This innovative Sector planning process was conducted in a series of public forums and approved by the Bay County Board of County Commissioners in December 2002. The Plan established future land use overlay for the long range growth of the County for the next one hundred years, including 4,000 acres for the relocation of the Panama City-Bay County International Airport. Other land uses included a 3,700-acre Regional Employment Center, Airport Business Center and residential land uses of various allowable densities. By far the largest single land use approved was 53 percent of the Sector that was designated as Preservation. This innovative Plan effectively places an unprecedented 62.5 square miles of Bay shoreline and watershed into preservation and made West Bay possibly the most protected estuarine water body in the State of Florida.
JOE has agreed to partner with the Panama City-Bay County International Airport on the mitigation of impacts resulting from the relocation of the International Airport to a 4,000-acre site north of West Bay in Bay County.
A 9,608-acre tract of land owned by JOE will serve as the mitigation site for wetlands and habitat impacts within the 4,000-acre airport relocation site once the airport has received State and Federal permit approval.
The long-term mitigation plans for this area include the restoration of pine savannah and the restoration of the sites hydrologic regime that has been heavily impacted by the historical logging in the early part of the 20th Century and the planted pine silviculture since the 1940s.