Neighbors fought Jacksonville over liquor store; now they’re fighting the placement of city morgue

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A community in Brentwood is still at odds with the City of Jacksonville. It has to do with land across the street from a school.

The city purchased the land for $1.8 million to stop a liquor store from opening.

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Now, neighbors are back to protest the city’s plan to build a new Medical Examiner’s Office right behind it.

Action News Jax’s Nick Gibson spoke with a resident who said enough is enough.

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“It’s time for our elected officials to do the right thing,” Lydia Bell said.

Bell lives in Metro Gardens, a small neighborhood in the Brentwood area where families live, work, and go to school.

She is one of a team of residents who blocked a liquor store set to open right across the street from a local school. They ended up getting the City of Jacksonville to buy the land and stop the owner from selling liquor near their homes and schools.

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Now, the neighborhood has a different worry. A new Medical Examiner’s Office is being built on the land. It’s set to be completed in the spring of 2025.

“If we did not want a liquor store in the community,” Bell said, “what would make them think we would be satisfied with a 300-body morgue?”

Now, Bell and her team of residents are fighting the city to stop the morgue from being built in their neighborhood. Gibson asked if she was OK with taxpayer dollars being spent again, this time to move the morgue.

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“When you say taxpayers, that’s my money too,” she said. “When you do the right thing, you don’t have to spend $1.8 million for something that should’ve never been here in the beginning.”

Gibson reached out to Jacksonville City Councilmember at large Matt Carlucci to find out if the residents can have an impact.

“I wasn’t that much aware of this until folks started coming up complaining about the liquor store and they brought up the morgue,” he said.

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He said with construction already starting, he believes it’s too late to think of other options.

“This one would be a hard one to undo. It would cost the city millions, more than $5 million, to somehow back out of it,” Carlucci said.

The current Medical Examiner’s Office is on Jefferson Street in downtown Jacksonville. Carlucci said the office needs to move.

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“Our previous city morgue was not big enough and that’s a really bad problem to have,” Carlucci said.

As for Bell, she said she will battle with city leaders until the morgue is moved.

“To put a morgue in a neighborhood, who does that?” she said.

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