Bay EDA: Creating quality jobs through quality education
BAY COUNTY, Fla. (WMBB) – The Bay Economic Development Association has been working diligently to bring several aerospace and manufacturing ventures to Bay County.
We've covered the developing inspire project happening through FSU Panama City, and IAG Aero group. Economic leaders have several other projects they're working to secure.
The turnouts for Bay EDA meetings continue to grow, like the list of potential businesses considering our area.
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One of those major opportunities is an aerospace company dubbed 'Project Opal.'
'They're looking at a 130-acre site in Venture Crossings, which is at the airport campus. It'd be 350 jobs and one billion capital investment. A truly high-tech game-changing project for us,' says Becca Hardin, Bay EDA's President and CEO.
Hardin says as 'Opal' whittles down its site list, Bay County continues to make the cut.It's down to 3 sites in Florida, one in Texas, and one in Louisiana.
'We hope to find out who this final selection is going to be, hopefully by the end of the week or early next week,' says Hardin.
Hardin says the focus is on quality.
'For the incentive packages that we offer the company doesn't qualify for incentives if they don't pay at least 115% of our average wage and if you look at data over the past five years because of the projects that we've helped to grow here, we've seen the average wage starting to creep up. And so that is in essence one of our key goals,' added Hardin.
A quality workforce goes hand in hand with access to quality education.
'So we came up with the scholarship program called the Gulf Coast Guarantee for any high school graduate in Bay, Gulf, and Franklin County. That's public school, private school, any school, we give them a $700 first-dollar scholarship to Gulf Coast,' said Gulf Coast State College President Glen McDonald.
That's $700 for every semester for full-time students.
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With this program, Gulf Coast has given out $3.18 million over the last 4 years, around the same time they started to see their enrollment rates trending upwards.
McDonald says their plan is working, but they could use is a little more help from the state.
'The state college system has been way behind in percentage of funding growth. So we would like to increase that because we are the workforce generators in the community, and we're very happy to see more students coming here and to get the help from the state,' said McDonald.
Bay EDA officials will be going to the Miami boat show next week to network with marine manufacturing companies.
Hardin says they already have 15 meeting scheduled. They'll also meet with the IAG Aero Group to discuss the construction kick-off at the airport campus.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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