By Jeremy Morrison, Inweekly
The city of Pensacola is betting big on two potential residential developments at the site of the soon-to-be-vacated Baptist Healthcare campus. A day after the Pensacola City Council approved a $460,000 municipal buy-in to secure a 9 percent tax credit for one of the projects, Mayor D.C. Reeves said that all that’s left to do now is pray.
“We’ll cross our fingers, say an extra prayer at night, and see if we can get this thing across the finish line,” Mayor Reeves said during his weekly press conference Tuesday.
Baptist is exploring two separate affordable housing developments with the non-profit housing developers Paces/Soho. One of the projects will focus on multi-family units, while the other caters to seniors. Each hinges on tax-credit financing, with one seeking a less competitive 4 percent credit and the other going for the highly sought-after 9 percent option.
Baptist sought municipal buy-in from Pensacola City Council members, requesting that the city create a Local Government Area of Opportunity and the commitment of $460,000 to the project. Now that such a commitment has been made, the city and Baptist will play the waiting game.
“That was really the first step; ultimately, now we cross our fingers and hope it’s a very competitive bid statewide,” Reeves said.
The mayor said that an exact timeline for awarding the Florida Housing Finance Corporation tax credit financing is not known at this time. After the new year, he said, the city should have a better idea of when a decision will be made.
Public Smoking Ban?
Smokers may no longer be able to light up in Pensacola’s public parks, nor will people be allowed to vape if the Pensacola City Council moves forward this week with a smoking ban for the city’s public spaces.
“Hoping to get that across the finish line on Thursday,” Mayor Reeves said Tuesday, looking ahead to this week’s council meeting.
The council is considering the ban because of a change at the state level that now allows municipalities to institute such measures. Previously, Reeves explained, the state of Florida did not permit this.
“There was some state law that did not allow us to do that in previous years; now some of that has changed,” Reeves said Tuesday, adding that not all of the city’s parks would fall under the new allowance. “There are some exceptions you’ll see in there that seem maybe a little unique or outliers — some of that is still wrapped up in state law.”
Mayor Reeves said he felt that the city’s parks should be treated like other city properties, such as Pensacola City Hall, where smoking has long been banned. He contended that eliminating smoking and vaping at parks will reduce the secondhand smoke risk for children playing at the parks.
“It’s a step in the right direction, and I’m certainly in support of keeping our city spaces safer,” Reeves said, adding that smokers would still have plenty of non-city-owned spaces in which to light up or vape: “There are plenty of outdoor spaces, private spaces, to do that if you want,”
Educational Aspirations
The city of Pensacola is trying for a $540,000 grant from the Escambia Children’s Trust. If awarded, the grant will be used to fund educational-related needs within the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
“One of the missing ingredients in our centers is stuff like daycare and those kinds of things. We have not had the manpower or staff, I should say, or the funds to do an effective job for that at our centers,” said Adrian Stills, parks and rec director, said during the mayor’s presser. “We’re very excited about the opportunity, about maybe even getting a staff person full time to be able to adequately do something about that in our community.”
Mayor Reeves noted that he considered improving the city’s educational prospects — the traditional purview of the Escambia County School District — a municipal responsibility.
“We can’t take a reactive approach to the need for education in our community. We can’t say, ‘oh, that’s the school district, that’s not us’ — that is us, it’s our kids, and we understand the value of being able to provide everything we can to every Pensacola kid we can,” the mayor said. “I would say, just philosophically,” “We not going to sit on the sideline and say, ‘that’s not our job.’ That is our job.”
Sizing Up the Airport
Pensacola just received the Florida Aviation Impact Study for the Pensacola International Airport. The study reports that the city’s airport generates $2.3 billion in economic impact and another $1.2 billion value-add to the community.
“As you’ll learn if you haven’t already, I’m very data-driven, and we can all subjectively agree that the airport does great things for us,” Mayor Reeves said. “And we’re bursting at the seams, we continue to break records, but when you can see it in black and white in the data that we provide for you, you know, those are huge numbers, but also not a surprise given the trajectory that we’ve seen with our airport.”
In preparing for an expansion at the airport, city officials are looking to conduct a study on the issue. Funding this study, Reeves said, is a top city priority.
“When I went to the legislative delegation last week, that was one of my big ask,” the mayor said. “Not so much that it would be a direct legislative ask, but a priority for us is to get the $2.5 million funded for the study for our potential new terminal at the airport.”
Reeves said he felt “very optimistic” about the prospects of securing funding for the airport study following talks with the Florida Department of Transportation. A delay in conducting this study, the mayor said, would mean waiting longer to expand the currently squeezed airport.
“They realize that every day that we don’t have this first domino knocked over is another day that we don’t have a terminal. So, if we’re going to go this direction, this truly is the bottleneck,” Mayor Reeves said.
Public Smoking Ban? In addition to reading the poorly written agenda item, I reviewed the 4,000+ word Chapter 386, Florida Statutes, relevant to the proposed city law, and the Florida Legislature’s staff analysis of the 2022 changes made to the law. Reeves claims that the Financial Impact of the new city law is “None.” That’s nonsense. The Florida Legislature’s staff writes that a local government doing as Reeves proposes “may incur indeterminate expenses related to enacting and enforcing such restrictions.” Has anyone asked the PPD what it will cost to enforce this ordinance? Diverting patrol units from real crime fighting is a cost. FDLE recently reported that the city’s per capita crime rate was 67.8% “above” the state average. The PPD refused to enforce the city’s COVID-19 mask ordinance and does not now enforce the city’s panhandling ordinance or prohibitions against smoking pot or drinking (beer/wine/booze) in a city park. City parks are a cesspool of bad behavior. Has anyone on the council ever read Section 1-1-8 in the City Code? It is the default penalty for violating this new law. The penalties are: 1) up to a $500 fine; 2) up to 60 days in jail; or 3) both. Does anyone really think that PPD is going to enforce this law in city parks in District 3 or District 4 gerrymandered in 2011 and again in 2022 to include a lot of rich white people and their entitled teenage offspring? Of course not. You can bet that PPD will bounce on young black males vaping in Legion Field as a pretext to search their persons and vehicles. The new law refers to the “boundaries” of a city park. I once asked city staff where the public right-of-way ended and the legal boundary of a city park began. It mattered because I was told that you can walk on the sidewalk adjacent to the street 24/7 but not “in” a park when it is closed. I was told that the inner boundary of the sidewalk was the legal edge of the park. For the purposes of determining where the law can be enforced in or near a city park, it seems a good idea to know if a person can smoke/vape the sidewalk or in the grassy area between it in addition to the road. City Attorney Peppler has advised in writing that there’s no need for the city to post signs letting people know about the new law. In my view, the bigger the sign the better. As it is, people park their cars far into Eastgate Park across the street from my house and claim to have never seen the big signs telling them not to do so. It might even
be necessary to hire a new cadre of park police officers to enforce this new law and other laws now not being enforced. Most unexplainably, the new law contains unjustified exceptions that would expose children to the danger of second-hand smoke if they play golf, visit park pavilions or attend major events in city parks. News talk show host Andrew McKay this morning asked Reeves some simple questions about that law that he could not answer and did not seem to understand. Reeves was specifically asked about the exceptions but he very passionately excused that he didn’t know why they were there but maybe it had something to do with state law, or something else, maybe. No.