Cole eyes environmental, economic projects and courthouse's completion

Editor’s Note: This is part of the Santa Rosa Press Gazette's ongoing series featuring candidates running in the Aug. 28 primary election and Nov. 6 general election.

MILTON — Robert “Bob” Cole of Milton is running for reelection as as a Republican in the race for county commissioner of District 2. 

Cole moved to Santa Rosa County in 1970 to work on NAS Whiting Field as a member of the United States Navy. He has been married to his spouse, Sheila, a Milton native, for more than 40 years. Together, they have four children and 11 grandchildren.

Here, we catch up with the commissioner and why he seeks re-election.

Tell us about yourself.

I’ve got a high school diploma and four years in Navy. After the Navy, I got a two-year degree in preindustrial education allowing me to teach automotive and shop classes.

I liked teaching, but realized it wasn’t going to pay the bills, so I went back to work as a mechanic and, eventually, 35 years ago opened my own shop. My wife and I have been fairly successful in building our own business.

I didn’t like what was going on [in the county at the time], and I started speaking out about it. It was suggested to me to run for commissioner and I did … I ran against, I think, seven other people and won the election [in 2002]. You learn what to do after you win the election.

I feel like I’ve been a pretty significant board member. Probably one of my best accomplishments was getting $14 million from Congressman [Jeff] Miller to start the process of building Avalon Boulevard, which in turn … fell in line for Obama stimulus money. After that, I was able to lobby the state senator of transportation to keep the excess funding from the first two stages of the project on Avalon Boulevard to continue it all the way to the interstate.

I worked real hard on that; of course, I had a lot of help from other board members and staff members, but I directly just wrote a simple letter to Rep. Miller asking for $23 million, but was able to receive $14 million.

Then, of course, we built Bagdad Community Center; we’ve built the Bagdad Mill Site Park and June Ates Equestrian Center, which every year for 10 years I saved $100,000 of my recreation fund and was probably one of the first commissioners in Santa Rosa County to ever build a project that large with cash in hand and didn’t borrow any money.

[The arena was a] $1.2 million project that we built with cash on hand, and it was a need for our whole county. Trying to make the best use of tax dollars, it wasn’t built as just an equestrian center, but it was built as an arena to be reconfigured in other venues, and also used as an emergency management position to deploy supplies to the citizens. It’s tall enough, we can pull semi trucks into it and unload, and it’s built with a high enough wind standard so it should survive.

[I also worked on] the flaring of the landfill gases; that was my idea. We used to just vent that into the atmosphere. I started questioning that and was able to get board support for our engineering and environmental department to look into and implement a process of collecting all that gas.

Now we collect it, we monitor it and we flare it off. So instead of those fumes escaping, it’s now flared and we’re able to capture how much we have and we’re really close to a point where it would be advantageous to either sell it as a compressed natural gas for fuel or to even run a generator and generate electricity.

There’s a fine point where it becomes profitable, and we’re very close, and may even have gotten to the point where we don’t have to flare anymore, we can put that to good use. To me, that’s a very important environmental thing.

Our waters have always been important to me. I’m involved in river cleanups; I’m one of the founding members of the Blackwater Pyrates and we do water education and also water cleanups.

Our industrial park — the Interstate 10 industrial park. There was a lot of pushback from several public members that said, “Don’t spend that money.” But you can go out there today and see — certainly we don’t have any occupants in there yet — we’ve got pristine property right on the Interstate 10 corridor that we have developed and it's being looked at every day.

It’s looked at to the point that Gulf Power aided us in becoming an accredited site-certified place for development, and we were also last year able to get $1 million from that state.

We’ve continued to develop new jobs at our airport. When I came on board, there was one fixed-space operator at the airport, and now we have two. We’ve got Life Flight being housed out there, we’ve got Trident [Aircraft] pilot training out there that takes a lot of the young student pilots and helps train them. We’ve seen a lot of growth in our airport.

The safety improvements on Highway 90 I’ve been involved with. And of course, working with the city government; since Milton is in District 2, I’ve worked closely with Mayor [Wesley] Meiss in some projects recently, and even back when Mayor [Guy] Thompson was in [office].

Paving Park Avenue and the implementation and improvements of Russell Harbor Landing, the boardwalk — you work together when you have a municipality like that in your district.

Why are you running for county commissioner?

Mainly, to try to get everything finished. You learn after you get on board that … there are no college classes … to get you prepared for this. So it takes a certain number of years to ramp up to knowing what your role in local government, in state government and even national government is.

I sit on the National Association of Counties; I’m a board member for the Environment, Energy and Land Use [Steering] Committee and also for the Arts and Culture Committee.

[That is] how you learn your roles … how can you best position yourself and your county for transportation dollars, arts and culture dollars, environmental dollars — all those things. And it takes quite some time to learn that; it’s a learning process every day.

Then the connections you make, the friends you make, the people you can pick up the phone and call … that’s not something you get automatically handed to you the day you take the oath of office, it’s something that you earn.

What do you hope to accomplish if reelected?

The courthouse — to me, it’s very important that the citizens understand where we’re building it, the endless possibilities of building it there and get out and support that half-cent [sales tax] to build it.

This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Cole eyes environmental, economic projects and courthouse's completion