You're spending $50 thousand dollars a month to rent out a deplorable facility that calculates how your votes are tabulated.

“The current situation at the elections center at Gateway Mall is simply unpairable,” says City Council President Stephen Joost. 

The Supervisor of Elections warehouse is located on the 5000 block of Norwood Avenue.

Some issues at the warehouse include faulty air conditioning, multiple ADA compliance issues, and a mall owner that reportedly owes more than $900 thousand dollars in backed property taxes.

Joost tells WOKV the mall’s owner, Carlton Jones, isn’t holding up to his end of the bargain.

“I don’t see why we should subsidize his business when he doesn’t even pay the property taxes out there,” says Joost.

Jones spoke to our news partners Channel 4 about the taxes issue.

“Taxes will be paid by March. If you look at our taxes we paid over $2 million in taxes since we’ve been here,” says Jones.

Joost continued on to say that he wrote a letter to Mayor Alvin Brown asking to support the decision to move the elections office elsewhere. He also says the warehouse is not giving Jacksonville a good name.

“They come over there and they’re trying to look at our elections process and we don’t even have decent working conditions for our workers,” says Joost.

WOKV also spoke with Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland. He tells us that they pay approximately $55 thousand dollars to operate and run the building on a month-to-month basis. The warehouse that holds their equipment, houses a call center and operates training centers is about 52 thousand square feet.

“We’re not wasting taxpayer dollars having the facility, we’re just wasting it from the standpoint of not getting the value for what we’re actually receiving,” says Holland.

Holland continued on to say that they are renting on a month to month basis so they will be able to evaluate where they want the warehouse to operate in the future.

“We can save what we estimate, if we went to our own building, we would probably save the city between $300 and 600 thousand dollars a year,” says Holland.

WOKV spoke with a Broker Associate with Watson Commercial Realty who tells us that for a warehouse with a similar square footage and condition, the city is paying 6 to 7 fold of what they should be paying, and say they should not be paying more than $13 thousand dollars a month.