Break, I said.

Hey, guys.

Guess what?

We've got a chance.

He was my fraternity brother.

Happy people, prosperous communities have healthy environments for us.

She lived in Traficant for four years.

I really felt for a lot of reasons, I felt, but I didn't have the guts to stand.

But in recent years, Pensacola has been celebrated for its downtown waterfront and lively Palafox Street.

But in the mid 2000, today's version of downtown was nothing more than a dream wrapped in a nightmare.

On the heels of the devastation caused by Hurricane Ivan.

It was time for change.

But not without one whale of a fight.

In his new book, Right Idea, Right Time The Fight for Pensacola's Maritime Park, author and journalist Rick Allison chronicles how Pensacola began its journey to become more than just a sleepy southern city.

We welcome Rick Alice in the conversation.

Thanks for joining us.

Oh, great.

Always great to be with you, Jeff.

Well, I'm excited about this book.

I'm so glad you decided to do this.

But let me ask you this.

Why did you decide to do it?

Well, it was 20 years ago.

We were in the middle of this fight, and I felt like no one's ever really told the story from behind the scenes.

And.

And there's so many lessons in this that I think we don't need.

We don't need to forget.

Because I think as we go on and continue to go on this trajectory that we're on, we've got to remember how easy it is to stumble.

And so it was it was fun to do.

Did a lot of interviews, went through the archives of the News Journal, our archives in weekly found blog posts that I thought I'd lost, and and just took about 18 months to be able to put this together.

You know, when I think back about it, and I'm not just saying this to.

You or whatever, but but, you know, you're probably, maybe the only journalist that has consistently, you know, because in the newspaper and television whatnot that people have changed over the years and what that has kind of consistently followed that trajectory of of what it was like before this whole development revolution started, you know, and so getting your perspective on it kind of gives us, I guess, a historical context when you think, have you thought about it like that a little bit?

And that's what really sort of drugged me.

The more I started doing doing the digging and putting it together, I just started to remember what a different time it was.

And you and I talked a little bit before we started the show.

Back then, the internet was my space.

Yeah, Facebook was more like a yearbook on college campuses.

It was just starting to get to the general public.

The number one opinion maker in town was it was a guy who had an afternoon radio show.

Luke McCoy on Pensacola Speaks.

The other big influencer was Mark O'Brien, who had a column at least four days a week, in the daily newspaper, when you wanted to run a campaign or wanted to influence people, you you had groups of people write letters to the editor.

Right?

And now we don't we barely even have an opinion page in the daily newspaper.

But it was a different time.

And misinformation could, I don't know if it's worse now or not, but back then it was, you know, misinformation was a big part of all of this.

And for us, as a struggling new newspaper trying to get Ahold, get a foothold in the in the community, this became our big issue.

This was the one that we saw early on before, really, we did a thing called a ballsy plan, where we took everybody's ideas about a ballpark and moving the sewage plant and maritime museum and just sat down with David Alsup with Sam Marshall Architects and sketched out where it would go downtown.

And not everything happened exactly like we thought it would.

But a lot of it did.

And it, it, it was, trying to change us, get us out of the doldrums and get us to where we could be something bigger.

I want to talk a little bit so people have context from your perspective.

So you're the publisher of In Weekly.

When did you start that problem?

Started your very first issue was July 1st, 1999, okay, 1999.

And you, you were doing things differently.

I mean, you, you kind of had on a weekly, but I used to always love to read and I forgot.

What was it, about the politics, what was going on with politics?

Yeah, we did a little different version of buzz.

Yeah.

Winners and losers were the first.

You know, we would pick winners and losers every week.

Yeah, it.

Yeah.

And we had to have an edge.

We were a lot more punk.

I'm not nearly as punk as I used to be.

Right.

That's a good way to put it, edge, because you did have a right.

Well we did.

Yeah.

You know, the News Journal had pelicans.

We did pink flamingo statues like we did.

We were all constantly trying to think outside the box and be be fun and be taken seriously as a news source.

And it was a, it was a juggling act and trying to find that voice and really coming out of, of and we found our voice.

And I think that's where we really started to take off.

How did Hurricane Ivan change the mentality of citizens?

You know that.

Yeah.

Well, a couple things happened, I think.

One is that we had kind of, as a community, didn't want to recognize how far we were slipping as a community.

I think that we we saw four of our county commissioners get indicted, and we are the most corrupt county in the state of Florida.

We're seeing, an idea for this piece of property originally was a call it the Trillium Project, and it was going to be a new bayfront auditorium there.

And for the first time in the city's history, the citizens had a referendum and overturned the city council's vote on something that had never happened in the city's history.

So it it emboldened, the citizens to speak out more.

I haven't hits us.

And it's like pulling the veneer off of a piece of furniture and realizing that it's plywood.

