Studer Community Institute

A meeting of the minds on ST Aerospace

February 22, 2014
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ community-dashboard

The City of Pensacola and Escambia County have a meeting of the minds about ST Aerospace. Friday afternoon the agenda for the Feb. 27 Pensacola City Council meeting was revised to include the draft interlocal agreement that will put together the local funding elements to bring the Singapore-based aerospace company to the Pensacola airport. The County Commissioners next meet on March 6, when they could sign off on the agreement. You can read the draft agreement here. It will cost $37,344,300 to build the company a hangar, shops, storage, offices, aircraft servicing facilities, site ingress and egress, movement areas and parking to accommodate the 300 jobs the aircraft servicer plans to bring to Pensacola. For the local share of that, the county will pay $8 million, with $3.2 million in the form of a loan to the city. The city will secure the loan with its communication services tax. it will be repaid beginning in Dec. 31, 2018 and will be repaid in seven years. Other key points: -- If the company leaves within 10 years and the city cannot recruit a suitable replacement tenant, the city still will pay back the loan. -- If ST Aerospace doesn’t employ an average of 300 people after three years, the city will pay the county $2,286 for each job below the 300 target number. -- Other funding sources for the project include an $11.6 million grant from the Florida Department of Transportation; up to $7 million from the Industry Recruitment, retention and Expansion Fund obtained by ST Aerospace; and a $3.5 million grant from the airport’s federal Airport Improvement Program entitlement fund for the fiscal year 2014. On Tuesday, Feb. 25, city officials are hosting a public meeting at 5:30 p.m. at the Vickrey Center on Summit Boulevard to update residents on the project. Likely to be among the questions residents have will be the impact the company’s operation would have on noise at the airport and in the surrounding neighborhood. That question has surfaced, for example, in a Facebook group originally organized to oppose a zoning request by East Hill Baptist Church that would have allowed discount retailer Dollar General to build a store at the intersection of Summit and Spanish Trail. ST Aerospace has been the subject of much political theater locally since Mayor Ashton Hayward announced on Dec. 17 that the city had a Memorandum of Understanding with the company to relocate its operations from Mobile to Pensacola. Initially County Commissioner Gene Valentino issued harsh public words for Hayward because Valentino said the mayor had failed to consult the county appropriately before the announcement. After a flurry of dueling news releases, most ruffled feathers seem to have smoothed down, with all parties citing the economic impact of the project. Valentino spoke favorably about the ST Aerospace project at a Jan. 7 town hall meeting at the Lexington Terrace Community Center. “What’s interesting about, (ST Aerospace), it’s not associated with Airbus,” Valentino said at the meeting. “As a result we’re sending out a separate message to the world, ‘Hey world, we’re not relying on Airbus. And if you come to town, we don’t want Airbus to be 80 percent of your business. If it’s 10, 20 percent of your business, that’s great. We hope you’re as diversified as we the county are trying to be, so that if Airbus was to leave somewhere down the road, the whole house of cards doesn’t fall.’

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A meeting of the minds on ST Aerospace

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