Mayor Reeves: Airport Hits 485-Day Streak, New Traffic Signals Coming for Emergency Vehicles

Pensacola, FL (NewsRadio 92.3) -- Pensacola International Airport has now gone 485 days without a wait longer than 30 minutes at TSA screening, Mayor D.C. Reeves told Pensacola's Morning News this week — a streak he says traces back to a federal staffing fix pushed through with help from Senator Rick Scott's office. Reeves also addressed lingering questions about last month's Palafox Street flooding, detailed a new traffic signal upgrade aimed at emergency vehicles, and gave an update on a citizen engagement portal that's drawn tens of thousands of votes from residents.

Airport Marks 485 Days Without a Major TSA Wait

Reeves says the airport has gone roughly 7,300 consecutive hours — measured hour by hour, not just day by day — without a security wait topping 30 minutes. That stretch covers close to 5 million passengers and about 2.5 million security screenings during a period of steadily growing traffic through the airport.

The streak follows a rough patch a while back, when long TSA lines became a regular complaint. Reeves says the city's "mild complaints" escalated after a particularly bad stretch prompted a letter to federal officials, and Senator Rick Scott's office responded with what Reeves called an emergency deployment — eight additional TSA staff sent to Pensacola within a day. A closer look afterward found the airport had been understaffed by about 30 percent, Reeves says, a gap he attributes to passenger growth outpacing federal staffing levels. The airport has since added extra screening capacity, including what Reeves believes is an additional screening lane.

City Explains Palafox Flooding, Points to Undersized FDOT Pipe

Reeves pushed back on characterizations of last month's downtown flooding as a city failure, calling it instead a win for the city's stormwater design. He says standing water during the storm was limited to one block of Palafox Street — between Garden and Romana — for about 15 minutes, with zero water intrusion into any downtown businesses, in a storm that he says historically would have caused sandbagging and flooded shops.

Reeves says the bottleneck traces to a Florida Department of Transportation-owned pipe under Garden Street that the city doesn't control. He says the city has known the pipe was undersized since at least 2015 and again in 2019, but its options were limited to leaving the first block of Palafox without stormwater improvements or routing water into the undersized FDOT pipe. "It just means the pipe is undersized," Reeves said. "That's the issue."

New Traffic Signals to Give Emergency Vehicles the Green Light

The city is upgrading traffic signals along 9th Avenue, Cervantes Street and Scenic Highway to work with its Advanced Traffic Management System, a roughly $1 million project funded by FDOT. The upgrade will let the city turn every light along a corridor green for emergency responders heading to a call.

Reeves says the technology has been in the works since he took office, but development has moved fast enough that emergency vehicles themselves may soon be able to trigger green lights directly — without needing to request the change through the city's traffic management office.

Online Portal Draws 65,000 Votes on City Issues

Reeves says a citizen engagement portal launched through the city's partnership with the U.S. Conference of Mayors has drawn about 65,000 votes on roughly 1,200 submitted ideas. The platform allows residents to submit and vote on concerns and ideas for the city, and Reeves says the process is designed to end in solutions-based recommendations rather than simply cataloging complaints.

Because submissions are open to anyone, some ideas posted to the portal fall outside city jurisdiction — Reeves pointed to a submission about fixing drainage on Nine Mile Road, which isn't in city limits, as one example. He says those outliers are expected in an open forum and get filtered out as the platform identifies the most common and widely supported themes. The city plans to bring together and pay about 100 residents to workshop the top issues that emerge and develop concrete recommendations.