Q&A with Mayor-Elect D.C. Reeves

Growth. Opportunity. Talent.

A New Mayor, A New Agenda

by Morgan Cole

Our once-sleepy community continues to grow more vibrant with the welcoming of new residents, businesses and housing developments. The city is also preparing to welcome D.C. Reeves as the new Mayor of Pensacola.

Mayor-Elect D.C. Reeves is an entrepreneur, community builder and native Pensacolian who moved home in 2015 to make a difference in the town he grew up in and that he proudly calls home. Reeves is the founder of Perfect Plain Brewing Company, which opened in 2017, and has grown to become a staple of downtown Pensacola, expanding to four different locations and more than 40 employees. Reeves recently sold Perfect Plain in order to focus on his duties as mayor. Reeves currently serves as the Chief Entrepreneur Officer at The Spring Entrepreneur Hub, which operates as the foundational front door and advocate for aspiring small businesses in the Pensacola community. He spent six years serving as the Chief of Staff for entrepreneur and community volunteer Quint Studer and in 2018, he led the effort to bring an appointed superintendent to lead Escambia County schools; a referendum that had lost convincingly in Escambia County five times in the past 60 years. In 2019, Reeves also authored The Microbrewery Handbook, a how-to guide to understanding the business of opening a brewery. Reeves has also served as chairman of the board for Visit Pensacola and was named 2021 Emerging Leader of the Year by the Greater Pensacola Chamber of Commerce. We had a chance to sit down with Reeves to learn more about what he has planned for his first 100 days in office and get his perspective on some of the important issues affecting downtown Pensacola before he officially steps into his role as the new Mayor of Pensacola in January 2023.

BC: How will your administration differ from the previous administration?

D.C. REEVES: Our focus is going to be on continuing to grow our vibrancy with an increased focus on opening the funnel of opportunity for young talented people to stay here in Pensacola or move back here. I look at that, really, as version 2.0. The last decade, we've all seen what's happened downtown, and its vibrancy, and certainly, I've been personally invested and emotionally invested in that myself. We've seen such great things. I think the next chapter for us is to provide more opportunity so it’s not just a place young people WANT to live and work in, but that they CAN move home to and live in. From job growth to attainable housing, there's a lot of different ways we're going to attack that. That is what is front and center for us—really growing the vibrancy of our community—and we know that downtown is the economic driver for the City of Pensacola, so we will continue that push to shoot for bigger and better things. Something else that we are currently working on, and maybe even shifting our focus to, is not just on first time homebuyer programs, but to advocate for more rentals or rental properties in the Pensacola area, and specifically in downtown. Right now, we have such an issue with attainable housing. Let’s start with step one and increase someone's ability to be able to live in our city. Then, we can kind of spend a little more time focusing on phase two, which is home ownership. As interest rates continue to rise, this is only going to become harder and harder. I don't want to miss an opportunity with attainable housing, and say, ‘Oh, well, it's either the American dream of owning a home or nothing.’ Let's solve this. We are

all aware that interest rates are rising, we don't have enough units in our city, and we've got to start offering opportunities for people to live here, period. After that, then we can begin working on phase two. I use the word ‘attainable’ because ‘affordable’ housing is all relative, in my opinion. Affordable housing to a millionaire is different from affordable housing to someone living below the poverty line. So, there's been a little change in calling it attainable housing, because what we're saying is, compared to what the average wages are here, can people find somewhere to live?

BC: What are your plans for addressing affordable housing in Pensacola, specifically in the downtown area?

D.C. REEVES: One of the ways to solve the housing issues is to have more housing, period. Whether it be luxury or short term rentals, we need more. The data shows that for every 100 market rate units, a community creates 45 openings in affordable or attainable housing. So, if we just snap our fingers today, and 100 units open anywhere in the city, it will migrate a total of five times. What this means is, that if someone rents a place on the market for $2,500 a month and the house they left was $2,000 per month, then someone rents that and in turn, leaves their other house behind that was $1,500 per month, and then so on and so forth, that fifth migration between two and three years, is was takes that 100 market rate units and creates 45 openings in affordable or attainable housing. Think how much money it would take the city to build 45 units on that scale in two years. Look at what kind of investment that would be for us. It's not just building solely shortsightedly attainable housing, it's becoming a better place to invest in that has more units, helps plateau rent amounts and creates opportunity for people to have a broad mobility within housing. Right now, one of our choke points is that we don't have enough available units here, and we're not unique in that. We had someone come in town from LA, who studies this stuff and said, “I've looked through all of your data, you're not building enough.” So, we just end up arguing, especially sometimes at the city government level, about what color the shutters should be, when in reality, we should be focused solely on knowing that any unit coming into our community is a good one right now. If it's in the form of attainable housing, great, we should have initiatives for that, or if it's $5 million condos that pay property tax that help pay our police and our fire, that’s great too. We've spent a lot of time as a community arguing over what kind of housing we should have, when, if somebody was looking at it from a data driven perspective, they'd say that we should take any housing we can get, period. This is what I’ve been talking about while campaigning about the attainable housing issue and I've always said it's a two part process. One is to make our city more investment-ready in order to be able to take on more houses. And second, is to light a little bit more of a tactical, strategic fire on workforce housing, such as those straight initiatives that go to help those certain areas, but we need them both in order to really be successful.

