As part of our continuing reporting on the Jacksonville Riverfront Alliance, we’ve been trying to get answers from its interim director, Linzee Ott, about transparency, procurement and how this new public-private partnership will operate. We emailed Ott directly. We submitted essentially the same question when she appeared on First Coast Connect. It wasn’t addressed during the program. We even went to the downtown address publicly listed for the Riverfront Alliance—only to find a mailbox at a UPS Store rather than a conventional JRA office.

So while we waited for answers, we looked more closely at the person the Alliance hired as its first employee to build the organization from the ground up. That examination led somewhere larger than Ott. It led into the unusually close network connecting Jacksonville’s downtown developers, private advocacy organizations, public regulators and now another taxpayer-supported nonprofit.

Ultimately, that’s what this story is about: who gets a meaningful voice when private development interests and public authority increasingly occupy the same space—and who protects the interests of everyone who isn’t sitting at that table?

From government to downtown development

Ott studied political science and international affairs at Florida State University and built much of her early professional career around government. She worked in legislative affairs during Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration, moved into governmental affairs with The Fiorentino Group—a lobbying firm whose clients included the City of Jacksonville—and then spent nearly eight years working for Republican State Attorney Melissa Nelson.

That background gave Ott considerable experience in government, policy, community relations and navigating public institutions. What it did not give her was a conventional professional background in real-estate development.

When the City of Jacksonville appointed Ott to the Downtown Development Review Board in 2022, she wasn’t a developer, architect, professional planner, engineer or real-estate executive. She worked in community engagement at the State Attorney’s Office. Ott has said her volunteer involvement with the San Marco Preservation Society sparked her interest in urban planning and design, which she pursued through independent education.

That background differed significantly from the technical credentials represented elsewhere on DDRB, where members have included architects, certified planners, developers and professionals whose careers center directly on real estate, planning and design. But Ott moved up quickly. By late 2022, she was already vice chair.

Thirteen days that changed the equation

On July 11, 2024, DDRB elected Ott chair. Just 13 days later, on July 24, Build Up Downtown announced that it had hired Ott as its new CEO.

There was another important distinction: Ott became Build Up Downtown’s first CEO. Before her, the organization had been led by Executive Director Allan DeVault, along with Director of Development Laura Edgecombe. Build Up Downtown didn’t simply replace one executive director with another. It put Ott at the top of the organization with the CEO title.

But understanding what that title meant requires understanding who was above and around her.

What did “CEO” actually mean?

Build Up Downtown is a privately funded nonprofit established to advocate for and facilitate downtown development. Its leadership has included representatives of some of Jacksonville’s most significant downtown business and development interests, including Alex Sifakis of JWB Real Estate Capital, Bryan Moll of Gateway Jax, Billy Zeits of Corner Lot, Alan Cottrill of Avant Construction and representatives of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ real-estate operation.

These aren’t people who needed Ott to teach them how to develop real estate. They already possessed that expertise.And that makes Ott’s résumé more interesting, not less.

Ott didn’t bring decades of construction, architecture, development finance or large-scale real-estate experience to a board that lacked those things. The board already had those skills. What Ott brought was government. Her career centered much more heavily on legislative affairs, governmental affairs, community engagement, advocacy, institutional relationships and navigating public organizations.

By July 2024, she brought something else as well. She had spent more than two years learning the City of Jacksonville’s downtown development system from inside the regulatory structure itself. Thirteen days before Build Up Downtown made her its first CEO, she became chair of that regulatory board.

In a nonprofit corporation, a CEO manages the organization, but the board ultimately governs it. Alex Sifakis remained Build Up Downtown’s chairman. So it would be a mistake to imagine Ott arriving and telling executives involved in enormous real-estate projects how downtown development should work. They didn’t need her for that.

A more meaningful question is what particular expertise Ott added to an organization that already possessed enormous development expertise. The answer appears directly in her résumé: government, advocacy, institutional relationships and knowledge of Jacksonville’s public processes.

Regulator and advocate at the same time

That’s where the overlap becomes important. DDRB isn’t ceremonial. It exercises regulatory authority over downtown development. It reviews development and redevelopment applications for consistency with the Downtown Master Plan and applies downtown zoning and design standards. Those decisions can materially affect what gets built in downtown Jacksonville.

So within 13 days, Ott became both chair of the governmental board regulating downtown development and paid CEO of a private organization advocating for downtown development whose board and financial supporters included significant downtown development interests.

Eventually those worlds directly intersected. Ott abstained from DDRB consideration of projects involving companies financially supporting Build Up Downtown, including Gateway Jax’s Publix-anchored Pearl Square project. Those recusals addressed particular votes, but recusals don’t eliminate the broader structural issue.

