Which do you want? Almost heaven or nearly hell? That's the choice in Beulah.

It’s a choice between almost heaven and nearly hell, with most of the Escambia County Commission willing to throw the Beulah community and the county’s longterm good into the fiery pit.  That’s what they will be doing if they choose to go forward with anything close to what DR Horton and Stirling Properties have proposed for OLF 8.

Stirling presented their design for the master plan at the April 6 commission meeting. While they promised to substantially adhere to the DPZ CoDesign plan in their offer letter, they totally violated the plan and the design code embedded in our Land Development Code (LDC) as well as the spirit of the plan.

All but Commissioner Robert Bender either don’t know or don’t care what the Stirling plan could bring. Bender lived in a real town center and knows how good it can be. He had a list of changes for the plan.

What's next for OLF-8? Escambia County to start negotiations with D.R. Horton to sell OLF-8

Related guestview: Residents are overwhelmingly against OLF 8 commerce park. Listen to them.

Let’s travel down the road into the future, after Stirling’s plan was approved. You are driving on I-10, see the food sign and take the new Beulah exit, heading south on Beulah Road. A traffic light turns red and you notice all the big trucks and cars on east Frank Reeder Road. At the next light, there’s a McDonald’s, gas stations and car washes. A salad from Panera sounds good, so you turn left. Panera is right on Nine Mile Road in a shopping complex where there once was a helicopter field. Look, there’s the answer to a commissioner’s dream: a LongHorn Steakhouse that sells wine. He lives right across the street.

The stores and restaurants are national chains, anywhere U.S.A. Beulah is nothing special, just a pit-stop shopping area off the interstate like Spanish Fort or fast-food mecca, Crestview. North of Nine Mile Road is another strip shopping center with a big parking lot and an even bigger parking lot by a Costco, with traffic from far and wide.  This is not a good place to walk or ride your bike.

A small park near the Costco has a bandstand. Maybe there are some restaurants with views of the western woods, the lake or the wetlands. No, that’s all apartments and townhouses. Subdivisions nearby, lots of them, are mostly designed for cars – no welcome mat there for outsiders to walk in or explore. You glimpse the commerce park in the northwest corner. Looks like all they could get was automated warehouses. Big trucks come and go relentlessly − day into night. By then, you have lost your bearings in the maze of roads and turn to Google Maps to help get you out of there.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

More: Bidding war: Escambia County gets multiple multi-million-dollar offers on OLF 8

Years ago, I gave the commissioners an alternative vision for OLF 8 after a Christmastime visit to Seaside.  There, we sat on a circular seating wall surrounding a village green while parents watched their children run around and the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra played Christmas music. A street behind the bandstand was lined with food trucks and pop-up, local shops. More village retail like a book and record store and a small grocery were behind us. The surrounding housing was all shapes, colors and sizes, lovely and walkable.

Seaside is the pioneering village of New Urbanism, designed by none other than our master planner for OLF 8: DPZ CoDesign, a world leader in making places people love. We were wildly fortunate to get them here to design OLF 8.

Today, there are many examples like that and they are close to heaven on earth for those who walk their streets and meet there. Town Madison, 563 acres outside Huntsville, is another DPZ design. The Breland Companies developed it around a Double-A baseball stadium, not a Costco or a Target. Their trails connect to the Singing River Trail of North Alabama. Their website says it is designed to “create a cultural experience unique” to the area. That’s the type of place we can have with the DPZ master plan. It will be a win-win for all of us. Don’t want residential? The plan has much less. Want jobs? The plan has much more light industrial.

The DPZ plan must be the starting point for any negotiations.

Sell the residential to recoup the county’s $15 million investment, holding the developer to LDC design standards.  Repay the funds the whole county invested to get OLF 8.  Then give due consideration to what’s best for Beulah.  The project will affect the whole county yes, but Beulah lives there. Hold the town center areas until the residential supports more for Beulah or sell to a developer that understands what a town center can be. And definitely hold the light industrial until the market supports more than warehouses.

Our great DPZ master plan and design code resulted from a compromise that District 1 Commissioner Jeff Bergosh promised to uphold. Navy Federal paid $1.2 million for the plan and the public weighed in, with 1,681 unique users visiting www.MyOLF8.com and 870 residents completing surveys. That master plan and design code will ensure that whatever is built is up to today’s standards, not those of the post WWII, car-centric era.

Commissioner Bender said negotiations are wide open right now. But he hopes some good thought will precede their next moves – that they won’t do something just to do something.

Want to learn more?

Visit the OLF 8 Facebook group, an offshoot of Escambia Citizens Watch, at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1357402914366631

Theresa Blackwell is a retired Tampa Bay Times reporter who lives in Beulah and is a member of the Beulah Coalition.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: DPZ Master Plan for OLF 8 in Beulah best for all of us in Escambia