The city will use the $7 million in state funding awarded for the Baptist Hospital Legacy Campus to begin reimagining the property for affordable housing.
Mayor Reeves said the city has engaged a demolition abatement expert. “We are waiting to get the final paperwork done to get into the building. We didn’t want to wait until the first day as if nothing happened. So now we just need to get into the buildings, and once we do that, we will be working that in tandem with dusting off the donation agreement that we had already been pursuing and getting that finalized.”
The initial steps toward Pensacola International Airport’s new terminal featuring five new gates are underway, along with preliminary planning and conceptual development. The $5 million in funding will advance the approximately $70 million project through design and into construction.
“The first money is always the hardest part of a big project to get in. So that’s a big step even if the number isn’t big in relation to the total cost,” the mayor said.
He added, “We’ve run numbers on what it would take for us to bond the whole thing at the airport. Obviously, we’re very financially strong and viable at the airport in terms of dollars and cents, but you always have to be careful because as you bond more dollars at the airport, rates and charges passed onto the airlines go up. So what you don’t want to do is have a shiny new terminal, and then the price per plane passenger goes up for Delta and American so high that they don’t want to bring new flights.”
The city has partnered with Conservation Florida, a statewide land conservancy, to keep Bay Bluffs Park in the public sector and prevent future city administrations from selling it on the private market. The $2.2 million in funding will allow for the demolition of the condemned boardwalk and pave the way for discussion with the Pensacola community and Conservation Florida on the design of the revamped park.
“I was told what I was going to do on a lot of things with the bluff – sell it, turn it into apartments, all those different things. We’ve done the opposite of that, and we are successful at doing such in less than a year, which is the $2.2 million for demolition and whatever that 2.0 of Bluffs Park will be in concert with Conservation Florida, which means it’ll stay within the public realm forever.”
Mayor Reeves called the three projects “transformational.”
Featured Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash
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