Regional planning in Northwest Florida runs through a single agency. The West Florida Regional Planning Council, staffed by the Emerald Coast Regional Council in Pensacola, serves as the state-designated planning body for a six-county region: Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, Holmes and Washington counties. Its work is less visible than a city council vote or a county commission hearing, but it shapes the policy framework within which all of those local decisions get made.
Gulf Breeze aerial. Photo: Unsplash.
The WFRPC operates under Chapter 186 of Florida Statutes, which establishes regional planning councils as the primary vehicle for cross-jurisdictional coordination on land use, housing, transportation and natural resource management. The council must maintain a Strategic Regional Policy Plan, a document that establishes regional goals and priorities that local comprehensive plans are required to be consistent with. The current plan addresses four priority areas: regional economy, natural resources and environment, housing and land use, and public safety and emergency preparedness.
Housing affordability is an active focus of the council's current work program. The regional housing needs analysis that WFRPC completed for the Pensacola metro area in recent years identified a substantial gap between housing supply and demand at income levels below 80 percent of area median income, the threshold for programs like federal CDBG housing assistance, which the City of Pensacola has used for the voluntary home buyout program approved by city council earlier this year. Regional housing analysis informs local comprehensive plan housing elements, which in turn govern density allowances, affordability requirements and mixed-use zoning decisions across all six counties.
Coastal resilience and post-disaster redevelopment planning have been significant components of the council's post-Hurricane Sally work program. Sally made landfall near Gulf Shores on September 16, 2020, causing an estimated $7.3 billion in damage across the region. The WFRPC has been involved in coordinating post-disaster redevelopment planning with local governments, a statutory requirement under Florida's Local Mitigation Strategy process, and in developing technical assistance resources for municipalities navigating FEMA reimbursement and CDBG-DR compliance requirements. The Port of Pensacola's $11.4 million CDBG-DR road and rail grant, approved by the Pensacola City Council in March 2026, is an example of the federal disaster recovery funding that regional coordination helps municipalities access and deploy.
The council also staffs the Florida-Alabama Transportation Planning Organization, which met most recently on February 11, 2026, and is scheduled to meet next on May 13, 2026. The staffing arrangement means ECRC plays a dual role, regional land use planning through the WFRPC function and regional transportation planning through the TPO function, with the same staff managing both processes. That integration is intentional. State law requires transportation plans and land use plans to be consistent with each other, and having a single agency staff both processes reduces the friction in that coordination.
WFRPC meetings are public. The council meets at the ECRC offices, P.O. Box 11399, Pensacola, FL 32524. Meeting schedules and agendas are available through ECRC at ecrc.org or by calling (850) 332-7976. Members of the public can participate in regional planning processes, including the comprehensive plan amendment consistency reviews that the council conducts when local governments seek to change land use designations.