Sal Nodjomian: This Is What Niceville Needs To Do To Thrive In The Future

In Brief:

🧑‍💼 Who: Sal Nodjomian, Niceville City Councilman and former Eglin Air Force Base commander.

📋 What: Reflecting on his 12 years of service and discussing Niceville’s growth, challenges, and future opportunities.

📅 When: Stepping down from his role in March after a 12-year tenure.

📍 Where: Niceville, Florida, focusing on projects like the Niceville Landing Complex and Deer Moss Creek.

❓ Why: Nodjomian aimed to serve the community, shape its future, and leave a foundation for the next generation of leaders.

Across Bayshore Drive in Niceville from the soon-to-be-built Niceville Landing Complex, sits a charming two-story building made of red brick. The lone rectangular outpost from a bygone era of small-town charm also signals the future for Niceville.

 

Inside the building is the office of soon-to-be-former Niceville City Councilman Sal Nodjomian. After a dozen years, Nodjomian will step down in March as one of the City’s five elected leaders. He decided not to seek re-election.

 

The former Eglin Base Commander retired from the U.S. Air Force after 24 years of service. After his retirement, he says he needed to do something to continue his ethos of service to others. “exclusively working at my private sector capacity left a big gaping hole in my soul, and I felt like I needed to do something to stay connected to the community, to give back to the community. I’d been effectively the mayor, if you will, of Eglin Air Force Base. So to do that and then step out and go, ‘I don’t want to touch this anymore,’ it just wasn’t right, and that’s why I did it [took an appointment and then ran for election as a city council member]. I didn’t do it with 13 years in mind. I’ll tell you that, though.”

 

He stayed on the council for over a dozen years because he felt he could make a generational difference for the City as it moved into what he calls ‘Niceville 3.0.’ The first iteration occurred before Lannie Corbin became City Manager; the second era took place in the 50-plus years Corbin served as the highest non-elected public servant at the City. The third era began when Corbin retired in 2022.

 

As he prepares to leave the seat, Nodjomian sat down with Mid Bay News Publisher Christopher Saul to talk about the strengths of the City, its weaknesses and what he sees as the future of the City he has called home for so long.

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SWOT Analysis

We asked several questions related to what the business school-types call a ‘SWOT’ Analysis. Nodjomian led us through what he sees are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) for the City going forward.

Strengths

Niceville has plenty of tick marks in the strengths column as it moves forward into the Niceville 3.0 era Nodjomian talked about. First among them, in Nodjomian’s opinion, is the Niceville Downtown Landing Area in the Community Redevelopment Zone along Bayshore Drive. “The beauty is, the heavy lifting has been done, the concept plan was done, the engineering has been done,” Nodjomian said.

On the other side of town, the Deer Moss Creek development could bring hundreds of homes and thousands of new residents before everything is said and done. Nodjomian sees the development, which will also have commercial and retail space, as the second anchor of the town.

RELATED: This is How Much A Home in Deer Moss Creek’s Newest Phases Will Cost You.

In addition to the opportunities development brings to town, the City’s new administrative leadership under City Manager David Deitch and Deputy City Manager Kristen Shell are a plus in Nodjomian’s book. “That whole team has never been better,” Nodjomian mused, “The additional checks and transparency that has been brought has been long overdue. Those are things are going to do nothing but serve our our residents, our constituency, really well.”

Weaknesses

Nodjomian says his biggest regret on the council was not starting the Niceville Landing Project, which aims to create a walkable downtown (you can see the plans here) for the City, sooner.

My regret is that we were too slow to move. We knew what we needed to do here at the landing years ago. We drug our feet on that,” Nodjomian said of the project – which encompasses more than six acres of real estate on the northeastern shore of Boggy Bayou, “now, we’re stuck here with construction costs that are 30% higher than they were just a few years ago.”

He also notes that, with hindsight, he wishes the City decided to connect to the Arbennie Pritchett Water Reclamation Facility Okaloosa County set up on, instead of stayhing with an aged reclamation plant on SR-285 near Jackson Guard.

Opportunities

Nodjomian says the changes wrought by the Niceville Council over the last decade have been overwhelmingly positive – as noted by the City’s rapid growth from 13,000 residents to about 17,000. He believes the City has a max carrying capacity of about 25,000 people – should the City incorporate areas in the county and Deer Moss Creek finish development.

He cited the Niceville Senior Center, the eventual decision to move forward with the Old Town Landing downtown area, new parks and green spaces for residents, the hiring of a new city manager, David Deitch, to replace longtime leader Lannie Corbin and the implementation of a strategic approach to planning for the City’s future as big wins.

City and County governments in Northwest Florida have had a lot of discussion surrounding parcels of land owned by Eglin Air Force Base that the Air Force cannot use for testing weapons due to their proximity to population centers – or the fact that they are separated by roads or other construction features in the area.

These so-called ‘orphan parcels,’ like the ones in the map below on College Boulevard, could make a difference in the creation of more affordable housing, more commercial space, or other needs that the residents of Niceville and the surrounding area continue to raise as a concern to the council.

