Opinion Archive

There is a lot to celebrate as we finalized the comparison data for 2021. There’s a lot I will unpack for you here…

For the first eight years I collected data from our local shelter, the average number of adoptions in 12 months was about 550. In 2019, DOUBLE the adoptions happened. This past year….TRIPLE.

Congratulations to all the Navarre Beach Area Chamber of Commerce award winner nominees for 2021.

The winner will be announced at the breakfast that will be held on Friday, January 28, 2022, at 7:30 am at St Sylvester Catholic Church, 6464 Gulf Breeze Parkway.

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.

I grew up with the sound of typing, as my mother sat in the kitchen writing letters to far away friends and family members. She had a Smith-Corona, inked by a ribbon that needed to be replaced regularly, and it was electric.

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.

My name is Sally Menk, and I was with Jack Wetherell when he started the Navarre Panhandle Butterfly House in 1997. I volunteered there in Navarre every year until they tore it down!

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.