Small Town Florida

Florida Rural Broadband Alliance, Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport: Access and Opportunity in the Florida Panhandle

By Mike Randle

If you've ever been to Northwest Florida, the most likely reason was for a vacation. Destin, Panama City, Pensacola, St. George Island, Seaside, Watercolor, Navarre, Rosemary, you name the beach on the Panhandle and most everyone in the South and far beyond has visited one. After all, the beaches in Northwest Florida are some of the most beautiful in the world. There are plenty of places on this planet with emerald blue-green waters, but I know of no place anywhere on this Earth with whiter sands.

Tourism in Northwest Florida is a huge industry, with bed taxes alone accounting for millions per month for many counties with a total economic impact topping $5 billion a year for the region as a whole. According to data provider EMSI, visitor spending is responsible for eight percent of employment in Santa Rosa County (the lowest) to 25 percent of employment in Walton County (the highest) in the region's five coastal counties. Jobs tied to tourism in all of Northwest Florida's counties are estimated to be about 55,000 out of a total labor shed of more than 660,000.

Yet, if there ever was a time that the people, elected officials and economic development practitioners in Northwest Florida realized that living and dying on tourism is an economic development version of Russian roulette, it was in 2010. On April 20, 2010, the Macondo blowout, also known as the BP oil spill, changed the Northern Gulf Coast like few single events in its history. There have been many hurricanes that have shaken the Gulf to its core, such as those by the name of Camille, Opal, Rita, Ike and Katrina, but none of them may have had a more negative effect on the region than the name of Macondo.

The economic impact of the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and the resulting Macondo well spill may never be known. The interesting thing is for Northwest Florida, very little oil was found on its shores during the entire three months the spill was occurring and there is little if any evidence of it now. But the perception exists that the entire Gulf Coast was awash in oil. Nothing could be further from the truth. But that is what the Northern Gulf Coast, including Northwest Florida, is now dealing with after the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

Officials in Northwest Florida have always realized that their economy is tied too tight to tourism. That's an easy determination for many tourist destinations in the South such as Orlando, Tampa Bay, Virginia Beach, South Florida, New Orleans, Myrtle Beach and Nashville, just to name a few.

Diversity is the key with most any economy and with the ongoing real estate crisis combined with the Macondo well blowout, an effort to mix it up in Northwest Florida is critical to its future. Add the fact that the defense industry will undoubtedly see dramatic cutbacks soon (the defense and aerospace industry employs about 70,000 in Northwest Florida counting enlisted personnel at the region's seven military installations), what millions of people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia call "the beach" better start preparing to recruit any and every business and industry prospect that is out there. That preparation is in place and has been for years.

There is so much more to Northwest Florida than "the Beach"

There are 16 counties in Northwest Florida with only six of those fronting the Gulf of Mexico. If you have accessed Northwest Florida's beaches by road from the north, through Alabama and Georgia to the Florida border, you have experienced one of the poster children of the rural South. I know. I have visited all of the most challenged regions of the rural South many times, such as the Mississippi Delta that encompasses small parts of six Southern states and Appalachia, which includes parts of eight Southern states. I have also been to the Black Belt of Alabama, the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, Southside Virginia and South Georgia, among other places in the American South that define the word rural. The counties that are located north of "the beach" in Northwest Florida are some of the most rural you will find in the South.

That being the case, if the prosperous coastal counties of Northwest Florida are currently facing some of most challenging times ever, then what is happening in the rural counties north of the beach?

Since economic development was invented, there is one consistent strategy to create prosperity in a rural region. That strategy is to provide access. It started with the farm to market road system decades ago. Access to Northwest Florida, which has been in the planning and development stages for a decade or more, represents the modern day version of farm to market.

The biggest development in Northwest Florida's history and one of the South's most impressive access achievements occurred this year. On May 23, 2010 the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport opened for business. The airport is the first major airport to be designed and built since the September 11 attacks.

