By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | San Diego | September 16, 2026
When Panama City commissioners walked away from a proposed partnership with City Marina Partners last December, they gained control over the design of the Downtown Marina’s first 50 boat slips. They also gave up something specific and quantifiable: a contractor willing to build those slips at cost. What replaced that arrangement was a decision one of their own commissioners described in blunt terms. “The city decided to put the 50 slips on a credit card,” Commissioner Brian Grainger said at the time. “In doing so, we lost the ability to have a contractor pay to build the slips for us at cost. So at this point, we’re putting it on a credit card without knowing exactly how we’re going to pay for it in the future.”
That credit card is a $150 million temporary loan the city is drawing on for hurricane recovery citywide — everything from the MLK Recreation Center to core infrastructure projects across Panama City, all stemming from Hurricane Michael’s 2018 devastation. Commissioner Josh Street defended the approach as a way to keep the broader recovery moving while the city continued to search for dedicated marina funding. That is a defensible position for infrastructure repair. It is a harder one to defend for a discretionary waterfront amenity competing for draws against the same finite recovery credit line that is supposed to rebuild the rest of the city.
The cost trajectory since that decision has not been reassuring. Early estimates released in December put the first phase at roughly $10 million once water, sewer, electric, and stormwater upgrades were added to the $4.5 million slip construction itself — a figure Commissioner Grainger flagged bluntly at the time: “The city doesn’t have $10 million to just pay for a marina, or more.” By late August, the commission had awarded the Phase One construction bid to Art Marine, LLC at approximately $2.9 million for that portion of the work, with the broader phase-one cost still tracking toward the earlier estimate once all category-specific expenses are included. Construction is expected to take roughly nine months from an anticipated summer 2026 start.
This is not the only Panama City marina project running past its original numbers this year. Across town, the St. Andrews Marina bulkhead was supposed to hold, on paper, until 2031. Sections of its docks have already collapsed. The city’s own public works director told commissioners in February that the 2031 estimate was never valid and that the structure now presents a safety issue, prompting a full rebuild approved despite cost estimates rising past an original $12.9 million figure set in 2024. Two marina projects, two sets of original projections that did not survive contact with actual construction costs, in the same fiscal year, financed in significant part out of the same disaster-recovery borrowing capacity.
None of this means the Downtown Marina project is wasteful on its own terms. Panama City lost a functioning marina to Hurricane Michael, more than 200 residents participated in planning charrettes shaping its redesign, and Mayor Allan Branch has framed the current concept as a genuine improvement in public waterfront access. Those are legitimate civic goods. The question this publication considers essential is narrower and more concrete: when a city commission chooses to finance a discretionary amenity through the same borrowing capacity earmarked for disaster recovery, without a named repayment source, at what point does that financing decision stop being a temporary bridge and start being a structural liability the next city commission inherits without ever having voted on it.
Commissioner Grainger’s own record on this point is instructive, and consistent. He voted against the marina’s earlier $150,000 boat ramp expenditure as well, arguing the city could simply defer the decision a year rather than spend money it did not clearly have a plan to replace. He lost that vote 3-2, with then-Mayor Michael Rohan on the same side, noting the existing ramp remained functional and that boaters frustrated with its steepness had a serviceable alternative nearby at Snug Harbor. He has now been proven right twice in a single fiscal year about the gap between what Panama City’s marina projects cost on paper and what they end up costing once construction begins — a pattern that deserves more weight from his colleagues than a single dissenting vote currently gives it.
The Navarro Report will continue tracking Panama City’s marina financing and its broader use of hurricane-recovery borrowing capacity as part of its ongoing Florida Panhandle accountability coverage.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — reporting and analysis produced under human editorial direction with AI research and drafting assistance.