-
-
Loading
Loading
Michael Tucci has always been an optimist. A former EMT and drummer, he opened his first Urban Air fun park location, in New Tampa, in the spring of 2020 to an enthusiastic response. “We opened on January 23rd, 2020 and had an amazing five weeks,” he said. “And then, boom—Covid hit, and we had to shut down for three months.”
Suddenly Tucci, like countless other business owners, found himself with no revenue—and no way to pay his employees or his bills.
“Our corporate office encouraged us to reach out to the larger financial institutions to get a PPP loan,” he recalled. “But nobody was getting much of a response. Then I looked into Gulfside.”
His PPP loan came through in a matter of days.
When Tucci was planning a second location in Brandon, he reached out to David Newton, Gulfside Bank’s Senior Vice President, Director of Government Guaranteed Lending, to help him qualify for a 7A loan from the Small Business Administration. A few years later, he approached Newton again about another SBA loan to expand into Sarasota.
This time, there was an issue. The SBA 7A program places funding limits on any one guarantor, and new construction meant that Tucci would need more money than he could qualify for under the program.
“At 60,000 square feet and a total cost of $18.5 million, it was a significant project for this area,” said Jeff Burkee, Gulfside’s Senior Vice President, Sarasota Commercial Executive. “But the location was good, we knew Michael was right for the project, and he had good partners who could help make the project successful.”
The Gulfside team quickly spotted a potential opportunity: a USDA loan. To qualify, the project would have to be located in specific areas delineated on the USDA’s map.
“We looked at a few sites that didn’t make a lot of sense," Newton said, "but eventually we found something in Lakewood ranch— which just happened to be in the entertainment district they were developing there.”
“It was meant to be,” Tucci said.
Or was it?
“We didn’t realize how quickly the USDA was planning to shrink the maps,” Newton said." I remember looking at the maps online one day, only to find that whole area we’d been working on had fallen out of qualification.”
The entire project looked dead in the water. But Newton wasn’t ready to give up just yet. He spent a month getting to the head of the USDA B&I loan program in Washington, DC to find a workaround. But it was all in vain. The team needed another alternative, and as luck would have it, Newton found one: by adding a renewable energy component, they could get some regulatory relief from the USDA.
The brand new Lakewood Ranch Urban Air fun park opened in September 2025.
“I believe I’ll always find a solution,” Tucci said, “even if I don’t know what it’s going to be. That’s been Gulfside’s mindset from day one. That’s who we want for our financial partner.”