There was big news in the Florida Panhandle this week as Southwest Airlines officials announced they had agreed to provide air service to the new Panama City airport -- the first airport built in the United States since 9/11.

Readers of "Paving Paradise" may recall how we chronicled the birth of this new airport, to be built on 4,000 acres of land donated by the state's largest private landowner, the St. Joe Co.

St. Joe's goal is simple: Get the taxpayers to spend $300 million building a new airport so it will stimulate the development of the 70,000 acres that the company owns around it, "building homes, stores, hotels, bars, schools, even a barge port," we wrote. Without the airport, St. Joe officials told us, those plans might never bear fruit.

How committed is St. Joe to making the new airport -- which at build-out would be larger than New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport combined -- a success? According to the Panama City News Herald, the company has agreed to spend up to $28 million over two years subsidizing Southwest's operations there, in the hope that it will eventually draw enough customers to break even.

Lost in all the hoopla over Southwest was another intriguing twist in the story, however. About half of the airport acreage, we noted in our book, "consists of wetlands that flow into Burnt Mill Creek and Crooked Creek, tributaries of St. Andrews Bay." It's so wet that the contractor building the airport, Phoenix Construction, had to bring in 9 million cubic yards of earth primarily to fill in the swampy property before constructing the 8,400-foot concrete runway.

But during construction, Phoenix repeatedly allowed cloudy, mud-laden storm runoff to wash into nearby waterways, violating pollution laws. State officials found that the company cut corners to save money and so they fined Phoenix more than $1 million for the violations.

But that's what happens when you wipe out wetlands -- the water has to go somewhere, and there's no longer a swamp to filter out the pollution. But here's the twist.

In order to get its state and federal permits to destroy 2,000 acres of wetlands, the airport authority and St. Joe agreed to a plan that would preserve to 9,000 acres of land southeast of the airport site.

“Mother Nature is the best place-maker of all time, and now we will be protecting forever some of her best work,” a St. Joe official said in 2007 when the Corps of Engineers approved the permit.

Well...maybe not forever. On the day before Southwest's announcement, Bay County Commissioners had on their agenda a small item about some of that preserved property by the airport. The commissioners voted to remove the "preserve" designation from 107 acres and instead designate it as "business center conceptual land use" in order to satisfy a developer's plans.

Why did they start nibbling away at something that was supposed to be preserved forever? According to WMBB-TV, one commissioner explained, "We should protect the environment, protect the environment that’s endangered, and let people use what’s not.”

At least now we know how long "forever" lasts in Florida: Two years.