EDITORIAL: A Tale of Two Emerald Coast Courthouses

By Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach

Jun. 3–Okaloosa County officials hoping to pay for a new courthouse annex that could cost up to $85 million (including debt service and the price of land) should watch what happens in Santa Rosa County, where commissioners are talking about a bold, innovative way to build a judicial center.

But we won’t get our hopes up. Okaloosa officials tend to choose the bland over the bold, building big projects the old-fashioned way — by reaching into taxpayers’ pockets — instead of, say, partnering with the private sector.

The private sector is behind Santa Rosa’s latest idea. Commissioner Gordon Goodin said last week that developers have expressed interest in building the longplanned judicial center, then leasing it to the county on a long-term basis with an option to buy. The developers, he said, hope a new courthouse will jump-start commercial development in the Milton area. Mr. Goodin thinks tax dollars collected from the newly developed property could be used to pay off the courthouse lease.

“I think it’s a great idea to have the private sector involved,” said Commissioner Bob Cole.

A greater idea, certainly, than the one underpinning the Emerald Coast Conference Center on Okaloosa Island, which opened four years ago and has lost money ever since.

Okaloosa County commissioners could have let a private firm build the conference center but chose instead to make it a government project. In 1996, two groups of developers lobbied hard to be allowed to build a conference center on the island, along with nearby shops, restaurants and perhaps a theme park to ensure the center’s profitability. But residents complained, the commissioners shot down the developers’ plans, and the conference center re-emerged as a county-run, tax-supported venture.

Daily News readers who suggest today that the conference center be “sold to some hotel group” (as a letter writer put it) or that a “Destin Commons-type attraction” be built next door (as a Spouter opined) have missed the boat. Similar ideas were floated 11 years ago … and torpedoed by a shortsighted County Commission.

Too bad. We always thought they were promising ideas.

We hope Santa Rosa County’s courthouse planners will give promoters of a public-private partnership a fair hearing. We hope that if the notion sounds feasible and details can be worked out, the project will get the goahead. And we hope officials in Okaloosa County, wrestling with their own courthouse plans and jaw-dropping cost projections, will pay attention — and remember the blunder they made in ’96.

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