BC: What is your approach to addressing the homeless population in downtown Pensacola?

D.C. REEVES: The first thing I always say is that solve is not a word that I would ever be using in the short term, because we all know much like housing, this is something that's affecting communities across our country at different levels. So, how I look at this issue is that, I do feel that we should have a compassionate heart for people who want a hand up. And what I mean is, people with unfortunate circumstances that have caused them to lose their home that have a family to take care of—the types of people looking to get out of those situations and work to get back on their feet. We are a charitable loving community and I think that we've proven that, especially with how many nonprofits we lift up and support and what we do for the people in our community. So, for people like that, who want a hand up, I fully support and will continue to engage in those conversations. But there's a very clear line for me, between that and people looking for handouts. What I always say is that we will not give up the vibrancy for 55,000 taxpaying citizens of this community, for the sake of a small number of people who do not want help. So, with that separation comes tough decisions and certainly, we're going to explore options to continue to accentuate our ability to help people who want it and to continue to keep our community safe, vibrant and welcoming. As with a lot of decisions as mayor, those are difficult ones and so, with whatever decisions we end up making, some might consider it to be inhumane or say that we don’t care about people, that’s just simply not true. I've been on and I've seen both sides of this situation. My mother, Connie Bookman, is the leader of the homeless reduction task force for the City of Pensacola. Growing up, she was a social worker and she started the women's program at the Waterfront Mission, so I spent a lot of time there after school as a kid. I've been around this issue on the periphery for a long time, but I've also been a downtown business owner. I understand the frustrations I heard on the campaign trail, about how it hurts our downtown and how it affects our city. I'm grateful to have this wellbalanced understanding of people who need the help and people who are taking advantage of the systems that don’t always filter out the difference between people who need help and the people who don't. So I wouldn't say at the moment, this early on, that we have a specific tactic we would tackle on day one, but we will be aggressive in our ability to create that fork in the road where we we lift up the people who truly need it and want it and we start to separate ourselves as a community from people who are not here for any help whatsoever.

BC: What is your approach to ensuring that our developing infrastructure is sufficient enough to support our growing population? Specifically, in terms of things like streets improvements, parking, traffic, etc.

D.C. REEVES: Number one is smart growth. This should always be our strategy. We’re not going to run away from growth, we're not going to generalize being stagnant because of some perceived inconvenience like increased traffic or parking. Here’s the reality, 48 percent of the revenue of the City of Pensacola general fund is generated by people living here. What I mean is that 34 percent of that is property tax and 14 percent of that is franchise fees. So half of our revenue comes from this one product, which is people living here. This means that we have to be looking for opportunities to make it more seamless for people to invest here and to be able to do things like turn that permit a little bit faster so someone can get on the property tax rolls a little quicker. Those are opportunities we need to seize within that. I'm a big believer in urban infill, and what I mean is, how we will best accentuate and best grow within the infrastructure grid that we already have. We all know about the stormwater infrastructure issues, just to pick one thing as an example. It would cost over $150 million to fix our key issues in stormwater and we don't have that money. When people built roads 30, 40 or 50 years ago, they didn't sock money away for when it may need to be replaced. So, I'm not a big believer in sprawl, and building new roads, new fire hydrants or new gas lines. I'm always thinking of the best primary growth opportunities within the grid and within the infrastructure that we already have. As a matter of fact, when you look at Garden Street, Cervantes or Palafox Street, these roads are actually built for significantly more traffic than what they are handling right now. Now, they would take modifications, of course, as we continue to grow, and we'll always be cognizant of that but we can’t run from our ability to grow and prosper and be able to have more police, have more firefighters and attract more jobs here because of a perceived inconvenience. You know, a better way to put it is that, instead of worrying about what may be an inconvenience, let’s look at this as a great problem to have because this means that we have so many people investing here and moving here and young, talented people wanting to work here. When the time comes and if infrastructure updates are needed, I promise you, we'll get right on it. But first, give me that problem. We are not going to we are not going to undercut our ability to intelligently grow, not just any growth, intelligently grow this community based on what may or may not happen because of that positive growth.

BC: Can you tell me a little about your views on the VEO stand-up scooters downtown?

