"Court temporarily halts Panama City airport construction"

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Court temporarily halts Panama City airport construction
The Associated Press

 
A federal appeals court temporarily blocked construction of Bay County's new
airport, granting a request by local pilots and environmental groups opposed
to the project.

A three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on
Thursday issued an interim stay of the Federal Aviation Administration's
2006 decision allowing the airport to be built.

Friends of PFN - the FAA's three-letter designation for the city's existing
airport - filed the motion requesting the stay. The group of pilots don't
want the airport moved. The Natural Resources Defense Council and other
environmental groups are also parties to litigation opposing the airport
relocation plan.

Michael Duncan, an attorney for the Panama City-Bay County Airport
Authority, said that airport officials expected the court to hear oral
arguments in the case on Dec. 18.

Duncan said officials were trying to determine whether the ruling would
prohibit them from moving construction trailers onto the 4,000 acre site,
doing surveys and other preliminary work.

The $331 million relocation project is being funded by state grants, federal
grants and the sale of the current airport property. It is expected to be
the nation's first new airport since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Land for the project was donated by the St. Joe Co., a real-estate developer
founded by the duPont family in the 1930s as a paper company and now
Florida's largest private land owner with about 800,000 acres of undeveloped
Panhandle land.


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