Barely three years after cutting the ribbon on its $22 million, 73,000-square-foot Flagler Palm Coast Readiness Center on the south expanse of Flagler Executive Airport, the Florida National Guard today broke ground on a 37,000 square foot building that will consolidate truck and weapons maintenance operations from two other units into the Palm Coast facility.
It’s the first maintenance shop to be built by the Florida National Guard since 2006. “It’ll consolidate two smaller shops creating a more robust, efficient operation that serves over 10 separate units. That translates to over 300 vehicles and trailers and over 900 soldiers that will be supported by this facility throughout the northern Florida region,” Maj. Gen. Robert Carruthers told a group of local elected officials, including every member of the County Commission, and others who’d gathered for the occasion.
It’ll also add 30 permanent jobs to the center and the area, said Lt. Col. Ryan Leonard, who oversees facilities across the state. “That’s huge,” Commission Chairman Andy Dance said, describing the additional facility as a big investment. “It says a lot about their commitment here to the county. They like it here.”
The units’ maintenance shops being consolidated locally are in St. Augustine, headquarters of the National Guard—that maintenance facility is too small now–and Titusville, where the National Guard has been leasing a facility for 20 years. The Palm Coast Readiness Center enabled the Guard to close a 24,000-square-foot facility it used to lease in Daytona Beach for many years.
“This location was selected for the main strategic reason: it is proximity to all of those units in its key location,” Carruthers said. “It also allows us to close a leased facility that we have been spending a lot of money on in order to do the type of work that we need to do in this new maintenance facility.”
— Text courtesy of flaglerlive.com
