Joe Patti’s Seafood Company has issued a statement in response to the City of Pensacola’s lawsuit:
For over 90 years, Joe Patti’s Seafood Company has been a cornerstone of Pensacola’s waterfront and a proud part of the city’s rich history.
We were disappointed to learn of the City’s recent decision to file a lawsuit involving our family business. Joe Patti’s Seafood remains an active, thriving enterprise and one of Pensacola’s leading attractions, welcoming visitors from across the country and supporting more than a hundred local employees and their families.
We believe there are constructive and lawful ways to achieve the City’s infrastructure goals while also recognizing private property rights and supporting local businesses that have helped make Pensacola what it is today.
We cannot comment on the City’s lawsuit other than to say that we have retained legal counsel to respond to the claims being made against us.
Our family remains deeply committed to this community and to operating according to the principles that have guided us for generations.
Lawsuit
At his press conference on Tuesday, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves announced that he had filed a lawsuit against Joe Patti’s Seafood Company and the family’s trust to gain access to property needed for a $7.8 million stormwater project.
- “That stormwater project impacts about 5,000 residents in total,” said the mayor. “We’ve met and communicated, we’ve negotiated with them, we’ve offered alternative routes, business protection measures, and hopefully we’ll continue to find a resolution.”
Reeves insisted the city’s relationship with the popular business and the Patti family is not adversarial. “We have maintained for a few years that some solution needs to be considered. So, because of some of the concerns of using the city’s existing easement across the parking lot, we have tried to entertain every other alternative solution over these three years and will continue to do so, but there are some issues in terms of family trusts and who wants to do what.”
He added, “Our hope and goal is that we get to some resolution that works for everybody, and our conversations will continue with them, and certainly those have been positive conversations in the sense that I think we all want the same goal. We haven’t been able to get the ball moving on a solution. And as you guys can see with your own eyes, construction-wise, that project is aggressively moving, and at some point, the water needs to be able to go somewhere.”