Jacksonville Comprehensive Plan — Jacksonville, Florida

Jacksonville's 2045 Comprehensive Plan, adopted by the City of Jacksonville Planning and Development Department in March 2024, is the primary regulatory and policy document governing land use, infrastructure concurrency, and development review across the consolidated city-county jurisdiction. The plan sets out the policy framework through which the City evaluates development proposals, schedules capital investment, and coordinates growth management across approximately 747 square miles encompassing all of Duval County.

Jacksonville's comprehensive planning operates within a governance structure unlike that of most Florida municipalities. Since October 1, 1968, Jacksonville and Duval County have functioned as a single consolidated government — one of the first such consolidations in the United States, as documented in the City of Jacksonville's consolidation history records. That structure concentrates planning, zoning, public works, and land-use authority in a single governmental body covering the entire county footprint, rather than dividing those functions among separate city and county administrations as is common elsewhere in Florida. The result is a comprehensive plan of unusual geographic scale, applying to a jurisdiction with a U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023-estimated population of 961,739 — the most populous city in Florida.

The City of Jacksonville's Planning and Development Department, through its Community Planning Division, administers the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. The Community Planning Division's webpage identifies the plan as the operative document for development review and concurrency determinations citywide — meaning that proposed development projects are measured against the plan's land-use categories, level-of-service standards, and capital-scheduling requirements before receiving approval.

Legislative authority for the plan rests with the 19-member Jacksonville City Council, composed of 14 single-member district representatives and 5 at-large members, which holds land-use and zoning powers in addition to its appropriations role. The elected Mayor serves as chief executive. As Jacksonville Today reported in February 2025, the consolidated structure grants the Mayor and Council authority over planning and zoning functions that in most Florida counties are divided between independent city and county governments. Amendments to the comprehensive plan are processed through the Planning and Development Department and require City Council action, consistent with Florida's growth management statutes.

The 2045 Comprehensive Plan is organized into distinct elements, each addressing a functional area of land use and infrastructure policy. The Community Planning Division documents these elements as the operative structure for development review and intergovernmental coordination.

The Introduction element, adopted March 2024, establishes the plan's foundational policy context, including the city's growth projections, its physical and demographic baseline, and its identification of floodplain management and sea-level rise as significant considerations given Jacksonville's extensive low-elevation coastal and riverine terrain. The plan's Capital Improvements Element schedules infrastructure investment across transportation, utilities, and public facilities, and — per the City of Jacksonville's documentation — ties transportation infrastructure investment directly to supporting continued port, logistics, and employment-center growth through the 2045 planning horizon. The Intergovernmental Coordination Element establishes the framework through which Jacksonville coordinates planning decisions with neighboring counties, the four independent beach municipalities within Duval County, and state and regional agencies. A Definitions element, also published in March 2024, provides the regulatory vocabulary applied across all development-review decisions. Land Use Category Descriptions establish the permitted uses, densities, and intensities that apply to each designated area within the consolidated jurisdiction.

The 2045 Comprehensive Plan applies to all of Duval County, reflecting the consolidated government structure in effect since October 1, 1968. As News4Jax reported in 2023 on the 55th anniversary of consolidation, Jacksonville became the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States at the time of the merger. That geographic scale shapes the plan's complexity: the jurisdiction spans upland pine flatwoods, salt marshes, tidal creek corridors along the St. Johns and Nassau Rivers, the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve (a National Park Service unit encompassing more than 46,000 acres), and the developed urban and suburban core.

Four municipalities within Duval County — Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, Atlantic Beach, and Baldwin — retained independent charters under the 1968 consolidation, as documented in the City's consolidation history. These municipalities operate their own elected governments, yet the consolidated jurisdiction's planning framework intersects with their boundaries on certain service and infrastructure matters. Jacksonville's plan also addresses coordination with Nassau County to the north, Baker County to the northwest, Clay County to the southwest, and St. Johns County to the south — all of which border the consolidated city-county. The plan's Introduction identifies the Atlantic hurricane season (June through November) as the primary severe-weather risk driving certain infrastructure and land-use policies, alongside the sea-level rise and floodplain considerations that bear on the extensive low-elevation terrain throughout the jurisdiction.

The 2045 Comprehensive Plan's policy priorities reflect the economic and environmental conditions specific to Jacksonville's consolidated jurisdiction. The Capital Improvements Element links transportation network investment to the growth of JAXPORT (Jacksonville Port Authority), which the City's Office of Economic Development documents as a deepwater logistics hub and a foundation of the region's trade, transportation, and utilities supersector — identified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as the largest employment supersector in the Jacksonville metropolitan statistical area. The plan's transportation and capital infrastructure schedules are calibrated, in part, to sustain access to port facilities, intermodal freight corridors, and employment centers concentrated in the consolidated city's logistics and distribution nodes.

Floodplain management constitutes a distinct policy area within the plan, given the city's extensive low-elevation coastal and riverine terrain along the St. Johns River corridor and the Intracoastal Waterway. Sea-level rise is identified in the plan's Introduction as a long-range land-use consideration relevant to development siting and infrastructure investment through the 2045 horizon. The plan also intersects with the military installations — Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport, and Marine Corps Support Facility Blount Island — that the City's Office of Economic Development documents as economic cornerstones, and which generate land-use compatibility and intergovernmental coordination considerations addressed in the plan's relevant elements.

The March 2024 adoption of the 2045 Comprehensive Plan — with its Introduction, Land Use Category Descriptions, Capital Improvements Element, Transportation Element, and Intergovernmental Coordination Element — represents the most significant comprehensive planning action in Jacksonville in recent years. The Community Planning Division identifies this adopted package as the operative regulatory framework for development review and concurrency determinations citywide as of that date.

Downtown Jacksonville's development trajectory, tracked by Downtown Vision Inc. in its 2024–2025 State of Downtown Report as covered by the Jacksonville Free Press, reflects investment activity, residential unit growth, retail vacancy conditions, and public realm changes in the urban core — all of which are shaped by the land-use designations and capital scheduling in the 2045 plan. The EverBank Stadium renovation — a major capital commitment involving the City of Jacksonville and the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL franchise, with construction ongoing as of 2025 — represents one of the larger individual development projects intersecting with downtown planning and city capital processes in the current planning cycle.

As Jacksonville Today reported in February 2025, ongoing civic dialogue continues about how planning authority and service-delivery coordination function within the consolidated government structure — questions that bear directly on how the comprehensive plan's policies are implemented across the jurisdiction's diverse geographic and demographic contexts.

The 2045 Comprehensive Plan's Intergovernmental Coordination Element, adopted in March 2024, establishes the framework through which Jacksonville's planning decisions are coordinated with adjacent local governments, state agencies, and regional bodies. Jacksonville's borders with Nassau, Baker, Clay, and St. Johns counties — and the presence of four independent municipal governments within Duval County itself — generate a range of coordination requirements under Florida's growth management statutes.

The Intergovernmental Coordination Element addresses relationships with the Florida Department of Transportation on network investments that cross jurisdictional boundaries, with the St. Johns River Water Management District on water resource and floodplain matters, and with the National Park Service on land uses adjacent to the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has designated Jacksonville a Preserve America Community, citing the city's integration of historic preservation into community planning — an approach that intersects with the comprehensive plan's land-use policies in the Springfield neighborhood and the Riverside/Avondale neighborhood, both listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the downtown historic districts. The Jax Daily Record's 50-year retrospective on consolidation noted that coordinated regional planning was among the original rationales for the 1968 merger — a rationale the 2045 Comprehensive Plan continues to operationalize across one of the most geographically expansive local government jurisdictions in the contiguous United States.