Page 47 - Panama City Living May/June 2019

Mexico Beach’s tourism department reports that at least a dozen shops and boutiques were open in Mexico Beach before the storm. In March, four of them were operational.
Business owners like Kathy and David Sloan, who operate the family-owned El Governor Motel, are pushing onwards and have started the rebuilding process. Kathy is the daughter of the original owners of the motel, Dorothy and Don Baxter, and has been a pioneer in the development of the El Governor Motel since 1997, when she stepped in. The motel was constructed in 1989 and remained the only five-story building on Mexico Beach, providing hospitality to generations of visitors. It was heavily damaged by the hurricane but deemed salvageable.
“We are still working with the insurance companies,” Kathy Sloan says during a phone interview. “We have received some of the proceeds from them, not everything. We’re working with a contractor and architect on rebuilding the high-rise and bringing back the RV park, with the RV park being rebuilt sooner than the high-rise. We pray that our money holds out so that we can keep things going.”
With new building codes in place, structures that were more than 50 percent destroyed will have to follow new guidelines.
Mexico Beach's land development regulations were amended in February 2019. With new building codes in place, structures that were more than 50 percent destroyed will have to follow new guidelines.
The destruction to the El Governor’s high-rise was deemed less than 50 percent. Kathy reports that the hotel is undergoing construction. “We’re able to bring it back as it was,” she says. “The annex is a different story. We won’t be able to do that again because it was ground-level. The new codes will affect us over at the RV park. We lost everything there. However, we are planning to rebuild it. Our bath house will have to be built up higher than it was before, as well as any other buildings that we have there.”
Kathy and David also operate Baxter’s Asphalt & Concrete, a family-owned commercial and industrial asphalt paving company in Marianna, Florida, approximately 75 miles north of Mexico Beach. The city of Marianna, where their main office is located, was catastrophically affected by Hurricane Michael’s torrential rains and intense wind speeds. While the Sloans had substantial damage to their Mexico Beach residence, it was not lost to the storm.
“Many of our employees had to leave because their homes were destroyed. While our contractor has his own team of workers, we are also supplementing his team with a few employees from the El Governor. We’re trying to help by keeping jobs available,” Kathy says.
The show of support from loyal customers has been inspirational to the owners. They are confident that customers will be back once
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www.PanamaCityLiving.com • May–June 2019 • 47