job corps building

Jewish Center / Job Corps building

After months of protest and hand-wringing by Springfield residents, River Regions and the City have finally come to a deal that does not involve the historic Jewish Center/Job Corps building in Springfield. The Daily Record reported this today in their article “City, River Region changing plans“:

After spending well over a year wrangling over the old Job Corps building in Springfield, the City has agreed to help River Region fund an expansion project of their current facility rather than relocate to the Springfield building, a move vehemently opposed by many Springfield residents and business owners.

River Regions was actually awarded the building by the government agency, GSA, which comes as a surprise to me. Did anyone else know this? I just checked the SPAR message board and the Metro Jacksonville message board, and no one has posted on this huge story.

River Regions decided not to move to the Job Corp building because the city refused to grant the permits River Regions needed to operate their drug rehabilitation center. Instead the City and River Regions have decided to expand on the current location. Now River Regions is looking to the city to help pay the 1.2 million dollars in property taxes that are due on the Jewsih Center building.

I have to wonder why they are looking for the city’s help with paying their property taxes. Shouldn’t they have set this money aside already? I also have to wonder why it took so long to come to the obvious solution of expanding on the current location.

Springfield residents and River Regions spent months waiting for the city to find an alternate site, and now they end up expaning their current location? It seems to me that would have been the first consideration.

tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Springfield. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.