D.C. REEVES: I fully support Mayor Robinson’s change to the seated scooters from the standing scooters that are no longer permitted in the city. A seated scooter is treated more like a vehicle and it feels like you should drive it in the street, as opposed to something that might be like a toy that you would play with in your driveway and is treated as such. When all of this came about and I was asked about the scooters, I said I think I would support a pilot program, but one thing I did know is that we don't have the infrastructure at this moment to support it. When I went to Denver, right before

Mayor-Elect D.C. Reeves and Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons

we approved ours, I rode scooters around the entire town. Now, they had protected bike lanes and designated places where you clearly knew where it was safe to ride them. With that being said, I wouldn't want to hinder trying something new like this. To that end, I fully support the idea of going to a seated model only, that's more like a vehicle that represents something that you should drive in the street and does not litter the streets with equipment everywhere. So, we'll see this through and see how this goes. The scooters are not a requirement to have for the city, there has to be mutual benefit to our citizens and our tourists, as well as the people who live here. We are always going to balance those things in any decision that we make, but sometimes one side of that coin will be a little happier than the other. It was a pilot for a reason and we've learned from that pilot and we've adapted to the seated version only. I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but since making the change to the seated scooters only, I know that City Hall has received significantly less emails, phone calls and overall complaints about the scooters in the streets. There was ambiguity about where to park the standing scooters and where to ride them, so overall this change has been positive and I think we’re going in the right direction with the program. We will continue to play this out and see where we stand here in the next several months.

BC: What project are you most excited to get started on as you take the seat as the new Mayor of Pensacola?

D.C. REEVES: That’s a good question. You know, I've got a pretty good list of what I’d call short term projects and certainly my longterm projects as well. I don't know that I have just one in particular, or one that ranks highest at this point, but I will give you a couple of the short term goals we will get started on right away. The first thing is that we're going to establish a grants office for the City of Pensacola. We have unprecedented infrastructure dollars coming down from the federal government; dollars at a rate we haven't seen before. We have to put our best foot forward and have someone waking up every single morning in the City of Pensacola wondering how we get those dollars here. We don't have a grants office at this moment. This is something that each department has had to handle on their own [seek their own funding]. On top of that, these department heads have to manage people and the day-to-day operations. We need someone waking up every day, figuring out how to get those dollars in the city. So that is a day one decision.

Second, in terms of the downtown area, is the gradual reopening of Plaza Ferdinand. That doesn't mean opening it to host any type of event on any given day, but for things like an extension of the Palafox Market, something government or quasi government, or possibly university events. We have this beautiful, historic space that has been in a little bit of a lockdown for a number of years and I think it's time to reactivate that space. A third thing is to refocus on economic development within our city limits. That means not only continuing to accentuate what's already in place to attract jobs and attract businesses here, but by also helping with that effort at the city level. But additionally, that is someone that can truly serve as the liaison to developers with large scale development projects in our city. So that when someone knocks on our door and wants to invest $50 million in a project, we have someone designated to help them get across that finish line. Sometimes we may figure out, it doesn't work, but we still need someone there so thank them for wanting to instest in the City of Pensacola and we are going to do our best to show them that we number one, appreciate you and number two, that you know we'll go with you to zoning, fire and to permit inspections. There needs to be someone with the City to help those developers through this process and show them how valuable their investment is to us and our community. The establishment of a City of Pensacola grant office, the gradual re-opening of Plaza Ferdinand and an increased focus on the City’s economic development efforts are the top three things that come to mind and that we will be focusing on in the first 100 days of entering office.

BC: What will you need to accomplish during your four years in office to consider yourself a successful mayor?

D.C. REEVES: I think the first step is for us to become a more data-driven city. I’m talking in terms of data with measurable performance. I think taking that step would be a big one for us. Growing our population at a faster rate than the surrounding counties that we are behind. I think that is a good indicator of success. Fortunately, between the survey on the quality of life in our community that we have benchmarks from since 2008, we also have an employee engagement survey that's been going on for three years, which is something I'm very familiar with, as Quint Studer’s Chief of Staff. And with that, we will continue. I think it's the mayor's job to have happy employees that love to show up to work every day and have happy people living in the city in which they lead. If we get those two things right — if our 800 plus city employees love to show up to work every day and citizens believe that their quality of life is high in the city of Pensacola— everything else works itself out. That means people want to invest here, that means our young people want to move home, it means that there are more dollars coming into our community and it means we have a safer place to live because we can afford to equip our police with what they need to keep us safe. So, the true pebble hitting the pond is happy employees and happy citizens in which we are able to prove by measurement and then, as I said, everything else and all the blood that comes with those two things, I truly think that can take care of themselves.

BC: Is there anything else that you would like to add or that you think readers should know?

D.C. REEVES: You know, I've been asked so many times, “Why do you want to run for mayor?” I say the same thing every time, which is that we are on the precipice of such amazing things here and I ran for mayor because I want someone waking up passionate and energetic every day about taking the city where we all know it can be, and so I'm excited to get started. The sole campaign promise I’ve made to anybody is that I'll give you everything I've got to make this the best Pensacola that we all know it can be. We all make decisions with head and with heart and you'll agree with some and you'll disagree with others, but at the end of the day, we are going to put everything that we have, all of the passion that all of us have for this place, all the energy that I've got to take Pensacola to the next level. So, I'm so excited for that and humbled by the opportunity. I'm really ready to go for these next four years.