Out and About Archive

Full disclosure – our editor, Wendy Rudman, is helping me with this week’s column because I’ve been busy with some very important projects that I hope to share with you next week or the first paper of the new year.

Since you’ll be reading this just over a week before Christmas, I’ll start out with a Christmas theme.

When Bob Dole died this past week, it reminded me of the Emerald Coast Honor Flights. They were the brainchild of a local panhandle physician assistant and our then U.S. Congressman, Jeff Miller, R-Chu­muckla.

The first Honor Flight took place in May 2005 and flew 103 local veterans to the newly opened and dedicated National WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C.

This weekend is the official start to Christmas in Navarre. Saturday morning there is a Jingle Bell Run/Walk that begins at 8 a.m. at the Navarre Fire Station – with a shortcut to Grandma’s house.

Where the goodies are. If you haven’t registered at this point – you might be out of luck for this year’s shirt, but a previous year’s shirt will be just as festive.

A hearty thank you to all of our readers, advertisers and community members and wish you the most blessed Thanksgiving.

I’ve been with many of you for more than 21 years and I think I can speak for all of my staff when I say we are grateful for you.

As I was typing my column, I found out that Adam’s Sanitation is suing the county again. I told our editor, Wendy, that they must have a lot of money to burn.

She then reminded me that Nathan Boyles is an attorney. He is also a county commissioner in Okaloosa County. So, he knows what it is like to be a county commissioner and he is an attorney.

Only the government could put “stormwater mitigation” and “COVID-19” into the same sentence.

In another twist to the long story of federal funding for the pandemic, the stormwater mitigation task force met last week to decide what stormwater projects to submit for COVID funding.

We have a new team member in our graphics department, Dan Bontrager. He worked with Momentum Church with their graphics for 18 months and before that worked with Pensacola Christian College and Navy Federal Credit Union.

You can read his bio along with all the other team members at https://navarrepress.com/about/.

Water has been the hot topic this past week, with some Midway Water System customers finding out first that they needed to boil their water and, nearly four days later, that boiling wouldn’t fully decontaminate the water.

According to the water company officials, they didn’t cause the problem – a contractor did. But now they have to solve it and deal with hundreds of concerned and angry customers.

Commissioner James Calkins has ideas on how to fix the county’s stormwater problems.

They include listening to the ideas of the current Local Mitigation Strategy (LMS) volunteer taskforce which, by the way, have been looking at stormwater issues for many years.

Navarre’s Cooking! Today we learned that Buffalo Wild Wings, Slim Chickens, and Smoothie King have filed paperwork to build in Navarre.

And, we have a Dunkin Donuts in the works near our new Aldi, and I’m sure there will be more restaurants announced soon. I hope you are hungry!