As the towers of the old Baptist Hospital begin to come down, the city of Pensacola is set to make another attempt to find a master planner to design what will come next.
Crews are set to begin demolishing the old hospital towers—one floor at a time—as soon as June 11, but what comes next for the 38 acres the city controls after the old hospital comes down is still an open question.
Last year, the Pensacola City Council rejected a contract to hire Bayou District Consulting to plan the development after a large show of public opposition at a Dec. 11 council meeting.
Now, the council, meeting as the Community Redevelopment Agency, will vote to approve a revised proposal to seek new bids for a planner.
Cliff Collins, associate city administrator, said the new request for proposals, or RFP, makes several changes, but the biggest one is that it requires the selection of a master developer to occur in a future bidding process once a plan is in place, driven by community input.
The RFP will consist of two phases: community input will be gathered in phase one, and phase two will be a study of what is feasible on the site.
“I will admit that in the current RFP, I think we have the appropriate checks and balances to make sure that the information we get from the community, we take that to heart,” Collins said. “Because at one point the community was saying, ‘We weren’t listened to.’”
The RFP requires a city selection committee to make a recommendation on the winning bidder to the mayor and City Council. The issue of the selection committee was a controversial point in the last process, as many of those opposed to the selection of Bayou District Consulting felt the selection committee should have had more representation from the community.
The new five-member committee will consist of three city staff members and former Councilwoman Jewel Cannada-Wynn, who served on the first committee, and a fifth member to be named by either Councilman Delarian Wiggins or the CRA Westside Redevelopment Board. In the first iteration of the committee, Cannada-Wynn was the only member of the body not on the city’s staff.
“So the mayor made it very clear that his position was (he) will support whatever Councilman Wiggins brings forward,” Collins said. “So working with Councilman Wiggins, we developed this plan for the selection committee. … Generally, those committees are always from the city, so this was more of a concession.”
If the City Council approves the RFP, then a contract could be awarded this fall. The council meeting to consider the RFP begins as 3:30 p.m. on June 15.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola plans another search for Baptist master planner
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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By Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal | USA TODAY Network
