COMMENTARY | The most popular part of the proposed $1.4 billion renovation of EverBank Stadium has nothing to do with the stadium and everything to do with providing help to the dispossessed, speeding up park improvements, and overall making sure residents get a share of the generational wealth coming out of city coffers.

More than 80 percent of registered Duval County voters back a proposed $150 million package of community benefits that Mayor Donna Deegan wants to attach to the $1.4 billion agreement with the Jaguars to renovate EverBank Stadium, according to a University of North Florida poll. That is a remarkable consensus that leads to an even more remarkable takeaway: The so-called “community benefits agreement” is so popular it makes the stadium deal palatable to a majority of voters, about 56 percent.

Without it, support for the city’s $775 million share of the stadium renovations falls to 41 percent.

Go figure: People like good things.

So it’s an only-in-Jacksonville kind of irony that the most imperiled portion of the accord between the city and Jaguars is this community-benefits agreement. Earlier this month, when the Deegan administration rolled out the agreement, City Council member Rory Diamond complained she hadn’t “negotiated anything new for this stadium lease other than to add ANOTHER 150 MILLION of additional City spending on non-stadium programs. Thats [sic] a non-starter, and Council will remove it.”

The agreement says the Jaguars would contribute $150 million, paid out in increments over the 30-year life of the new stadium lease, and the city would match with its own $150 million, which would be deployed much faster — over about five years.

It’s true this additional $150 million from the city would raise the true taxpayer cost of this stadium deal to $925 million, but that community benefits money is, by and large, for expenses the city would be covering at some point anyway. Homelessness, for example, is a stated and funded priority of this City Council. So are downtown parks, which have been included in annual infrastructure budgets this council has approved. True, too, for workforce development and lifting up the Eastside — the neighborhood around the stadium that has suffered from inadequate investment for decades.

These community-benefit packages have become a standard part of stadium deals throughout the NFL, and they are best understood as another piece of the overall transaction. Which is to say this isn’t charity from the Jaguars: It’s a business term. Still, the Jaguars, in putting up $150 million over 30 years, have offered the city the most generous community-benefits agreement ever.

And the team’s $150 million is contingent on the city’s $150 million; without the city’s match, the Jaguars’ contribution will likely decrease significantly. Diamond implied this week that the Jaguars might still be prepared to offer $100 million if the city drops its match entirely. “If you asked Jax tax payers if they wanted $100 million from Jags for free or $150 million but it costs $150 million of their money, they are taking the free money every time,” he said.

That is codswallop. A self-professed fiscal hawk like Diamond ought to know nothing is “free,” least of all anything to do with this stadium renovation deal. And how strange it is to hop on board with the most unsavory element of the financial arrangement — in essence, using taxpayer money to subsidize the business operations of Jaguars owner Shad Khan, one of the wealthiest men on the planet — while drawing a line in the sand at spending money on poor people.

“Cutting” the city’s $150 million — which, again, the city will spend at some point regardless — will “cost” the city $50 million in “free” money from the Jaguars. The value the community-benefits agreement offers is the chance to leverage a longer-term $150 million investment and a shorter-term $150 million, all targeted toward the same limited set of priorities. This isn’t rocket science, and most people get it: What else do more than 80 percent of Duval County voters agree on?

Diamond is part of a particularly partisan faction on the Republican-controlled City Council, and it’s fair to suspect his attitude reflects, to some degree, the thinking of at least four or five others behind the dais. How to support the overall deal while denying the city’s Democratic mayor a clear win: That is the only logical underpinning to explain a conservative politician’s apparent anger about park improvements but complacence over socializing the costs of an NFL team.

The state of Florida doesn’t offer financial support for professional sports teams because, at least in this one narrow way, Tallahassee Republicans are more ideologically consistent than their Jacksonville counterparts, who sometimes get feted in the owner’s box and aboard Khan’s gaudy mega-yacht.

To be clear: Nixing the community-benefits agreement would be self-sabotage, killing the one way in which this massive investment would directly benefit the city and not a car-bumper baron.

Is that $150 million big enough to truly move the needle? Are the various way it would be spent too diffuse? What kind of governing structure will be put in place to make sure the money slated for the Eastside won’t be wasted? Those are fair questions, but they argue for something even more ambitious than what Deegan has proposed — not shriveling the offer on the table into irrelevance.

That zeroing out the city’s contribution to the community benefits agreement is a possibility at all reflects another dynamic UNF found in its poll: Of the political approval ratings the university tested, support for the City Council was by far the lowest.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Why do City Council members oppose community benefits in stadium deal?