RiverTown Church, a church planted in 2007 in Jacksonville's Southside, relocated to San Pablo Road in 2019 as we acquired and moved to our permanent home as a church.
Over the last 5 1/2 years, the church has come together to bring new life to our campus through significant capital investment to create environments that welcome people as they hear / respond to the good news of Jesus. We have sent our best out as missionaries, and have sought to love, serve and share hope with our community.

Since 2019, RiverTown has seen God work in exciting ways, but we have also been difficult (especially the last two years). Navigating and overcoming the oppressive and suffocating construction on San Pablo has been in a word ... brutal. Revenue, attendance and momentum have all been adversely affected during this time.

While the JTA did an amazing job on the completion of the road, there was both unintended collateral effects  to our church family and unintended collateral damage to our church property. San Pablo Road looks amazing (T H A N K   Y O U ! ), but there is more work to be done to finish the job.

We detail below some of the negative effects of this period of road construction. It is our belief that a $20 million dollar plus road construction project should include the clean up and repairs to the inherent and unintended damages to property along San Pablo Road. We would also like to explore the possibility of financial compensation due to the clear and devastating revenue loss due to the construction.

The front parking lot has been damaged beyond usability over the last two years. Throughout the construction project, RiverTown's front parking lot was used as a staging area for construction vehicles, excavators, dump trucks, etc. The pictures below illustrate the use of the parking lot for many construction vehicles for the San Pablo Road Project over the last two years. These vehicles clearly damaged and trashed our front parking lot to the point of it no longer being usable.

Due to the aforementioned use of RiverTown's parking lot / property for staging of construction vehicles, significant damage has been done to our parking lot, landscaping and uplighting. While moderate patching has been done to some of the damaged parking lot, even the patches are uneven, covered with pebbles / rocks, and unsafe for walking for people attending our church. The parking lot is unsafe and unwalkable, in addition to.now being a hideous eyesore detracting and deflecting people from visiting our campus.

While the damage to the driveway and the back parking lot is SIGNIFICANTLY AND SUBSTANTIVELY LESS, there are still "tire marks" from large trucks and some damage as the trucks would on occasion go to the back of our property to turn around. 

As you can see, there was close to a 30% drop in both donation revenue and Sunday worship attendance.
RiverTown, though sending out missionaries to Africa in January and having a strong community, has significantly suffered in terms of money and momentum since the difficult construction process began. This unintended collateral damage was both unintentional on the part of the JTA and suffocating construction process.