Opinion Archive

My wife and I recently spent a morning running errands. We emerged from our neighborhood into a thick blanket of marine fog. Visibility on Navarre Parkway was less than a quarter of a mile.

The bridge to Navarre Beach arched into a misty uncertainty. Buildings and trees emerged from the mist as faint shadows and only gradually took on definition.

When I started covering Navarre in the summer of 2020, I spent a lot of time on Concerned Citizens of Navarre’s Facebook page.

You can learn a lot about a community from pages like this. They help reunite lost pets, share stories of small kindnesses, give much appreciated updates about what’s going on in the community, as reported by individuals living there.

Florida’s rules for high school athletics seem so relaxed when it comes to athletes transferring that you have to try hard to do something that constitutes a violation.

Yet, rules still seem to be broken in one form or another and you wonder if any lessons are ever learned from it.

The zoning board has denied a request for a new RV park on a 20-acre parcel east of Milton, citing environmental concerns.

It will be interested to see whether county commissioners take a different position, as the two boards have so often split in the past.

House Bill 1035, sponsored by Representative Jayer Williamson, needs to be defeated. It is merely a thinly veiled attempt to hamstring an aggrieved community’s ability to exercise the right of home rule.

Communities need this when the other means of redress have failed to achieve what many in the community feel is inequitable governance.

After violent storms like those in early January, there are discussions about the trees which have fallen. Too many times the trees in question have landed on a home or another structure which resulted in damage.

Frequently water and laurel oaks are the culprits. They are commonly found in the area and with shallow roots these large trees have a relatively short life span.

“It’s over already? That was short!” said 4-year-old Killian after a recent Sunday service at COMPASS Church.

Out of the mouth of babes! Most often, the variable in the service’s length is the length of my sermon, and such was the case that Sunday.

You typically don’t see teams win games by such a wide margin that people who see the score question if it’s real or not.

That happened to be the case for Navarre’s girls basketball team, however, in its game against Escambia earlier this month.