Shannon NickinsonWhat happens when the residents of Pensacola won’t have the Main Street wastewater treatment plant site to kick around anymore?
For at least the last decade — make that decades — everything that was wrong with Pensacola could be linked to Old Stinky, a sewer plant that sat on the downtown Pensacola waterfront for at least 70 years.
Why don’t more people live downtown? Who wants to smell Old Stinky out the front door?
Why is the west side lagging behind neighborhoods such as Aragon and Old East Hill as they redevelop and grow? Who wants to live down the street from Old Stinky?
Even after the plant itself was demolished, its ghost loomed.
Why can’t the energy and development along the Palafox Street core of downtown move west?
Don’t know the second you put a shovel into the ground at the site of Old Stinky, you’ll have to pay to remediate it?
Last week business owners and philanthropists Quint and Rishy Studer offered to buy the property from the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority for $5.2 million cash.
The Studers’ offer was below the $8.9 million asking price, but it came with the promise that they would put life back into those 19 empty acres at the western edge of downtown. The offer is also about $2 million less than a 2013 offer from a Houston-area real estate developer that fizzled amid questions about that person’s plans and ability to develop the property.
“People have said, ‘What if there is so much environmental damage that you can’t build there?’” Quint Studer said. “Then we’ll create one great place for people to enjoy. We didn’t buy it with the idea that it had to be perfect.”
Drawing inspiration from Lake Park in Fort Myers and the water park in Destin Commons, Studer wants to create “a great place for families to come to,” including fields for soccer or lacrosse, as well as restrooms, concessions.”
That part of the vision for a “wellness village” could be ready for use by next baseball season, Studer says.
A medical facility along the lines of an urgent care or clinic could be in the mix, as could educational classrooms, maybe even residential space for people who would love to be able to walk to much of what our burgeoning downtown has to offer.
Put that next to the plans for Corrine Jones Park, where the City of Pensacola plans to create Admiral Mason Park for the west side.
The city has a $2,106,500 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to create a stormwater pond on West Government Street that will be designed in a fashion similar to the pond at Admiral Mason Park on Bayfront Parkway, with walking trails, benches, fountains, aquatic plants, bicycle rack, lighting and other amenities.
It will be walkable, visually appealing and environmentally friendly. Near what used to be a sewage treatment plant.
One by one, fellow Pensacolians, our excuses are falling away.
Beck Properties’ new building, One51 Main, is coming out of the ground at the Community Maritime Park, proving that someone not named Studer can invest in that site.
Beck sold to developer Fred Hemmer the former Vernon McDaniel Building on West Garden Street. Hemmer plans to build residential space and more on the site.
Bobby Switzer bought the Brent and Blount buildings with an eye presumably toward maximizing the underutilized spaces on nearly a whole block in our city’s heart.
Space Florida is getting nearer to having a tenant on the downtown tech park, which has been empty since its inception.
Money from inside and outside of the community is going into making Pensacola, a good city, great. Now when it comes to reasons why not, the old stand-by answers won’t hold water. That bucket has a hole in it, friends.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of PensacolaToday.com, a news and commentary website in Pensacola. Follow her on Twitter @snickinson.com. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