For roughly 16 months, the chair of the City of Jacksonville’s downtown development regulatory board simultaneously served as the paid chief executive responsible for advancing the mission of a private development-advocacy organization governed and supported by companies actively pursuing downtown development.

There is no evidence those companies instructed Ott how to vote or that she improperly influenced a project. That’s not the point. The point is institutional independence.

Why independence matters

Developers absolutely belong in the downtown conversation. Jacksonville cannot rebuild downtown without developers willing to risk enormous amounts of private capital. Their knowledge of financing, construction costs, market demand and feasibility is indispensable.

But development interests are not synonymous with the public interest. That’s precisely why government has planning departments, regulatory boards, procurement requirements, ethics rules and public meetings. The City’s responsibility extends beyond getting projects built. It must consider what Jacksonville looks like after they’re built.

That means listening not only to the largest developers, but also architects, planners, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, skilled trades, competing developers, small businesses, neighborhood stakeholders and taxpayers. Those groups can see a project very differently.

A developer may understandably prioritize financing, density, project economics and return on investment. An architect may see design consequences. A contractor may see constructability. A competing business may see whether procurement is genuinely open. A planner may see how today’s decision affects the surrounding district 20 years from now. Residents may see traffic, accessibility, public space and quality of life. And taxpayers see something else: the bill.

That’s why government exists as something more than a partner to development. It represents the people who aren’t in the development deal.

The City has to live with what gets built

There’s another fundamental difference between public and private interests. A private developer can build a project, stabilize it, refinance it, sell it or move its capital somewhere else. Companies change ownership. Investment groups come and go. Executives change jobs.

Jacksonville doesn’t get to leave.

The City inherits the streets, infrastructure, traffic patterns, public spaces, maintenance obligations, incentive agreements and long-term consequences of the decisions made today. Taxpayers may be living with those decisions decades after the original developers have exited the project.

That’s why a healthy development system shouldn’t be anti-developer. It should be broader than the developers. The purpose of independent public oversight isn’t to obstruct development. It’s to make sure enthusiasm for getting a deal done doesn’t overwhelm the government’s obligation to consider what happens after the ribbon cutting.

And Ott wasn’t the first overlap

There’s also precedent. Ott’s predecessor as DDRB chair, Matt Brockelman, came primarily from government affairs rather than architecture or development. Brockelman worked for VyStar while serving on DDRB and stepped aside when VyStar interests created conflicts. But Brockelman also served on Build Up Downtown’s board.

That creates an unusual continuity. Build Up Downtown had the outgoing DDRB chairman serving on its board and then hired his successor as its first CEO just 13 days after she became DDRB chair.

That makes this larger than one person. It demonstrates just how interconnected Jacksonville’s private downtown advocacy network and its public regulatory structure have become.

Then Ott moved again

Ott left Build Up Downtown on November 4, 2025. Within months, she emerged as interim director of the Jacksonville Riverfront Alliance. And here we encounter another notable first: Ott was Build Up Downtown’s first CEO. Now she is JRA’s first hire.

The Downtown Investment Authority describes Ott as responsible for building JRA’s “operational architecture from the ground up.” That description fits the professional pattern. JRA didn’t hire a landscape architect, engineer or park-maintenance professional as its first employee. It hired someone whose career centered on government, advocacy, institutional relationships and systems-building.

And Ott remained DDRB chair. She moved from a private organization advocating for downtown development into a private organization preparing to participate in the management and programming of publicly owned downtown assets—without leaving the regulatory board overseeing downtown development.

Now follow the money

The Riverfront Alliance itself evolved from the Riverfront Parks Conservancy, incorporated in 2021 and renamed Jacksonville Riverfront Alliance in September 2025. Before that transformation, the Conservancy operated on a comparatively small scale. Its 2024 tax filing reported roughly $154,000 in annual revenue, $52,000 in expenses and $211,000 in assets.

The City had previously provided the organization $150,000 to assist with riverfront operations, maintenance, programming and access. Then the scale changed dramatically.

For FY2025-26, the City of Jacksonville placed $2.6 million into a designated Downtown Riverfront Parks contingency. Parks Director Daryl Joseph later explained to City Council that the original concept anticipated JRA essentially “taking over everything.”

That represented an enormous potential transformation—from a small nonprofit into an organization assuming broad responsibilities for major publicly owned riverfront parks. But JRA wasn’t ready to do that. Ott became its first employee, charged with building the organization’s operating infrastructure.

The City changed course

The City ultimately scaled the arrangement back. Joseph told Council that under the revised model, the City would maintain the facilities while JRA focused more heavily on programming and fundraising.

City Council ultimately appropriated $570,159 directly to JRA, while another $1 million went toward City-managed downtown park maintenance, and approved a potentially decade-long relationship with the private nonprofit.

So JRA didn’t simply receive the original $2.6 million. The important history is that the City contemplated putting $2.6 million behind a much broader private operating model before ultimately retaining significant responsibility itself.

