Tomorrow’s ribbon cutting at 3 p.m. will formalize what Mayor D.C. Reeves calls years in the making—a $20 million, 56,000 square foot Center for Maritime Excellence that “establishes our city as the preeminent home for sailing and watercraft innovation in the United States.”
- For the mayor, the facility represents far more than a building. It’s a statement about Pensacola’s future.
170 High-Wage Jobs Coming Home
City Economic Development Director Erica Grancagnola laid out the numbers that matter most to families: “It means 170 high-wage, cutting-edge jobs. It means partnerships with our educational institutions that are already underway, with interns from UWF and PSC already employed with American Magic.”
For parents like Grancagnola, whose son just accepted admission to UWF, the facility represents something deeply personal. “It means that our kids will have opportunities in the engineering and technology fields here in Pensacola that can’t be found anywhere else in the U.S.”
- The project was funded through Triumph Gulf Coast, the Governor’s Job Growth Grant Fund, and the Florida Seaport Transportation and Economic Development Fund.
A Facility Unlike Any Other in the World
American Magic Chief Operating Officer Tyson Lamond stressed the facility’s unique capabilities. “There is no other facility in the world that has all of this under one roof,” he said. “In Pensacola, Florida, we have a facility that we can design, we can manufacture, and we can launch and sail high-performance race boats out of.”
- The building houses everything from Olympic gold medalists to apprentice composite technicians learning aerospace-grade manufacturing. “Those skill sets could go from an Olympic gold medalist on one end of the team” to “an apprenticeship program for composite technicians” on the other, Lamond explained.
Finding the Port’s “Happy Medium”
Mayor Reeves addressed the decades-old debate about Pensacola’s port identity—industrial cargo versus community amenity.
- “There used to always seem to be two camps. One was a heavy cargo industrial port, or I don’t support the port,” Reeves said. “I think what we’re proving with this project and moving in the future is—no, there’s actually harmony between the type of activities that can happen on the port.”
The mayor pointed to the port’s finite 50 acres in the heart of downtown as both a challenge and an opportunity. “Every puzzle piece matters, every single one,” he said. “What changes our community is high-paying jobs.”
- Port Director Lance Scott called American Magic “an ideal tenant, a true teammate” and sees the facility as “just the first step in realizing the vision of a hybrid seaport.”
The mayor added, “We talk a lot about history in the city, rightfully so. I think what we’re rewriting now is the perfect combination of a finite-size port in the heart of the downtown, where we don’t just talk about nostalgia. We talk about being on the cutting edge of innovation between this project and other things that we have in mind and finding that happy medium.”
Expanding Footprint and Community Impact
American Magic will maintain a presence at Warehouse 9, which will house training programs and an aerospace-grade clean room for educational partnerships. The company’s sail loft is now the fourth largest in America.
I asked Mayor Reeves about how American Magic’s expanded footprint at the port impacts UWF’s Watercraft and Vessel Engineering (WAVE) program. He said the agreement with UWF sets a specific amount of space but isn’t tied to one building.
He said. “If there’s more job creation that can happen at (Warehouse 9), we don’t want to stop that if we can move them around. So my hope as the mayor of the city is, as close as we can have students right next to Tyson’s employees, that’s the best.”
Finding a home
“As the team, when we first were looking for a location to go in 2018, and when we came down to Pensacola, we stumbled across a community that is unlike no other,” Lamond said. “We traveled all around the world with our team, and ultimately, you go to communities and quite often you’re there for an event, and then you leave. But when we come here, it’s true we come home. We have so many team members now that have bought homes in Pensacola.”