Panama City looking to re-vision downtown, with public input

Feb. 13--PANAMA CITY -- Plans are starting to come into focus for the redevelopment of downtown Panama City after Hurricane Michael.

Well, at least the plan for the plan.

The phrase of the day at the Panama City City Commission on Tuesday morning was that the train was moving and it was time to get on it, as commissioners discussed moving forward with the St. Joe Company's proposed hotel on the Downtown Marina property and a plan to hire a nationally recognized consulting company to lead a public visioning period on what to do with the city's waterfront property.

"The key to this is going to be citizen involvement, and that is through town halls, focus groups, charrettes," said City Manager Mark McQueen. "It is imperative that everyone who wants to get involved, get involved."

The plan is to hire Dover, Kohl and Partners -- a town planning company, whose founding principal Victor Dover has visited the city before as a guest of citizen's group Panama City Growing Strong -- to lead the visioning process with the marina. The hope, McQueen said, is to have the first citizens' meetings in April.

The partnership with Dover Kohl is to be done in phases, with the first phase focused on the lower half of the downtown waterfront, McQueen said. As resources become available, the same visioning process will be done throughout the city.

This is meant to work in tandem with two other efforts.

The first is the potential 100-room hotel St. Joe is pursuing constructing on the marina. According to city leaders, St. Joe has bought into the public input process. In part because of the "respect" the company has shown to citizens, the commission unanimously moved forward with an informal and changeable memorandum of understanding.

Almost to prove it could be changed, the schedule for the planning phases was adjusted during the commission meeting at St. Joe's request to better align with public input schedule, reducing the amount of time before a conceptual design is presented to the city to five months, compared to the seven-month period outlined in the initial letter.

The second is McQueen working with Hagerty Consulting, the firm the city hired to help process and understand FEMA paperwork, to create a long-term plan for the entire city that fully utilizes the financial opportunities Hurricane Michael made available.

One example brought up was the repairs to the downtown marina, which the city had taken out a $7 million loan for. Now, it's highly possible FEMA will cover some of that cost, freeing city money up for other uses.

There's also applications for the waterfront park in Millville, other city parks, historic preservation and much more, McQueen said.

This isn't the first time strategic plans have been done for the city, and many residents have complained the old plans ultimately sat on a shelf. But this time, leaders said it will be different, in large part because of Hurricane Michael.

However, it's worth noting a long-term plan that looks toward 2050 was part of McQueen's initial pitch when he applied for the job. Then when he started in September, he said he would deliver a look "down and in" and "up and out" within the first 120 days.

Because of the hurricane, it was a little late, but as he talked about the planning process he delivered pieces of the plan Tuesday.

The look down and in, he said, is still ongoing as he works to reconfigure the organizational chart to eliminate duplication of efforts and silos. He said the plan is 85 percent complete and he expects to finalize it at the end of the month, and bring it to the commission.

Up and out is a little more complicated. The first priority is safety and security, and after that he described "three equal lines of effort" covering infrastructure, the economy, and quality life. Changes in policy are expected to make those possible as well as significant infrastructure projects to update utilities and protect the environment.

McQueen also is looking at how to leverage Verizon's 5G investment.

All of this, with community input, will be realized in the long-term plan.

"With the storm ... we are going to be able to do things we could have thought about it doing, it would have taken 20 years to do, maybe, now we can do it in a lot less times because we have the funding to do it," Mayor Greg Brudnicki said. "We will be better because of this storm."

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