any project oversight. A 1993 lease agreement between the city and the Jacksonville Jaguars, Inc. (then known as Touchdown Jacksonville) gave the Jaguars "the exclusive and unconditional right to control the project site, and to select and enter into contracts with any and all contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, vendors ... or individuals."
The agreement allowed the Jaguars to make all decisions on the renovation, and only obligated the city to finance it.
Unfortunately, as the project progressed, the city's burden kept growing. In April 1990, the Jaguars promised an NFL-quality stadium for between $20 million and $50 million. In November 1990, they said it would take $60 million -- "Not a nickel more," according to Jags partner Tom Petway. By March 1993, Jags President David Selden said the cost would be closer to $80 million. Three months later, Jaguars majority owner Wayne Weaver said it would be $100 million.
The final lease agreement put the price tag at $121 million, in a deal that obligated the city to spend an additional $29 million on improvements around the stadium, including parking and a practice field. But the lease was soon amended, in February 1995, increasing the base contract cost to $124 million. A third amendment hiked it to $144 million. (City bonds sold to finance the project added another $200 million in interest payments.) The Jaguars agreed to pay just $20 million of this, in payments spread out over 30 years.
The taxpaying public had reason to wonder how, and how wisely, their hard-earned dollars were spent -- not least because the team decided to give the lucrative project to a company owned by an early Jaguars partner. Preston Haskell's The Haskell Company (as part of the joint venture Haskell/Huber, Hunt & Nichols) won the contract without submitting a competitive bid, even though state law requires taxpayer-financed projects exceeding $200,000 to be publicly bid. (City law requires competitive bids for any project over $12,000.) State law also requires design-build firms like Haskell to provide a guaranteed maximum price when working on taxpayer-financed projects -- something that clearly didn't happen.
Haskell was also legally prohibited by both state and local law from working on the project. Florida Statute 287-057 (18) prohibits a person involved in the drafting of a project to later receive a contract for that project. State law is echoed by Jacksonville ordinance 89-1087, which was coincidentally included in the 25 boxes of data. Signed by then-Council President Eric Smith and Mayor Ed Austin, the ordinance states, "A design criteria professional who has been selected to prepare the design criteria package shall not be eligible to render services under a design-build contract executed pursuant to the design criteria package." Since Preston Haskell, as a Jaguars partner, was involved in the design and cost estimates of the Gator Bowl renovation starting in 1990, the awarding of the renovation contract to his company violated both the state statute and the city ordinance.
The dubious nature of the deal gave Jacksonville residents a reason to be curious about the renovation contract. But they also had a right to see the document, according to Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes, which governs public records. The lease agreement between the city and the Jaguars acknowledged this right, guaranteeing the city and its taxpayers "reasonable access to all renovation project information, including but not limited to financial, technical and computer data."
Despite that "guarantee," when Folio Weekly requested a copy of the contract in March 2004, the city refused. Initially, city procurement officials said they couldn't find the document. They later changed their story, saying that since the Jaguars and the Haskell Company were both private entities, the agreement between them was also private: Neither taxpayers nor city officials were entitled to see it.
