Maybe only The Village People loved the Navy more than the various cities sprinkled across the Gulf Coast. For those not in the know, this swath of land bordering the Gulf of Mexico … or America … is a hub of activity for the U.S. Department of Defense .. or War, and the Navy leans on it quite a bit.
Take Pensacola for example, where on Wednesday the city was given initial approval to receive a $76-million grant by the nonprofit Triumph Gulf Coast for the development of something called Project Maeve. In this project, which in total costs $275 million, the city would establish a 400,000-square-foot shipbuilding center that would then be occupied by Australian-based Birdon, a company which manufactures Navy vessels including submarine parts and, as a press release states, “complete surface vessels.”
Triumph Gulf Coast, by the way, is a nonprofit created to disburse awards to projects aimed at rehabilitating the area of the Florida Gulf Coast that was economically devastated by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Since 2017, Triumph has approved everything from a port dredging project to a high school welding program…