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.