For the past five years, there have been three big projects on the drawing board: Relocation of the Main Street Sewage Treatment Plant, Downtown Technology Park and the Community Maritime Park. Only the first one has been completed. That $300-million plus project was completed by ECUA on time and under budget.
The old city government —pre-Ashton Hayward— ran off the most promising tenant for the Downtown Technology Park, Avalex. The most telling quote in today’s daily newspaper about the Tech Park that is about to be completed (without any tenants) is:
“We had done some initial planning for a four-story, 100,000-square-foot building in the tech park,” Ihns said. “But a couple of people at the city had different ideas about how the design should be executed.”
One of the people that Tad Ihns, Avalex CEO, is talking about is Thaddeus Cohen, former Director of the Community Development Department for the City.
Now we have the Community Maritime Park which has huge cost overruns and pre-development and other soft costs that are excessive—such as paying the legal fees of MPDP, hiring consultants to negotiate with consultants and engineers to check on the work of other engineers that are checking other engineers.
ECUA has a strong leader, Steve Sorrell, driving its project. While they can be a lot of finger-pointing on the two city projects, the old city manager-city council couldn’t get either one done. Yes, the Tech park is a PEDC project and the Maritime Park is controlled by the CMPA—but the old city staff was heavily involved in both…and not in a positive way.
The empty Tech Park and Maritime Park are the best examples of why the City of Pensacola needed to move away from the city manager model.