Mayor Mark Sheldon delivered the City's first State of the City report to the community March 2 in the City Council Chambers of City Hall. Mayor Sheldon used the speech to recap 2022 accomplishments and lay out plans for 2023 and beyond, while outlining how past, current and future initiatives are driven by the priorities established through the adoption of the City's Strategic Plan. Below is the Mayor's speech, which can be viewed on the City's Facebook page here or here on the website. For more information, contact the City's Communications Director, Debbie Ingram.

S T A T E    O F    T H E    C I T Y 

Good evening and welcome to the first ever, formal State of the City address for Panama City Beach.

It's a bit remarkable isn’t it – the City is just over 50 years old, and yet we're still doing a lot of things for the first time. We may be a young city, but we are not the reckless teenager we were in 2015 – we’ve learned some hard lessons and earned some gray hairs to grow up into a responsible adult you'd want as your next-door neighbor, or the real fun cousin you can’t wait to visit on your next vacation. 

The bucket list first set by Councilmembers and Mayors before us is bold, inspiring, and challenging, and many thanks are owed to my current colleagues on the Council. With us tonight is Vice Mayor Paul Casto, Councilman Phil Chester, Councilmember Mary Coburn, and Councilman Michael Jarman. This team works so hard to prioritize policies and projects to check things off the list to make this community the best it can be. Of course, the daily work of implementing these policies and projects falls on our outstanding City management team and their staff, who we cannot thank enough. We are a city with almost 400 employees who work tirelessly to make sure that you have all you need to enjoy every aspect of our paradise. These employees are the backbone of who we are, and we are truly thankful for each and every one of them and the work they do for all of us.

Before we dive into the recap of what we did in 2022, and where we are now, let me back up to 2020, when the City adopted its first strategic plan, with an aim of creating and maintaining a safe, family-friendly, vibrant community with an outstanding quality of life. With the input received from citizens, stakeholders, and businesses, areas were identified as priorities for 2021-2026. Tonight, I will review the priorities of the strategic plan and update you on what has been and is being accomplished.  

Priority One is Financial Health: This City Council is committed to fiscal responsibility, accountability, and transparency.

Our capital plans for the next several years are ambitious, but significantly, they are not dependent in any way on property taxes. We continue to be the largest city in the state with no personal property tax. The City dedicated the summer to creating a budget that planned for growth of personnel and facilities, and held two public hearings to consider, among other things, the best use of City funds and projects over a three-year horizon. 

It’s a big budget, our biggest yet, and while it presents a heavy price tag for infrastructure, which is our City’s biggest opportunity, it also relies heavily on grant funding and other restricted revenue streams to pay for these capital projects. In 2021 and 2022, the City received 13 grants for stormwater outfall and drainage projects, septic-to-sewer conversions, new safe room facilities for parks, utilities and police, utilities relocations, streetlighting repairs, and a new fire training tower. Some of these grants are funding projects that are now under construction, such as the CRA lighting repairs and the fire training tower. Several more are in the design stage getting shovel ready for next year. All these projects will provide tremendous new assets to increase the safety of our community, as in the case of the streetlights, fire tower and safe rooms, or ensure protection of our greatest natural asset — our beautiful sugar white sandy beach.

Getting the funds for all these projects is not an easy task. We have hired federal and state lobbyists so that our community can get its fair share of public dollars for infrastructure and other improvements. Last year we saw these efforts begin to materialize in significant ways, and we remain confident that with persistence and hard work, they will continue to completion. To continue these funding efforts, we have a team going to Washington D.C. next week to meet with the Florida delegation and several key departments. We also have a planned trip to Tallahassee to see our state lawmakers and departments in April. We know the state is led by the best governor in the country, Governor Ron DeSantis, who loves this area, and we are blessed he and his family spend so much time here. He sees what we are facing, and we want to tap into the state budget to help get more of these projects completed. These projects have great support from our local elected officials, and I want to thank Senator Jay Trumbull and Representative Griff Griffiths for all their efforts.

The uptick in grants and expansion of so many projects has triggered some new developments behind the scenes too. In 2022, we kicked off a multi-year process to implement a City-wide software update to unify the activities of all the City’s departments. Once all is said and done, our Finance Department will be able to quickly produce real-time reports of revenues and expenditures that will in turn better inform policy decisions as necessary data becomes more quickly and accurately generated. 

