- November 17, 2024
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The Florida Army National Guard is coming to Flagler County by January, but won’t be building its own facility — not yet, anyway.
Instead, 15-25 soldiers who will make up the local installation’s permanent staff and another 250 soldiers attending weekend training will move into the old Commercial Airline Training Program building at the Flagler County Airport, with minor modifications — most notably, new women’s bathrooms — while the state’s National Guard leadership waits to see if the hoped-for new facility will receive federal funding, Major Gen. and Florida Army National Guard Adjutant Gen. Emmett Titshaw said at a special County Commission meeting Oct. 20.
The building would cost $22 million to $23 million to construct and the project would need to be scheduled. If that happens, it could be as far out as 2020, and construction would take about 18 months.
For now, Titshaw said, “this site that we have leased here at the airport is going to fit our needs remarkably well until we have the construction funding to build the armory.” The monthly lease for the building is $15,000.
The building the Florida Army National Guard would like to build could either serve as a state armory or an armed forces readiness center, Titshaw said. It’s “100% design completed… shovel-ready,” he said, and would house a headquarter element and two air defense artillery batteries.
The funding for the building’s construction would differ based on whether it is to be used as an armed forces readiness center — in which case the money would be entirely federal — or as a state armory, in which case the construction money would be mostly federal, and partly state.
But that federal money for military construction comes from a total that is to be divided between all 50 states — for fiscal year 2015, it’s $146 million, Titshaw said — so for each state “the piece of the pie is not very big,” and some states, some years, receive no military construction money at all.
Construction facility manager Lt. Col. Mark Widener, attending the meeting with Titshaw, said funding for military construction has dropped in recent years, and projects are placed on a merit list: ones at the top get funded; ones below a cutoff line don’t.
“We’re anxiously awaiting next year’s budget” — to be released in February — “that will tell us if we’re on that years’ s defense plan,” he said.