That distinction reinforces why public oversight matters. The parks belong to Jacksonville. Whatever organizational model comes and goes, the City remains responsible for what happens to them.

The landscape expert at the table

Another JRA relationship makes the structure even more interesting. Mike Zaffaroni is JRA’s vice chair. Zaffaroni owns Liberty Landscape Supply, a substantial Northeast Florida landscaping business and existing City contractor.

That gives JRA something useful: private-sector knowledge directly relevant to landscapes, materials and the kinds of services major public parks require. Again, expertise is not the problem. The question is whether the system also protects competition.

A public-private organization benefits from having knowledgeable businesspeople at the table. But businesses outside that organization should also have confidence that opportunities involving taxpayer-supported operations aren’t effectively shaped by insiders before everyone else gets an opportunity to compete.

That matters to more than Liberty. It matters to every landscape contractor, irrigation contractor, nursery, arborist, maintenance company, construction firm, design professional and other qualified business that might reasonably compete for work associated with Jacksonville’s riverfront parks.

The public interest isn’t served merely by finding qualified insiders. It’s also served by giving qualified outsiders a fair opportunity.

There is no evidence Liberty has received JRA work. Nor have we established that JRA will eventually assume the maintenance responsibilities Parks currently retains. But those unknowns make strong procurement rules more important—not less.

Public-private shouldn’t mean public-private-private

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Jacksonville working closely with its development community. In fact, it has to. Billions of dollars in private investment won’t happen without cooperation between government and business.

But the phrase public-private partnership contains two sides. The private side shouldn’t become so concentrated among a relatively small network of developers, advocates and contractors that the rest of Jacksonville’s business community becomes an audience rather than a participant.

There are plenty of developers, architects, engineers, builders, contractors, tradespeople, entrepreneurs and investors who aren’t sitting on these boards. Their perspectives matter too. So do those of taxpayers and residents who aren’t in the development business at all.

Competition isn’t an obstacle to public-private partnership. It is one of the mechanisms that gives the public confidence in it.

Two organizations. Two formative roles.

Now step back and look at Ott’s progression. She entered DDRB from government and public affairs rather than a conventional development career. She gained much of her direct downtown-development experience from inside the regulatory system itself, rising from member to vice chair and then chair.

Thirteen days after becoming DDRB chair, a privately funded downtown-development advocacy organization governed by major downtown interests made her its first CEO. The developers already possessed the development expertise. Ott brought government expertise.

For roughly 16 months, she occupied both positions. Then she left Build Up Downtown. Within months, another private nonprofit entering into a significant relationship with the City made her its first employee, charging her with constructing its operational structure from the ground up.

And through both transitions, she remained DDRB chair.

Protecting the public side of the partnership

None of this establishes wrongdoing by Ott, Build Up Downtown, JRA, Zaffaroni or any developer involved. What it establishes is an extraordinarily interconnected system.

Developers and development advocates interact with regulators. A DDRB chairman served on Build Up Downtown’s board. His successor became Build Up Downtown’s first CEO while chairing DDRB. Build Up Downtown’s previous executive director moved into DIA. Ott then moved from Build Up Downtown into JRA while remaining DDRB chair. An existing City landscape contractor now serves as JRA vice chair while the organization develops its capacity around publicly owned parks.

Each relationship may be entirely legitimate. The accumulation of them is why institutional safeguards matter.

The answer isn’t excluding developers. It’s making the table bigger.

Jacksonville should want JWB, Gateway Jax, Corner Lot and other major developers participating in downtown’s future. But it should also want competing developers, architects, engineers, contractors, skilled trades, small businesses, neighborhood stakeholders and taxpayers confident that their access to City Hall doesn’t depend on belonging to the same network.

Ultimately, government has a responsibility none of those private organizations carries. The City of Jacksonville has to live with the result.

A developer can complete a project and eventually sell it. A contractor can finish a job. A nonprofit can change leadership or mission. A board member can resign. The public inherits what remains.

Jacksonville inherits the buildings, parks, streets, maintenance costs, incentive obligations, infrastructure demands and consequences—good or bad—of the decisions being made today.

That is why this isn’t an argument against development. It’s an argument for independent government in a development-friendly city.

Jacksonville can aggressively pursue downtown investment while still insisting that regulatory independence remains meaningful, procurement remains competitive, conflicts remain visible and the broader professional and business community has a genuine opportunity to participate.

That’s what protects the public side of a public-private partnership. And that’s why the increasingly close relationship between Jacksonville’s developers, advocates, regulators, contractors and publicly funded nonprofits deserves scrutiny.

Private interests should help build downtown. But the City of Jacksonville must remain the institution responsible for protecting the people who will still be here long after today’s deals are done.

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