Big Deal at the Airport

A big deal is brewing at the Pensacola International Airport. While local officials have kept the lid on the details fairly tight, it appears something is in the works.

During last night’s Pensacola City Council meeting, City Administrator Bill Reynolds noted that Mayor Ashton Hayward wished he could have been present to congratulate the University of West Florida’s girls soccer team on its championship season, but that he was in a meeting with “some very important people from outside the city.”

Earlier in the week, members of the city council—as well as officials from other local bodies—briefly discussed a project at the airport related to economic development during a meeting of the Florida-Alabama Transportation Planning Organization in Milton. They discussed funding—from both the state and local levels—in the neighborhood of $15 million.

“It’s 450 jobs initially, phase two and three takes it up to a thousand,” Escambia County Commission Chairman Gene Valentino told his peers on the Florida-Alabama TPO. “So, the impact is geometric.”