Which leads to our second priority, Economic Development. We want to aggressively support economic development that will create a diverse, more resilient, and long-term robust economy. To help with this, we stood up an Economic Development Citizen Committee, which moved forward the creation of a video to showcase all the resources our community can offer folks who are looking to locate or relocate, their business operations here in paradise. As a numbers guy, here are some highlights I’d like to share with you:

Year over year housing growth went from 68 single family permits to 131 permits. Our commercial permits went from 11 to 32 permits and increased in value from $7M to $46M. The total of all permits in the last 12 months was $143M. We approved the City’s largest budget for $256M – the largest in the City’s history. Business tax receipts for Fiscal Year 2022 were $18.8M and we saw a 26% increase in new businesses. Lastly, short-term rentals were $4.2M, up 8% year over year.

We have done all this and at the same time at every City Council meeting, I read a list of the happenings in this City. And the list, the special events and tournaments, are year-round! Panama City Beach does not have the “off season” that it once did so our business community has more year-round potential. We’d like to offer a major thank-you to the team at Visit Panama City Beach who consistently and successfully market our community. There is something to do every weekend in Panama City Beach, from Iron Man races to food truck festivals to classic car shows, boat shows, Oktoberfest, Pirates Fest, July 4^th celebrations to New Year’s Eve.  We truly have so many events that you can’t list them all. What a real fun place to live, work and play, right? There are so many reasons to want to live here, heck, it is why my wife and I moved here to raise our family. I want to thank my wife, Jessica, my daughter Sydney, and my son, John Robert, for being here tonight and supporting our City every day.

As you can see, it’s no secret at this point that we have continued to see unprecedented growth, not only in the last year but in the last several. And all of us understand that our biggest challenge is transportation mobility, our third priority to discuss tonight. To that, we must talk about the Front Beach Road Community Redevelopment Area.

Our Front Beach Road CRA marked its 20th year in 2021-2022, with the completion of Front Beach Road Segment 2 and the award of Segment 3 and State Road 79. A new CRA Manager, The Corradino Group, was hired in 2021, because this project was taking entirely too long. As a result, the pace of the CRA's projects has sped up in major ways. I have every expectation that next year we will be celebrating the completion of the Front Beach Road Segment 3 project, educating everyone on how to use the City's first roundabout at the intersection of Front Beach Road and Highway 79 – so we all aren’t just going around and around – and encouraging our residents, businesses, and our visitors to bear with us through growing pains as we construct Segments 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. The completed redevelopment of this City main street will vastly increase mobility in the City, and the undergrounding of utilities as part of this effort will ensure this corridor is as beautiful as it is functional for the cars, pedestrians, bicyclists and trolleys for our residents and visitors. 

North of Front Beach Road, we coordinated with the Florida Department of Transportation to raise Alf Coleman Road out of the flood plain and improve it with much-needed sidewalks and sought their assistance to help fund a second roundabout project on North Richard Jackson Boulevard. Bids for the Alf Coleman project will open next week, and the project should be under construction by the end of this year. We recognize that these north-south connectors are especially critical to students and families who attend Arnold High School and Breakfast Point Academy, and we cannot wait to see these projects completed and these necessary routes to schools made safer.

Now, we haven’t forgotten about our roads outside of the CRA, though you may have noticed that we paused our annual resurfacing program last year. This pause was deliberate, as it was determined in our budget workshops to combine the proposed programs for 2022 and 2023. Doing so allowed us to have a bigger project to get a better per mile price. That combined resurfacing project is underway right now and will improve 17 miles of City streets over the next several months.

If it isn’t obvious by now, let me be as clear as I can. This Council truly believes that the City’s overall appearance is critical to the community’s image, quality, and vitality, and we’ve done some exciting things to ensure it stays an attractive community for you to enjoy a high quality of life.

We have spent over $1M on odor control measures going in at the wastewater treatment plant on Gulf Boulevard and several lift stations around the City. We have created no smoking areas in our parks and City beaches for people to enjoy. We will continue to move forward with the SeeLife public art project that began in 2021 and will soon unveil 10 new sculptures in phase 2 of that project. We launched a plan to replace streetlights along Front Beach Road and identified crosswalks that will be signalized to improve safety in our tourist corridor. We are also working with FP&L on lighting our neighborhoods better than ever. We solicited partners for the redevelopment of the City footprint at the Russell-Fields City Pier, and will soon see that beachfront area expanded and improved with new decking, a rooftop restaurant and new restrooms.

It’s not only projects that make this community such a nice place to live though. The City is committed to providing a safe and secure environment for its residents, businesses and visitors—our fourth priority.  This can’t be accomplished without a lot of very hardworking people.

I would like to take a moment to brag on our building department and code enforcement teams. Our City is seeing massive growth, and these employees have been working hard behind the scenes to process and review development applications and permits, and out on the streets to keep an eye on construction and maintenance and nuisance abatement to keep the city cleaned up and safer for all of us.