You know, it's it's not particleboard, it's not real wood.

And we saw all these roofs, all the poverty, all the, how hard it was going to be to build back.

And what happened was we ended up with, the only thing comparable to Ivan was Hurricane Andrew early in South Florida homestead.

And they had rebuilt, about ten years before of it.

And so they sent a group up here and they talked about, you need a, community effort to get people back on their feet.

And that's what rebuild northwest Florida became.

And then they said, you need a community project, something to build up everybody's spirits, something that everybody could pull together on.

And.

And homestead.

It was, a huge youth, sports complex is what they did in here.

City was reluctant to do anything because they, they really gotten the the wrist slapped on the Trillium deal.

Quint Studer was out there trying to find a place to build a ballpark.

He'd been at UW f two small of a spot up there.

Could never make enough money to to justify itself.

He needed something bigger.

Admiral Jack Fetterman, rock star.

That's what I call him in the book.

He's looking to.

He wants a maritime museum that it would complement the National Aviation Museum.

And those are two big projects.

And really, morto Sullivan and Miller Colwell, both sort of got these two Titans together, and neither one of them really wanted to do, Jack really didn't want to work with Quint because he didn't really know Quint.

And he's got his own.

He they felt he felt like he was pretty close.

Quint didn't want to go on the Trillium property because he remembered all the bad publicity about it.

But they got them together.

And the great story that Mort tells is they're sitting in the room.

They're looking at ideas, what it could look like, and it says, Jack Fetterman acts like he's at a poker game and he just puts his hands out.

I'm all in.

And from there on, that began the work, and it was, it what should have been a simple idea still took, 15, 18 months to get to a referendum because that same the core of the group that was against the Trillium project, didn't want anything on that property, really.

So they saw an opportunity, maybe they got a little bit of an ego involved because they had done this once.

They saw this as the same kind of fight.

And what should have been a simple decision.

What you.

Yeah.

What do you think their real pushback was?

I think that I think they had been very successful before their, their concept, and they were pretty, savvy in how they worked public opinion.

Was it that, you know, we need to have a public process?

This was happened behind doors.

All of a sudden.

This is coming out here while we're trying to rebuild our community.

We need a public process.

The we want nothing there.

We just want it to be a green space for the community.

Come enjoy it.

The other idea was, well, once, there was some momentum that we needed to do something with it.

Then we need to do a national bid process.

We need to get in there.

Is this the best project ever?

There were those that said it ought to be condos because the the best, rate return for the taxpayers is to sell it to a developer and make it condos.

The we had done our research and seen where downtown ballparks, minor league ballparks were really catalysts for downtowns.

We'd seen it Montgomery.

Chattanooga, it was was happening around the country.

And so we really felt as the newspaper, we had already done sort of doing our research.

So we felt like this was was a really worthwhile project, which is kind of why we did the ball.

We planned start planning that seed.

But for them, I think it really was in the other thing, we had a mentality that we couldn't do, what, one thing at a time.

Yeah.

And the most important thing in their mind was we had to move the sewage treatment plant.

They had no one to complain about the sewage treatment plant for decades.

But all of a sudden that becomes the biggest thing.

And we get we can't do both.

We will go broke, the city will go broke.

In literally.

We know that both of them happened.

Actually, the plant got moved first.

But the pie got bigger.

Yeah.

When we built the park, you know, without more people developed, more people now living down there, the revenue for the downtown district is so much more than it was before.

But we had that, you know, that small man, small town, small town mentality.

Yeah, yeah.

I used to always say during those times that we just don't know what we want to be when we grow up.

Think about it.

It worked for some people.

Yeah.

You know, I remember, you know, we helped support, principal young professionals and, I remember at some of those early meetings, sitting with some of those, some of the young professionals that were coming, they said, well, you know, we're really okay with everything, you know, everything's fine.

We really like the town.

This is what you know, you work for your daddy, right?

Yeah.

Nine times out of ten, they did.

You know it.

Their world worked.

But for others, it didn't.

And, but we've seen we've been able to retain talent.

We were able to.

We I would imagine that DC Reaves would not have moved here after you got out of college.

He graduate in oh seven.

The idea of being mayor here, probably when he graduated, was never a big.

I remember just recently at a press conference, he talked about the big news when he moved back was Palafox got another restaurant.

Yeah.

You know that was the big news for downtown.

So it how we look at ourselves now is completely different than we did back then.

Yeah.

Because you think about and we can get into this later.

But you think about all the things that are right now currently on, you know, or at least in, in the on deck circle, right, right of development downtown.

But let's go back and talk about just kind of some of the fun, you know, political and how can I maneuvering, if you will, for lack of a better term, that led up to the referendum and, and some of the things that happened, because I know you talk about like some of the ads that were run and things like that.

