Editorial Archive

Santa Rosa County businesses and officials want tourists to come. They are and in solid numbers if recent bed tax revenues are the indicator.

When the tourists come, they arrive in cars. The cars cause more congestion on our always crowded roads.

There is no shortage of adjectives to describe how folks on both sides of the Pensacola Bay Bridge felt earlier this month when they learned that it would not reopen as promised March 22. Angry, betrayed, hopeless and sad are just a few.

Why did that barge cause damage to the bridge?

The answer, as I see it, there was no protection for the bridge supports. Now, the question is, why not? Was it not in the design contract or did the design engineers not include protection for the bridge supports?

When you’re in charge of making decisions for a county as large as Santa Rosa County, there are a lot of directions you can turn.

People care about it all.

Representative government or political interference with the law?

Like the Federal government functions on the principal of subdividing its lawmaking (the Congress), law administration (the Executive), and law interpretation (the Judiciary) duties to prevent abuses against citizens, so too must Santa Rosa County.

Exciting news for Tiger Point Golf Course! The City of Gulf Breeze has approved a purchase and sale agreement with Capstone Golf II LLC for the 18-hole east golf course and with Scott Zepp for the clubhouse and adjacent holes 10 and 18 of the old west golf course.

Following a due diligence period, closing is scheduled for late February.

Eight words and at least two months of argument that revealed political fissures, real or imagined, between the north and south ends of Santa Rosa County and pitted science against business might have come to an end.

It is anticipated that the county commission will vote 5-0 during a Feb. 25, 2021 meeting to drop a proposed amendment to the Comprehensive Plan that would have allowed more or new borrow pit mining above a protected drinking water reservoir that serves tens of thousands of people.

If you have not seen the news, the East Milton Wellfield Protection issue is about how three commissioners (Bob Cole, Sam Parker and James Calkins) voted to remove “existing” water protection rights for the citizens of South Santa Rosa and East Milton.

Let me repeat that, remove an “existing” water protection right.

Clock-watching may prove counterproductive.

Unlike the Santa Rosa Board of County Commission meetings – one of which recently ran over six hours – the local legislators run on a tight schedule. When they call a meeting from 5:30 to 7, they mean it as more than a dozen constituents discovered last week.

Over the past several months, Santa Rosa’s politics have been inflamed by heated debates concerning the county’s water supply.

The arguments largely concern local developers and their practice of digging sand. The practice leaves large holes or “borrow pits” that many experts say are hazardous to our underlying water sources.