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Escambia County, Navy Complete OLF 8 Land Swap

A land swap between Escambia County and the U.S. Navy is now complete.

Navy Outlying Field 8 (OLF on Nine Mile Road now officially belongs to Escambia County, which traded a property now known as OLF X south of Jay for helicopter training. An ribbon cutting for OLF X will be held Wednesday.

The land exchange provides Escambia County with property that can accommodate a wide variety of residential and light industrial development options, that will benefit the citizens and improve the county tax base. In return, the Navy gains a new, fully functional helicopter OLF, that meets current helicopter flight training requirements and is closer to NAS Whiting Field.

Navy Federal has offered to purchase 100 acres of OLF 8 for $4.2 million to expand their campus, and the county has received one unsolicited offer of $18 million for about 530 acres. [Read more ...] The county would legally required to declare the 530 acres as surplus and sell to the highest bidder.

“Although we (Escambia County) paid a lot for this property — recent appraisals peg the value of our soon-to-be acquired property in Beulah at between $46K and $51K per acre,” Escambia County Commissioner Jeff Bergosh wrote on his blog Tuesday. “This means this huge field could be worth as much as $32 Million in the current red-hot real estate market in this booming community. This means Escambia County taxpayers will be taking possession of an asset that is valued as much as $14.5 Million over the cost of acquisition—on day one.”

“Yes, this is a big deal for Escambia County. It is also a huge win for the U.S. Navy and Naval Aviation. This is what you call a ‘win-win’,” Bergosh said.

“This land exchange project was extraordinarily challenging considering there was little prior experience or formal guidance available,” said NAVFAC Southeast Project Manager Ferdinand Salomon. “Without the outstanding contributions of a small, but talented and motivated group of team members from NAVFAC, Naval Air Station (NAS) Whiting Field and the Escambia County staff, this project would have been absolutely impossible.”

A land exchange project of this nature is without recent precedent in the Navy. Many of the real estate procedures and processes required to execute this type of transaction are not formalized in Navy real estate directives and have not been successfully accomplished on this scale.

“This transaction is of keen interest to the highest levels of the Navy, and will serve as the model for leveraging our underutilized facilities and real property assets to obtain new facilities, optimize our resources and more effectively support the Warfighter,” said Salomon.

The project was made possible by special legislation authorizing the land exchange in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by President Obama on November 25, 2015. The legislation authorized, but did not require, the Secretary of the Navy to convey NAS Whiting Field’s NOLF Site 8 to Escambia County, in exchange for land and improvements from the county, which are acceptable to the Navy and suitable for use as an OLF to replace Site 8.

A land exchange agreement signed June 2016 between the Navy and Escambia County, was amended September 2017 to reduce certain construction requirements that Escambia County was responsible to build. Site X construction was completed December 2018, and was deemed acceptable by the Navy for use as an OLF.

“Once the construction was complete, we finalized the necessary documents to complete the deed exchange with the county,” explained Salomon. “The timing had to be precise to ensure the paperwork was ready, so that the base could conduct it’s official closing of Site 8 and opening of Site X.”

Pictured above: The lowering of the American flag for the last time at OLF 8, and the final flight in and out on Tuesday. Pictured below: The land swap signing between Escambia County and the Navy. Photos for NorthEscambia.com, click to enlarge.