Out and About Archive

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!

We just wrapped up the 9th annual fishing rodeo and we are already looking forward to next year which will be our ten-year anniversary of the rodeo.

The next Navarre Fishing Rodeo will take place on October 1 and 2, 2022. (kind-of rhymes) I’ve been involved with the rodeo since the inception so I can say, with confidence, this wasn’t my first rodeo.

Businesses help the communities around them in ways most of us don’t realize and could never have imagined.

For example, when a dump truck and car collided Tuesday morning on U.S. Highway 98 in Gulf Breeze, both drivers were injured and the highway was blocked not just by the damaged vehicles, but by 20 cubic yards of dirt that the truck had been carrying.

There is a lot of dirt being moved in Navarre right now. The Publix at the county line has cleared their lot and new apartment complex, “Elevate Navarre,” started clearing this week.

Also, we have a report in this week’s issue that the new K-8 school, East Bay K-8 is already almost 100 students over projections and more than 80% capacity in their first two months after opening its doors for students. Navarre is growing with or without your permission.

I’ve heard people complain that there is nothing to do in Navarre or surrounding nearby communities.

However, if you hear this in the next 1.5 months – it must be someone that is in a basement without connection to the outside world. (There are very few basements in this area.