Airport Built, It's Time to See if the Traffic Comes
March 10, 2010, 5:19 AM
The first new international airport in the United States in more than decade is set to open in May near Panama City, Fla., a community of 37,000 people on the state's panhandle. That is no small feat given the environmental, regulatory and financial hurdles involved in building runways and terminals, as well as community opposition to planes flying overhead.
But the airport, Northwest Florida Beaches International, is also noteworthy because it is perhaps more of a real estate project than an effort to address a pressing transportation problem, The New York Times's Susan Stellin writes. Backed by a major Florida landowner, it is part of a plan to create "a new national and international destination," as one investor presentation proclaims, in a relatively sleepy region of beaches, barrier islands and wetlands.
"Silicon Valley at one point was out in the middle of nowhere," said Britt Greene, president and chief executive of the St. Joe Company, the Florida developer that donated the land for the new airport and is the driving force behind the project. "We think we can do the same."
St. Joe, once primarily a timber and paper company, has shifted to development and real estate, and owns hundreds of thousands of acres of land in northwest Florida. The airport property, northwest of Panama City, occupies just a fraction of the company's 75,000-acre West Bay sector plan, which envisions 27,000 residential units, 490 hotel rooms, 2 marinas and 37 million square feet of commercial space that would bring tourists and entrepreneurs to the panhandle.
The existing Panama City-Bay County International Airport handles 11 departures a day, with about 160,000 departing passengers a year. Projections sketched out by the airport authority years ago anticipated that a new airport with a longer runway would entice airlines to schedule bigger planes that would nearly triple that passenger number by 2018 - including some international flights.
Regulatory hurdles were cleared, legal challenges from environmental groups were overcome and construction began in January 2008. Then the economy collapsed, casting the airport project in a different financial context.
Critics argue that there was never a need for a new airport - especially one that will cost more than $300 million - and that construction problems have caused the environmental damage they had predicted, The Times said.
Proponents counter that the airport is a long-term bet on northwest Florida's future, and that competing to attract businesses and tourists requires a transportation infrastructure that better connects the panhandle with the rest of the world. The airport will have space for customs and immigration facilities and runways long enough to handle any eventual overseas flights.
It may be years before anyone finds out which viewpoint is right. But in the meantime, both sides can point to evidence that bolsters their version of events.
St. Joe and the airport authority scored a coup late last year when they persuaded Southwest Airlines to begin flying to Panama City through a deal that ensures the carrier will not lose money on the service for three years.
Starting May 23, Southwest will operate two daily nonstop flights to Baltimore, Houston, Nashville and Orlando. Delta now flies to Panama City from Atlanta and Memphis, relying on regional partners to operate the flights.
"Our job, and our challenge, is to build a market - a market that heretofore has not existed," said Bob Montgomery, vice president for properties at Southwest. He said the routes were chosen based on research that residents in those markets have second homes near Panama City, which they would visit more often if they could take affordable flights rather than drive.
The Baltimore route would link military personnel and contractors in the Washington area with installations near Panama City, like Eglin Air Force Base, which fits St. Joe's strategy to attract aerospace companies to the Panhandle.
But Southwest's arrangement - a first for the low-fare carrier - means it is hedging its bet on the region and can pull out if the routes do not prove to be profitable. "We weren't in the position to take a huge amount of risk ourselves," Mr. Montgomery said.
Mr. Greene, of the St. Joe Company, said the Southwest deal was well worth the passengers he expects the airline will bring to the area, visitors who will fill hotel rooms, shop at stores and possibly buy second homes in developments his company has planned or has already built.
"Tourism will grow as a result of Southwest connecting us to the rest of the nation," he said. "Our new dominant strategy is economic development and job growth."
Not everyone in the community believes that vision will pan out. Among the most vocal of those skeptics is Don Hodges, a retiree who worked in airport development for Delta for decades and describes himself as "not an opponent, but certainly a vocal critic" of the way the new airport has been handled.
"It's been oversold, underdesigned, undermanaged and now botched as a construction project," said Mr. Hodges, who lives in Bay County. "They've got layers of construction experts who have not been able to deliver on what layers of planning experts promised."
Mr. Hodges has raised his objections in detailed posts on his blog and on various news sites, mostly taking issue with the need for a new airport but also documenting environmental damage that has occurred during construction. Much of the land where the airport is being built is wetlands, with creeks flowing nearby, and heavy rains have caused flooding on the property and storm water breaches that have muddied the waterways, leading to fines of more than $350,000 from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
That possibility was why the Natural Resources Defense Council filed two lawsuits to block the project, though the group lost those legal challenges. "Unfortunately, a lot of what we were concerned about has come to pass," said Benjamin Longstreth, a senior lawyer with the council. "Filling all these wetlands we thought and continue to think really jeopardizes the health of the ecosystem in West Bay - for an airport that was entirely unnecessary."
Randy Curtis, the airport's executive director, disputed the idea that the old airport could have been modified to accommodate larger planes, citing residential neighborhoods and the nearby bay as barriers to extending the existing runway. The new airport will have a 10,000-foot runway, longer than the two 7,000-foot runways at LaGuardia Airport in New York.
Mr. Curtis acknowledged that managing storm water was the airport's biggest challenge, but said that once the system for filtering and treating storm water was finished it would exceed regulatory requirements.
"Once the airport is completed and constructed, you'll actually have a net environmental improvement in the area," he said, referring to the conservation easement St. Joe agreed to in order to mitigate the effects of building the airport on wetlands.
As part of its West Bay sector plan, the St. Joe Company promised to set aside 41,000 acres as a nature preserve, though environmental groups note that so far only 10,000 acres have been legally given this status, leaving the remaining parcel's fate uncertain.
"What we had wanted them to do was create a written document where they legally put the land in a conservation trust though an easement," Mr. Longstreth said. "They also could give it to an entity like the Nature Conservancy, but none of that has been done. It's simply protected by the creation of a county plan that could be changed at any point."
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