St. Joe announces master-planning agreements

WEST BAY - The St. Joe Company announced that it has entered into agreements with The Haskell Company, a design-build firm, and TranSystems Corp., a transportation planning and engineering firm, to masterplan JOE land adjacent to the new Panama City - Bay County International Airport, which is scheduled to open in May 2010.

The initial parcels are being planned and positioned for office, retail and industrial users, totaling approximately 1,000 acres. This land is a portion of approximately 71,000 acres that St. Joe owns within the West Bay Sector, a large mixed-use master-planned project in Bay County in Northwest Florida. The sector is anchored by the new 4,000-acre international airport now under construction.

“With the scheduled opening of the airport now less than one year away, we are accelerating our preconstruction activity and stepping up marketing outreach to global users who need ready access to the new airport,” said St. Joe’s president and CEO Britt Greene. “Our land at West Bay is a world-class asset, and our marketing outreach is to global users. Our initial marketing focus will be aerospace, logistics and defense-oriented technology companies.”

As part of the master-planning process, the team is creating a development node capable of joining the Gulf Coast’s aerospace corridor. A concentration of U.S. Air Force, Navy and Army aerospace and aviation facilities along the Florida, Alabama and Mississippi gulf coast have created a cluster of aerospace and aviation businesses and workforce talent in the region.