A boondoggle in the Florida boondocks

By DIANE ROBERTS, Special to the Times
Published October 9, 2007

Here's the plan: build a very big airport - a Tampa International-sized airport - way out in the wild next to Pine Log State Forest. Call it the "Panama City-Bay County International Airport," even though Panama City is 30 miles away and already has an airport. Insist that West Florida "needs" expanded air service, even though passenger traffic from Panama City is half what it was in 2000. Be shocked! shocked! if anybody suggests that the raison d'etre for airport relocation is so that St. Joe Co. can develop its vast adjacent acres into high-priced ersatz "Old Florida" villages with all the charm of a theme park.

Never mind that St. Joe is donating 4,000 acres for the new site, half of it wetlands which will be destroyed. (St. Joe "promises" to set aside 9,000 acres of conservation land in return). Never mind that the housing boom which made St. Joe as fat and happy as a kennel tick is over, and that the company has been laying people off.

Florida taxpayers will take care of it. We always do. Even a boondoggle in the boondocks.

"This has nothing to do with airports and airplanes and such," says Donald Hodges. "It's a land deal. In Florida, if you peel an onion down far enough, you find a land deal."

Hodges retired from Delta Air Lines after 20 years as an engineer, executive and airport design expert who worked on the expansion of Atlanta Hartsfield. He isn't exactly antiaviation. He's not a wild-eyed socialist, either: "I'm on the Bay County Republican Executive Committee, for God's sake," he says.

But he does think that this new airport is a "house of cards," an environmental nightmare and a lousy economic proposition. He's hardly alone. The people of Bay County voted against the new airport. But hey, here in Florida winning a vote is often just a suggestion.

Boondoggle boosters insist the project will bring jobs to West Florida, though a study conducted by an Orlando economist projected that most would be in the service sector. Want fries with that $700,000 second home?

The Federal Aviation Agency, concluding that the economic benefit of relocation was "slight," will only grant $72-million, the same amount they would spend upgrading the existing facility. To be fair, the FAA did concede that the new airport would save on fuel consumption - after all, it's 6 miles closer to Atlanta.

This whole deal hangs on what Joseph Tannehill Sr., chairman of the Airport and Industrial District, terms "deficiencies" at the current airport: short runways, residential areas on three sides and water on the fourth. Curiously, airports with the same problems, say, New York's LaGuardia, D.C.'s Reagan-National, and Boston's Logan, have yet to be shut down by the feds.

Boondoggle boosters claim the existing airport can't lengthen its runways because that would damage "a particularly environmentally sensitive part of St. Andrews Bay." Instead of extending into the water, they prefer to sell the existing airport to a developer who plans to bedeck 12,500 feet of waterfront with condos, retail and lots of lovely asphalt. Plus a dredged-out marina. Which won't harm the bay at all, of course.

The punch line to this unfunny joke is that the parlous state of Florida's economy combined with the national credit crunch, may bring down the house of cards. The deal to sell the existing airport was supposed to close more than three weeks ago, but it hasn't. Costs for the new airport are galloping up toward half a billion dollars.

The Wall Street Journal in a September 29 piece called "Is Florida Over?" reckons the wheels have come off the souped-up economic vehicle that was Florida real estate. What with stratospheric insurance rates and scary weather, the state must now compete with Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and even Alabama for baby boomer bucks. "The airport has devolved down to an aspirational project," says Hodges.

That and another shining opportunity for Florida to show its commitment to corporate welfare.

Diane Roberts, a former member of the Times editorial board, teaches English and writing at Florida State University.

[Last modified October 8, 2007, 21:44:23]