The new airport is essentially the relocation of the old Panama City-Bay County International Airport. But the story behind the airport's successful launch is quite a story.

The new airport is set on 4,000 acres that was donated by The St. Joe Company, which owns about 575,000 acres in the Florida Panhandle. St. Joe didn't donate the land just because it is a good corporate citizen in the region. The big real estate outfit has gigantic plans for development in and around the new airport at the beach beginning with its 1,000-acre VentureCrossings Enterprise Centre at West Bay. The new park offers "greenfield" commercial opportunities that include "through the fence" access to the new airport's 10,000-foot runway.

St. Joe is one of the most successful hospitality and second-home developers in the South, responsible for such outstanding Northwest Florida beach developments as Watercolor, WaterSound, RiverCamps and WindMark Beach. With the new Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport and VentureCrossings, St. Joe has embarked on a commercial and industrial real estate venture that has not been seen in the region. 

The benefits of the new airport are already being seen by companies in Northwest Florida. "As a defense research and engineering company working with the military here in Panama City, we travel all over the world and especially to the Washington, D.C. area," Glen McDonald said. McDonald is a vice president with Applied Research Associates (ARA) office in Panama City.

"Before the new airport opened, we spent about $1 million a year on airfare. That has been cut in half, or about $500,000 a year because of the new airport's successful recruitment of Southwest Airlines. We can get on a Southwest flight in the morning to BWA (Baltimore-Washington International Airport), get our work done and be back home (in Northwest Florida) at dinner time," McDonald said.

Florida Rural Broadband Alliance

There are other ways officials in Northwest Florida are providing access to the region in a proactive 21st century fashion. In August, the Florida Rural Broadband Alliance (FRBA) was awarded nearly $24 million to deploy a network designed to provide broadband Internet access to improve education, public health and safety services, as well as economic development opportunities in Northwest Florida's most rural counties.

Formed by Florida's Heartland REDI and Opportunity Florida, the two economic development organizations teamed to compete for funding the life-changing project. The $24 million grant is part of the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program to expand broadband access and adoption across the U.S. and is part of the Recovery Act Investments Stimulus Package.

FRBA is comprised of two Rural Areas of Critical Economic Concern (RACECs) established by Florida's governor. The Northwest Florida RACEC counties include Calhoun, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Holmes, Jackson, Liberty and Washington counties, two of which front "the beach." The other rural area that is part of the FRBA is in South Central Florida (see below).

South Central Florida also part of Florida Rural Broadband Alliance

Below Orlando in South Central Florida is the other rural region that is part of the Florida Rural Broadband Alliance (FRBA). It is called Florida's Heartland Regional Economic Development Initiative (FHREDI). It too will benefit from the $24 million federal stimulus grant to build new broadband infrastructure. The region is formed by DeSoto, Glades, Hardee, Hendry, Highlands and Okeechobee Counties.

The FRBA is a Florida limited liability company formed through the regional cooperation of local governments, economic development agencies and community activists from 15 rural disadvantaged Florida counties designed to meet the essential and advanced broadband network needs of unserved and underserved communities in the Northwest Florida Rural Area of Critical Economic Concern and the South Central Rural Area of Critical Economic Concern.

In 2009, FHREDI applied for a middle-mile, broadband grant to create a fiber optic network to connect Florida's Heartland cities and counties to the information highway and help close the digital divide. FHREDI was not awarded the grant.

However, a region in North Central Florida was awarded a grant for a similar project and when the Round 2 Grant Cycle opened, FHREDI, along with Opportunity Florida in the Northwest part of the state formed the FRBA. FRBA applied for a middle-mile broadband grant to create a wireless network and won the $24 million needed to deploy the network in the two rural regions.

Lynn Topel, executive director of Florida's Heartland REDI, said "We have always been a rural, agricultural community, but that is changing. This initiative and our FRBA partnership will give us a depth and breadth of opportunities that simply haven't been possible."

This article is sponsored by Progress Energy