Durkeeville

The following post was written by Amani Francis who, along with Terri Staten, is working to get a historic desingation for Durkeeville

Our meeting with Mr. McEachen went well. Our first step is to set up a meeting with our councilwoman, Gwen Yeats. I called her office on Friday and I’m waiting for a return call. I’ll call her again this afternoon if I don’t hear back from her soon. Hopefully we can convince her to take our motion to the city council to have Durkeeville declared historic. If she doesn’t agree to help, we will have to do it ourselves.

After that step, we will have to call a neighborhood town hall meeting and inform them of what we’re trying to do, as well as explain to them how that will effect them – especially when it comes to taxes (the elderly people may be concerned about this, as well as others who live on fixed incomes). After that, ballots will go out to residents. They will have to vote on whether or not they want the historic designation. If we get a large enough percentage of votes, then the council will approve a local historic designation for Durkeeville.

We also met with the ladies of AKA who own the large AKA house at 8th and I-95. They are going to help us by reminding their neighborhood residents (they said about 50 AKA’s reside in Durkeeville) to vote for the historic designation. They actually do their own African American historic tours of Jacksonville and they have a historical society faction of the sorority. Anyway, they were extremely helpful and they want to help in any way that they can. All in all, Friday was very productive for us. We’re quite hopeful about the outcome.

Mr. McEachen stressed that it may be a challenge and it may also be seen a controversial by Councilwoman Yeats, but Terri’s dad knows her and she is going to get him to speak with her if she won’t agree to meet with us right away. We’re hopeful that she will be supportive though. I don’t really see why this is controversial. It seems to me that people should want their neighborhood to be the best that it can be. We’ll see though.


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 4:00 am and is filed under Durkeeville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.