by Jeremy Morrison, Inweekly
The city of Pensacola’s deal with Streamline Boats to set up shop at the municipal port may be in question, but Mayor Grover Robinson doesn’t appear to be sweating it too much.
“If it doesn’t work out, we do have opportunities now,” Robinson said Monday during his weekly press conference, painting a rosy picture of the port’s future prospects.
With Streamline facing eviction in its home base of Hialeah, Fla., the mayor said if Pensacola’s contract with the company falls through, the city could already find new tenants for the sought-after port space.
“From our standpoint, we continue to see more and more warehouses being used,” Robinson explained. “And if something happens and we do get that warehouse back where Streamline Boats was going to be, we have uses right now.”
Some sizable real estate has already become available at the port, with the Blue Origin ship shoving off over the weekend. The cargo ship was in port being retrofitted by Offshore Inland for use as a landing pad for Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space operation.
“We knew it was going to leave at some point,” Mayor Robinson said. “I was a little bit surprised it left in hurricane season. I thought it was probably going to wait a couple of more months.”
Though in port for three years being retrofitted, Bezos recently scuttled the idea of using the ship — rechristened Jacklyn after the Amazon founder’s mother — for a landing pad. Thus the ship is now reportedly making its last voyage to a Texas scrap yard.
“They’re going to do whatever they’re going to do with it — scrap it, sell it, that’s a business decision they will make,” said Deputy City Administrator Amy Miller, noting that the city made about three times as much money off Jacklyn’s extended stay than initially anticipated and that the ship’s departure had opened up about 20 percent of the port’s berth space.
“It opens up a new berth for us. We’ve missed on some opportunities because they were there,” Robinson said. “It was a good thing to have, but we also have turned down opportunities we could have worked through with having it there. So, obviously, not having it there, we’ll look, and we think the port has new opportunities,”
Mayor Robinson said the port would like to see some marine research-related tenants take up residence at the north end of the port. In early September, he said, the city is expecting to put forward a request to Triumph Gulf Coast, the group that oversees environmental restoration funds stemming from the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for funds to support such operations.
“Certainly one of those things we think would be perfectly good for something like a research, a sailing area, such as could be partnered with American Magic and the New York Yacht Club there, these are things, we’re looking into the future, with what we can do,” Robinson said, suggesting a partnership with the American Cup sailing competitors. “I think the future for the port is bright; there’s a lot of opportunities.”
Scootering Toward the Finish Line
The city is moving toward another extension with an e-scooter company, though Mayor Robinson said he’s looking to stick with one of the companies the city has been courting and cut ties with the other. The extension of the city’s current pilot program contract will only be for a couple of months while a more long-term contract is drawn up.
“When we do this extension, we are very much headed toward a final thing,” the mayor said.
Robinson said that the decision to pursue a contract with Veo was based on the type of scooter the company offered.
“The decision was to go with Veo over Bird, but that really wasn’t so much the companies one way or the other; it was really just the equipment,” the mayor said. “We like the sit-down scooter better than the stand-up.”
Throughout the course of the city’s year-long pilot program, Mayor Robinson said he thinks that Veo’s sit-down scooters offered both riders and the city a better experience.
“I think what we found out is that we like the sit-down scooters better than the stand-up scooter; they seem to have fewer — we have fewer problems with those being inappropriately driven or used,” he said. “I think they’re a little bit easier for people to understand, the public, and we saw better parking consistency with those.”
Mayor Robinson said some tweaks to the scooter program before moving forward will be adding more parking corrals, probably about 15 or 20 more of the sites around downtown.
“I think we definitely want to move to more of a forced parking in those corral spots, and it’s just really identifying and figuring those out as we move forward — what are the right places to have those?” the mayor said.
Robinson said that he has heard comments noting that the rentable scooters are increasingly being found in farther away neighborhoods, such as the East Hill and North Hill areas.
”That’s a good thing,” the mayor said. “That solves parking; that solves a lot of different things for us.”
Robinson said that the city pursued the e-scooter option to reduce traffic downtown, thus alleviating traffic and the scarcity of parking spots.
“It wasn’t just that we wanted to have scooters. That wasn’t the whole issue,” the mayor said. “The whole issue was we wanted to find a way to deal with parking issues and stop cars from ever coming into downtown. If we could do that, we could be successful in giving people other options.”
Maritime Marina Delay
Pensacola will soon be getting a municipal marina at Maritime Park. But not as soon as expected.
Mayor Robinson said Monday that the Maritime Park’s $1.6-million marina project was supposed to commence this month, but the work has been delayed for a few months.
“We’d hoped we would be under construction and have that thing finished, but unfortunately, because of things on the supply side, the main dock components have been ordered but will not be scheduled for delivery until December,” Robinson said.
Even with this delay, Mayor Robinson said, a completion date of next spring is still expected.
“So, boat season next year, we’ll have a place for you to dock in downtown Pensacola,” the mayor said.