When Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle on October 10, 2018, it was the strongest storm the region had ever faced, and the first Category 5 hurricane in the U.S. since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Panama City, a municipality with around 40,000 people located between Tallahassee and Pensacola, was hit particularly hard. Ninety percent of homes and businesses in our local area were damaged. There were more than 18,000 change of address requests filed as displaced residents moved from place to place to find shelter. Three million acres of timber and one million trees were destroyed. But with that destruction came the rare opportunity to radically rethink and reshape the future of our community for the better. To that end, last week, we held a series of community-wide planning events to reimagine our city from the ground up.
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