“I think we can have some very good conversations on what’s highest and best use and what can be done with some of those things,” Nodjomian said of the land, “It’s not all affordable housing. There are plans out there that show housing developments on that on that land, and maybe some of it will, in fact, go down that road. But there’s other things the city needs. There’s rec space that we need.”

 

Threats

While the City and Eglin Air Force Base have worked together well in the past, any change in that relationship for the worse constitutes a serious threat to the growth and stability of the City in the long term.

 

The City has a long-term lease deal with the Air Force for what’s known as the Mullet Festival Grounds. The land, which is on the far north extremity of the City’s boundaries and includes a majority of the City’s space for recreational sports, like the Howard Hill Soccer Complex, is key to the quality of life for residents – especially those with children.

 

RELATED: The Chances for a Mullet Festival in 2025 Look Grim

 

The other main threat for Nicevlle is that city leadership does not balance small-town charm with healthy growth. “I estimate the capacity of this City could be 25,000 at some point in time. I don’t want people to feel like we’ve lost our small-town charm, “Nodjomian said, “Life’s a series of trade-offs. By having 25,000 people, you become a different type of community. The opportunities go up. There’s more job opportunities, there’s more housing opportunities, there’s more cultural events that can be supported. Because somebody’s going to look and go, ‘Oh, it’s a 25,000-person versus a 12,000-person community,’ I will consider bringing in a studio, an art studio, or a dance studio, or whatever fill-in-the-blank. We’re going to be able to program events down here at this waterside landing that we could not have done as a smaller community. The trade-offs are more people, more traffic, more, you know, more congestion, maybe more crime, the things that nobody wants to talk about.”

Why Does City Government Matter?

“I’m gonna go my soapbox for a minute,” Nodjomian said with a big grin on his face, “I’m sure some academic is going to debate me on this, but I would argue there is no form of government or, more important than local. Yes, we pay federal taxes. I got it, and we can go up and down about one party versus the next. But if you look historically, the changes that occur are in the margins, whether it’s a democratically controlled Congress or Republican-controlled Congress, a Democratic White House or Republican? You look at it because the system is intentionally built for checks and balances. So we go through so much gyration for very little movement in Washington locally, what do you think costs more? Your ad valorem, your property taxes, your sales taxes, all those things are local. Those are local decisions and how we spend those dollars and what we yield for them. Local government is non partisan.”

 

He says local city and county governments have much more of a regular effect on your daily life than national or even state governments do. Trash and water rates, what roads get fixed up first or whether or not a new park gets purchased and maintained are up to local governments. Plus – these are the people that matter the most in your life.

 

“I heard a quote, and I can’t attribute it, and this was literally less than a week here, because I used it in a presentation that I gave on Tuesday.” Nodjomian said, “And the quote was, it’s very hard to hate face to face. Think about that for a second. It’s really easy to get on Facebook or Instagram and rail against something. It’s really easy to sit in our comfort of our room and talk about something that’s happening halfway around the world or in some other state or whatever. But when you’re sitting with somebody and you’re talking to somebody, even if you have different opinions, it’s hard to hate. So having community, whether it’s local government, whether it’s town halls, whether it’s festivals, whether whatever fill in the blank, just being together and trying to understand where somebody else is coming from, is critical if we’re ever gonna get to a point where we all don’t feel like the world is spiraling out of control, it’s hard to hate up close.

Youth Advisory Council

City Council is a big commitment. In addition to the meetings, there are thousands of pages of documents to read. They aren’t exactly beach reads, by the way. Councilmembers also have to serve on various transportation, planning and other boards in additon to their day jobs.

 

But the lagniappe responsibilities can also be the most fufilling part of serving as a council member.

 

For Nodjomian, he found that to be the case with the Youth Advisory Council. The council, which consists of local high schoolers, serves as an advisory body to the city council and has succeeded in moving the council to take on various projects – like the commitment of funds to maintain the high school’s track.

 

The council also creates and manages local non-profit and charitable activities like the annual 5k to raise money for the Emerald Coast Autism Center at Northwest Florida State College.

 

But that’s not why Nodjomian loves it.

 

He cares most about the molding of Niceville’s future leadership cadre in the twilight of his career as a councilman and as the leader of Matrix Design Group. “If I’m not trying to groom the next generation, if I’m not out there making time in a busy schedule to touch a few lives, 85 let’s call it in this particular capacity [as the docent of the Youth Advisory Council], then I failed because I didn’t provide the gift to them that was provided to me by my mentors along the way,” Nodjomian argued. “I didn’t succeed in the Air Force because I was smarter than anybody else or worked harder than anybody else because I wasn’t. I’ll guarantee you on both fronts. But I was very well mentored, and I had people who looked out for me, And I had people who helped me. And when I made a mistake, I didn’t get my you-know-what chewed, I got told what I did wrong and what to do better next time. And that’s a heck of a lot better way to approach something than, you know, the previous chewing method. So it’s incumbent on any of us who’ve had these gifts bestowed on them to turn around and pass them forward, and that’s all I’m doing.”

 

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