PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. (WMBB) — Panama City Beach’s CRA Advisory Committee want to bring new improvements to the area and on an accelerated timeline.
The committee held their meeting Monday afternoon and discussed multiple potential projects some of which included smart lighting for the city, better wayfinding, and placing fencing in medians in high traffic areas.
Matthew Bush, the CRA Advisory Committee chair, said the plan is to have multiple projects going at one time.
“We’re going to try to speed everything up,” Bush said. “That is the plan. We advise council and try to let them make their decisions but we want to speed up. We want to get multiple things going.”
One of the new potential projects includes something called smart lighting.
Smart lighting consists of LED street lights which can feature buttons that you can press for police dispatch, more signage for better wayfinding or, cameras attached to the street light monitoring the surrounding area.
Councilman Michael Jarman was also present at the meeting and wants to push Panama City Beach to be a smart city.
“I think it’s important to bring up that with the CRA project, we’re trying to really move towards a smart city development plan,” Jarman said.
Jarman also agreed that speeding up the projects will help the community in the long run.
“The biggest thing that I’ll probably be bringing to the council is, once again, we need to do these projects as fast as we possibly can,” Jarman said.
The next CRA Advisory Committee meeting will be on September 14th at 3:00 p.m. at City Hall.
