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• City leaders have a plan to ask the Air Force for the opportunity to buy dozens of acres of land for development.
• The land, which would likely cost tens of millions of dollars, far exceeds the total amount of money the city brings in revenues each year.
• Some in the city’s leadership say that an expansion like this may be the only way to keep Valparaiso viable in the long term.
While not the last stand at the Alamo, Valparaiso’s City Administrator Carl Scott made one thing clear about the future of the 5,000-person, one-stoplight town next to Eglin: Without new development, specifically the new development the City hopes to facilitate on land currently owned by the Air Force, Valparaiso “If we don’t do something to expand our tax base, we are going to tax ourselves out of existence,” he said. That claim led at least one resident to call for the City to look into merging with the City of Niceville to keep the same level of services, leverage this opportunity with the Air Force, and work toward a higher quality of services for residents from the City.
RELATED: Why Niceville and Valparaiso Need to Merge Now.
Scott is no stranger to making headline-grabbing statements – this one, though, was followed with a warning – he doesn’t believe this land transfer from the Air Force to Valparaiso will take place in his lifetime. “It would be wonderful if it ever came to fruition, but I can tell you, it’s nowhere close.”
That leaves the City in a lurch. Valparaiso has few commercial properties and has raised its tax rate by almost 80% in the last two decades. It’s a city that nearly lost fire protection this year when Niceville asked for the City to pay for it’s share of the costs – a situation that had one commissioner call her own City ‘a mooch.’
The City is a long way from signing a land deal that one resident, Terry Griffin, calculated would cost the City roughly $44 Million. For reference, their 2024-5 Fiscal Year budget was about $9 Million for all of the City’s operations.
As a part of the deal, city leaders say, the Air Force wants the City to turn around and sell the land to developers for higher-density housing – specifically for base readiness. “The last conversation with the base actually started because the base general was always concerned – he can’t have his top people in Crestview,” Scott said, “because they are not within three or four minutes of the base during an emergency. Say we got bombed; you can’t get those guys from Crestview onto the base in sufficient time.” Scott added that the base leadership told him they wanted to see condos or townhomes on land the Air Force would lease to the City. The City always wanted an agreement between the City and the Air Force to buy the land, so the deal imploded.
Bob Bachelor, the City of Valparaiso’s planning and zoning board chairman, said that any arrangement where the Air Force mandated what was built amounted to shifting the Air Force’s problems into the laps of the Valparaiso Commission. He told the commission he took a sightseeing tour of the base and found that most of the on-base housing, which was online when he was on active duty, had been demolished. “Back when I was here in ’75 there was housing for everyone and his brother,” Bachelor noted, “You want to live on base? You can live on base, just like that.”
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The parcels of land the City wants to purchase are split into three giant groupings of land.
What Bachelor referred to as ‘Area A’ sits across from The Lewis School, ‘Area B’ abuts the City’s cemetery and is pockmarked with private land – and ‘Area C’ is a large virgin parcel that sits across the street from the Lewis School, just north of the Eglin Gate.
Bachelor noted that Area A had the most going for it – it has access to water and sewer lines that the City owns and, therefore, is the most prepared for development. A resident who says she lives near the land told the commission Okaloosa County School District Program Director Bill Smith had already approached her about buying their land so that the district could build a new school on Area A. Mid Bay News has not yet been able to verify this claim independentl. Still, wee have initiated communication with Dr. Smith and hope to get information back soon.
“Now they don’t know if they’re going to build within the next year, two years, whatever, but that’s going to be final for them in the next year. So area A is a no go,” the resident said.
If the school district builds on Area A land – the land would stay off Valparaiso’s tax rolls.
Because the Air Force owns the land and is a government entity, the City receives no tax revenues from it. The school district would have the same arrangement, which means the City would not be any worse off than it is now, revenue-wise. But some residents at the meeting argued that the City would have to deal with the negative effects of a school, like traffic, fire safety and the provision of other services, which would not get support from added revenue that housing or commercial buildings would bring. In short, it would likely be cheaper for the City of Valparaiso if the Air Force kept the land and did nothing.
That left options B and C for the City to gobble up, should the Air Force allow it.
Area B would constitute the second-best option when it comes to infrastructure. While it doesn’t have sewer access, it has water lines – meaning it would be less expensive to build homes on the land. To the chagrin of some residents, Bachelor recommended that some of the 28.6 acres in this area become an expansion to the city cemetery. The rest of the land, which he reckons could hold another 77 homes, would be for single-family residential.
The third area of land – about 64 Acres immediately to the north of the east gate would be the most difficult to develop, as city water and sewer services don’t reach this land, which is bisected by old state highway 10.
Still, the City’s planning and zoning board chairman, Bob Bachelor, laid out several options to put in front of the Air Force for their consideration as early as next month after the city commission meeting. Ultimately, the City Commissioners told Bachelor to move forward with a proposal for the Air Force to ask the Air Force for the right to purchase the land.
But, to make any proposal happen, the City will need to get someone from our area congressional delegation, either Senators Marco Rubio or Rick Scott – or US Congressman Matt Gaetz – to advocate on behalf of the City and get language into the coming year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) so that the Air Force would have permission to sell the land to the City, who would turn around and sell it to developers.
The city leadership agreed that Mayor Brent Smith should start by contacting Congressperson Gaetz to start a conversation about the idea.
In the meantime, commissioners instructed Bachelor to take his working plan, which can be seen here, and prepare it for an official city commission vote to send it to the Air Force’s civil engineering group on base. As the CE group looks it over and sends it up its food chain to General Mark Massaro, city leadership will continue contacting congressional leadership to move the ball forward.