As a City, we are in the process of also upgrading our fire department assets and capabilities.  Through the leadership of Chief Ray Morgan and his team, we are starting construction of a new fire station by City Hall and replacing Station 32 on Hutchison Boulevard. These projects have been in design for a few years and are now shovel ready and fully funded.  The current fire station at our city hall campus is not a safe facility and our team has to leave the building in a storm situation. This facility is funded by the city as FEMA denied the claim when the roof pulled off during Hurricane Michael.

Along with our fire department, our police department through the leadership of Chief J.R. Talamantez and his team, continues to grow. This City Council has approved every ask of our police department as we know their requests are based on what is needed to keep all of us safe. Increasing the number of our K-9 officers has been a priority. Friday you can see a K-9 in action as the department holds a demo here at the Municipal Complex at 2:30 p.m. We are working with our grant team to secure funding to build a K-9 housing facility. At the same time, we are upgrading our police impound yard here on the City Hall campus.  We have launched a car seat safety program so our families can have peace of mind traveling. The team also continues to do an amazing job with community outreach from the annual Cops N Kids event to Christmas with a Cop and the Annual Cops N Kids Toy Drive.  We fully support our BLUE and always will!

These employees and the departments they represent are the backbone of our community.  Knowing we can count on them every day enables the Council to work on our final priority: To further improve the community’s quality of life, the City will invest in and seek strategic partnerships to promote enhancements in the cultural, recreational, health, aesthetics and educational assets of the community.

One thing the citizen survey and strategic plan highlighted for us was a need for more healthcare on Panama City Beach. Our community needed a hospital. Through the amazing vision of The St. Joe Company, Florida State University and Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, we had a groundbreaking ceremony for a new hospital, and the facility is full steam ahead on the corner of Highway 79 and Phillip Griffiths Sr. Parkway. This is not your everyday hospital. This is a RESEARCH, TEACHING, AND CLINICAL DELIVERY hospital!  This is a state-of-the-art education facility. Physicians will be able to do their residency here and grow with our community. This facility, when fully operational, is anticipated to have over 400 beds to serve our community and visitors. This is a true blessing for our city. 

Also, just outside the city limits, HCA has opened another medical asset to the beach –a free-standing ER! We thank all those involved in changing the medical landscape for our city.  These are major investments, and we know that they will pay off for everyone.

Speaking of great projects, we did a new master plan for Frank Brown Park and Aaron Bessant Park. The City as well as our partners at Visit Panama City Beach, have committed to expending more funds to add more amenities for the future. We are adding a skatepark, pickleball courts, new basketball courts, a community center safe room, and a future BMX course.  To do all this we are straightening the road at Frank Brown Park.  Also, we are working with the Florida Department of Transportation to work on a pedestrian overpass to connect the two parks over Panama City Beach Parkway. This will allow people to travel from Front Beach Road all the way to Gayle’s Trails, which has an entry point at Frank Brown. 

Speaking of Gayle’s Trails, we are doing an expansion!  At our last City Council meeting last week, this great Council approved funding to add another 1.5 miles of trails from east of Clara Avenue to Breakfast Point, which will connect past Arnold High School, giving a clear path for people to use.  After the meeting we got word that the state, through the hard work of Interim Public Works Director Kathy Younce, will be increasing by $1.7M the SUN Trail grant funds through the Florida Department of Transportation! This is great news for our City and the trail system. This trail will now only cost the city less than $80,000 to complete.

In 2022 we worked diligently with the Florida Department of Transportation to keep their plan moving forward to 6-Lane Panama City Beach Parkway. We had several meetings with them, and the City has spent millions of dollars to relocate water and sewer lines as it was never a thought that “Back Beach Road” would be as wide as it will be once construction is completed. I am happy to say this project is FULL STEAM AHEAD and two contracts to widen the road will be in place this year. One contract is from Mandy Lane – at the entrance to Frank Brown Park – to Nautilus. The second contract is from Nautilus to Richard Jackson. There are two separate construction contracts so the work can be happening at the same time. While we all understand that road construction is never fun, we know that it is necessary.

It is my sincere hope that much of what you’ve already heard or will hear is not a surprise, as we work hard to tell you everything that is happening. We have grown our communication to people through our social media platforms and have over 118,000 followers on our Facebook page. We made over 500 posts last year for your information. Please check out our website, www.pcbfl.gov, for community updates, meeting calendars and agendas, approved budgets and legislation, the strategic plan I mentioned earlier, and all sorts of useful information about doing business with the City.

The City is in a great position from all the work that has been done, is being done, and is still planned to be done in 2023. We are growing, but we are staying true to who we are as a family destination for thousands to live their best life daily and millions to see and visit each year.

Thank you all and God Bless Panama City Beach and God Bless our country.

Click here to see the City's Strategic Plan.