Late Friday afternoon, we received an email that a Pensacola City Council Workshop has been scheduled for 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 5, in the Hagler Mason Conference Room, 2nd Floor of City Hall. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss Reimagine Palafox.
Background: On Wednesday and Thursday, Mayor D.C. Reeves and Project Strategic Initiatives Chief Adrianne Walker unveiled the latest details of the New Palafox Street reconstruction project to downtown business owners and retailers.
Mayor Reeves made clear that despite ongoing discussions, nothing has been finalized. “Nothing has been signed. The city has to go to the council to get funding approval. That has not happened yet,” he told attendees. “This project can go really three different directions as it sits in the city right now.”
- The three options include: doing nothing and leaving utility cuts in the road, proceeding with Florida Power & Light’s basic mill-and-overlay obligation, or moving forward with the comprehensive New Palafox project currently under consideration. Read more.
On Wednesday, the mayor stated he planned to hold a council workshop during either the second or third week of November, with a council vote in December. That timetable appears to have changed.
Budget
The workshop memorandum lays out the project’s budget:
Actual Budget:
$7,687,924.50 Contract Base Bid for Construction
$768,794.25 Required 10% Contingency
$768,794.25 10% Incentivized Early Completion
$491,145.18 Design
$694,303.20 Contracted Project Management, CEI, Marketing Coordinator, and
Archeological Services from Insight Global
$307,517.70 Project Oversight and Engineering Allocation by City Staff
$46,125.66 Geotechnical Testing/Miscellaneous
Total: $10,764,604.74
Funding for the project:
$3,046,132.00 FP&L Contribution
$399,193.00 Parking Revenue Fund
$4,316,956.00 2019 Urban Core Bond Fund – Hashtag Phase 1 Construction
$123,652.00 2019 Urban Core Bond Fund – Hashtag Phase 1 Engineering Fees
$539.00 2019 Urban Core Bond Fund – Hashtag
$157,400.00 CRA Fund – Complete Streets – S Palafox Improvements
$1,493,164.00 CRA Fund – Complete Streets (from FY25)
$1,011,500 CRA Fund – Complete Streets (FY26)
$216,087 CRA Fund – Property Acquisition and Development (FY26)
Total: $10,764,604.74
Minute with the Mayor
Mayor Reeves also posted his weekly “Minute with the Mayor” on Facebook yesterday:
“We are excited to get moving on the Reimagine Palafox project. We’ve had lots of productive meetings. We met with the winning bid contractor for the first time on Tuesday, met with the property owners along Palafox on Wednesday, and we’ll be meeting with the lessees on Thursday—trying to share all the accurate information about exactly how this project may go in terms of timeframe and all of those important questions.”
Supporting Downtown Businesses
“And certainly we expect to be supporting ourselves, all of these great local small businesses that we have along Palafox Street. We’re asking our property owners, our local residents, our visitors to be doing the same, but we are excited and encouraged about the ability to help control and shorten some of the timeframes in different aspects of the project and to share all of that news, of course, with the property owners as well as those lessees and small business owners. So more to come on that.”
Council Vote
“Obviously, there’s going to be a council vote in November to decide how that project moves forward, but that conversation will, of course, continue at my desk and throughout the city.”
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$399,193.00 Parking Revenue Fund; I think the business owners would want that fund used for more parking garages for their customers.