Yeah, yeah, it was, I think there are two developments.

It really, that that the opposition called Save Our City, that was what they went by.

They really position them that they were going to save our city.

In the other side were friends for Waterfront Park.

Those were the two groups.

They, they didn't they never.

We had never organized the young people in our community.

Right.

And I got involved in doing that because my daughter had just graduated from, from college and she said, dad, I went to rotary.

And they say, I have to sit in the back of the room.

I can't, you know, in rotary was much bigger than it is then, than it is now.

And she got tired of being told, you have to wait your turn.

You just, you know, you get you get to serve the food.

You don't get to play in the meal, you know, and and so, I wrote a fiery outtakes about it, in those punk days.

And, Yvonne Emerson was the CEO and president of the chamber, said, Rick, you need to come.

I don't think you understand what we do.

So I went in for an hour and a half.

I listened to all the department heads tell me what they do.

And at the end I said, well, here's the issue, because back then the chamber had a three legged stool.

It was, the military, hospitality, tourism, and the other was economic development.

I said, well, you know, my daughter's not going to enlist.

She's not going to go work in a hotel, and she doesn't want to work at a call center.

And I said, you're not going to keep her here.

And to Ivan's credit, she said, you know, she it didn't go over well when I said it.

But if those things don't when I say things.

But but she call me the next day.

I said, let's sit down and talk again because we need to figure this out.

So we met and I said, let's pull together ten people and young people and see if they're interested in trying to put a group together.

You know, I think when when we were younger, Jeff, you know, the JCS were the junior chamber and, but it was all male and and it failed to the wayside.

We didn't I didn't want that.

And I don't think that age group would have wanted it either.

But I felt like we needed to to get them a seat at the table.

So we met with them.

Yvonne and I shared our ideas.

We agreed that neither one of us would wanted to control it.

We weren't going to do their charter.

If they don't want to ever meet again, we won't meet again.

But they liked the idea.

So we said, we'll meet again in a week.

Everybody bring somebody with them.

And we did that for a month.

And by March of oh six we had people formed and they, listened to Save Our City.

They listened to friends in the waterfront park and they all rallied.

We want to help build the park.

And that became sort of the ground troops going door to door work in the precincts.

That really helped get the message out.

And I think that was a, a really big thing.

And then the other thing was the block and, the, back then every journalist had a blog.

Yeah.

Not not the and I couldn't figure out what to do with it.

But I heard about this guy in little Rock that had one that was.

So he got.

And so, controversial that Mike Huckabee, who was the governor of Arkansas, banned him from coming to their press conferences.

Yeah.

Would not let him in the room.

And I said, I want to be that guy.

I would that's what I was.

We were up there for a meeting.

Dwayne.

Escobedo, my editor, and I, hunted him down, and I said, how do you do this?

And he said, Rick, you post all the time.

You know, everything.

You get every news tip, every buzz, every you know, and you do at least three times a day first thing in the morning, right around noon.

So they'll talk about you during lunch.

And then at the end of the day.

Yeah.

And he said, you do it every day.

Eventually you'll get something really big.

And, that something really big was a maritime park.

And here we are 20 years later on, just that, in the blog is is still it's call.

You know, it's Rick's blog, but you could pretty much you weird town, you say the blog.

Everybody knows what it is.

Yeah.

And again, I mean it's a go to I mean, I look at it a couple times a day, you know, just to see what's going on, they call it.

And what I find myself doing, just talking about how media has changed, you know, I'll see something and then I'll share it with somebody because I'll say, hey, I know so-and-so was they'll get a kick out of this or whatever, you know, when you when you were putting this project together, the book together, did you go back and talk to some of the people who were against it at the time?

I talked to a few, not as much, because I felt like their story was in concrete, and I really all I really wanted to do was focus there on, originally I was going to go all the way to when the first ball game was played, but, it wasn't as interesting as this fort.

So I'd stayed here, and I tried to I had a pretty long list of people to interview, and at some point they all became very similar.

And at some point you got to start writing.

Sure.

So I said, okay, we'll stop, start here.

But back then, everybody was pretty vocal letters to the editor.

We had a lot of editors, letters to the editor, too, from both sides.

We had a pretty good feel for what the moment was like, and that's where I was focusing.

I'm just curious now if they've changed their way of thinking, or did they still think it's a bad idea?

Well, Quinn has shared that several people have come up and talked to him and had been, you know, that they, didn't realize completely understand the process.

And there's some, you know, you.

You get caught up in the moment and you don't necessarily think all the pieces through.

Yeah.

And so there's a lot of distrust out there.

And I think the other part that made the blog really different and hard for Save Our City was I could respond right away if they if they've got a letter to the editor, you know, if the other side won't stuff up, you know, it takes two days to get it back in the paper.

Where that day I've got the letter to the editor, and I've already broken it down into what the facts are.

