The Jacksonville City Council has been confronting Mayor Donna Deegan's administration over the installation of a hologram-like projector at Jacksonville International Airport that displays a message from the mayor herself. The Jax Daily Record reports that during a Tuesday Council Finance Committee meeting, serious concerns were raised about the source of funding for the device, with suggestions it might contravene state and local laws.
The controversial expenditure, reported by the city on December 19, 2024, uses a technology from Proto which casts video and audio in such a way that "it appears as if there is actually a person inside the 7-foot-tall machine," as the city described. Council members were not just worried about the price tag but also whether building inspection fees, which are supposed to be allocated strictly for activities related to enforcement of the state's building code, were being misappropriated. Council auditor Kim Taylor noted, concerns after the device's association with JAXEPICS, the city's online building service portal, was made public, yet the mayor's office has yet to formally respond, as per the news release from First Coast News.
At the heart of the dispute is a claim that the hologram, referred to as 'Holo-Donna,' cost $75,000, as revealed by Action News Jax. The Council Finance Chair, Ron Salem expressed his blunt opinion on the investment saying, “You oughta send the damn thing back.” Moreover, the relevance of the hologram's features, which includes multilingual responses to queries, is being questioned by council members given its placement at the airport and not in the building inspection office for which the funds were intended.
Mike Weinstein, Deegan’s Chief of Staff, justified the location as a preliminary test of the Proto Box before its intended use in the building division, a rationale that found little favor with council members. They saw this move as a promotional tactic for Mayor Deegan rather than a public service. In defense of the mayor, Phillip Perry spokesman for Deegan, argued that welcoming messages from city mayors are common practice at airports across the country, as he "told First Coast News.” The administration's spending on this technology and, the communication strategy behind it, continues to be a contentious issue in Jacksonville's local government discourse.
