Riverside, Brooklyn businesses hopeful a JSO move to Florida Blue building will give them a boost

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is looking to move hundreds of employees from their downtown offices at the Police Memorial Building to the Florida Blue building in Riverside.

JSO has started to negotiate a lease for the office space.

JSO said about 750 employees work at its current downtown headquarters daily, and once a new location has been solidified, all of those employees would be expected to make the move to the new building.

Jose Marin owns Arepa Please, a South American restaurant located just steps from the Florida Blue building. Marin said business has been coming back since the pandemic when they went from around 200 lunch customers a day to just six customers a day.

“We just decided that we weren’t closing and yeah, I think that was the right decision to make,” he said. “We still don’t have the same amount of people at lunch, but they’re coming back slowly. There are a lot of offices that are starting to come back slowly. They start with two days a week and now they’re like three days every week.”

Marin said he would welcome an influx of potential JSO customers.

Nearby Plenti restaurant owner Dean Nixon said the same.

“We love it, yeah, highly encouraged,” Nixon said. “We’re a fast-causal, coastal theme concept, so we do some poke, we do cooked seafood, chicken, grain bowls, salads, Acai, smoothies.”

For those hoping for a downtown resurgence, the news is not great.

People at one downtown deli didn’t want to go on camera but said that in 10 years of business, they haven’t seen the downtown growth they were hoping for and losing its JSO customer base would hurt.

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If JSO built a new Police Memorial Building, it would cost as much as $470 million to fund, so the sheriff’s office believes the move is the best financial decision, especially since the cost to lease the office space dropped significantly since the pandemic.

JSO said it’s too soon to say when the office move might happen.