So we could do it so quickly that it became something that there wasn't anything like it to respond to.

So that really sort of became the hook of the blog.

And then we.

Yeah.

And then it's got my sense of humor in it.

And that's where you mentioned some of the humor here.

The, you know, Joe Vincent and the AP Art agency came up with the Chucky and Dano cartoons, right?

Yeah.

And that, was sort of based on the old crotchety old man at the end of The Muppet Show.

Yeah.

And we debuted that on on the blog, and then they ran ads with it, and I think they did about five different ads.

And, first time a cartoon ever been used in a campaign.

That was the first time that a real.

And that was Joe Vincent, who is he's the one who put that together.

And Dick Appleyard, you know, to his credit, really saw the advantage doing something like that.

Yeah.

You know, when you think back on it and of course, if you're new to this area or you're young and don't remember it, but, you know, you go back and you know, that sewage treatment plant seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?

You know, just all of that.

And just when you look at what has occurred, you know, the development.

Which brings me to the question of where are we now, where things are continuing to be.

I know there's something recently came out, a hotel development, etc.. Yeah, I you know, it's been slow going on developing those other parcels.

The maritime park, the museum didn't happen because of state funding.

It changed.

We went through a recession, real estate recession, definitely, in the latter part of that decade.

And so certain things didn't happen.

We've been slow to get the right deal there, but there is going to be, a version of a hard rock, hotel there.

We've got now partnering on the deal is Diane Hendricks.

She is the richest woman in the country.

ABC supply, real community.

Organic does really cool projects.

Having that come into the communities is huge.

The Main Street sewage treatment plant property is being developed now.

That'll be primarily apartments, so that many more people will be living downtown.

The, and then I think we've got the Baptist, the old Baptist property, what happens there?

And that's that's, probably that a 30 or 40 year project.

And then I, I'm excited about what could happen around the Bayview, center, you know, the Bay center, what could happen there?

Yes.

Because I think that they're looking at doing some master planning and looking at because around in towns now those type of facilities are economic hubs too.

Yes.

So they've got to find a buyer for the for the hotel there.

And I keep hearing there's a contract but nobody's must not be ready yet.

But then you've got areas around there that we've, we could do more with.

So, I think that's another exciting part.

So we'll see.

But downtown still has room to grow.

Yeah.

No question.

Tell me a little bit about what's going on with you.

Of course we've got the book.

And what people may or may not realize is that you you also have a series of nonfiction books or can.

But I'm, I don't I'm a fiction major.

Do not yet say I write fiction.

I'll tell you this book, but yeah, a series of fiction books of Walker Homes.

Right.

So are you continuing on with that?

I am, and I'm in the rewrite stage of the third book.

It's it's, I took time off to do this, but it motivated me to go back and finish that, and I'm excited about it.

It is, you know, Walker Homes is an alter ego for me, and I enjoy with him because he's always doing the wrong thing and getting beat up, and people like that.

I think they like Walker Homes getting beat up, but, that's they're the podcast we don't color on.

The dog is doing well.

Yeah.

The, I interviewed your daughter, which was great.

Thank you.

It's news as well as just, you know, somebody comes across my computer, and.

So what?

I really want to talk to them.

So, So it's been fun to do it.

The blog in the paper, just doing really well.

And, the, the newspaper gods have been good to me.

We seem to be in the middle of a whole lot of stories, and they seem to keep coming.

You know, I wake up every Sunday.

So what in the world I'm going to write about this week and by 9:00 Monday, I know it's gonna start.

So, it's it's a fun process.

And, I've got a couple other things out that we may be pulled together, but it's been fun.

In in about 60s.

What are you most excited about as far as our community is concerned?

Okay, I know you are the most excited.

I think that, what I'm excited about right now is I really feel that we have got good leadership at the city, in the county, and for the first time, I feel like we've got we don't everyone doesn't have to agree all the time.

And that would be very boring, would be no news.

But I feel like we've got a lot of pistons working on the engine now, and I think that excites me.

Rick Allison, thank you.

Oh, always the name of the book.

Right idea, Right Time the fight for Pensacola's Maritime Park.

And the author is Rick Allison, who also has the N weekly and of course, Rick's blog.

And he also has the Walker Home series, which is a, fiction, series.

Great writer and probably I'd be hard pressed to name anybody who has their finger on the pulse of what's going on in Pensacola, Northwest Florida, more so than Rick, and especially over an extended period of time.

We're talking multiple multi decades now.

So I had brown hair and yeah thank you my friend.

By the way you can catch this and many more of our conversations online at Street.

Org slash conversations as well as on the PBS video app and YouTube.

I'm Jeff Weeks, I hope you enjoyed the program.

Thank you for watching.

Take great care of yourself.

We'll see you soon.