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Now We're Talking

Author:	Joe Byrnes	Created:	10/3/2006 12:31 PM
All about news and life in Marion County, Fla.

A parent's worst nightmare
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/30/2007 9:20 PM

It fell to me Sunday afternoon to photograph an accident that claimed two lives on State Road 200 near the Citrus County line. When I saw the badly damaged car, I realized it looked a lot like my 20-year-old stepson's Honda Accord. I struggled quietly with the sort of panic you hold back with one rationalization after another, assuring myself it couldn't possibly be him because of this or that. Then I reached him by cell phone. Other parents - Tim and Lori Hess, of Inverness - heard about the accident and hurried to the scene. Their daughter Melissa and her best friend, Molly Paquin, had been shopping in Ocala. Hours earlier, Melissa had called her boyfriend and told him she was driving home. No one had heard from her since then. Lori Hess would recognize the car. The young women, recent graduates of Citrus High School, had been killed in the accident. ...

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Florida's elements
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/30/2007 9:16 PM

Earth, wind, fire and water. The old elements are a litany of political and environmental questions - and dangers - facing Florida. Earth. Beginning June 12, the Legislature convenes to consider cutting the taxes we pay for our little patches of Earth. They have risen along with land and home values. Local governments, meanwhile, fear losing essential revenues. There's nothing more earthy than the gopher tortoise. Also that week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will take up a management plan for the tortoise, whose tunnels provide refuge for 360 other species. The new rules will not permit bulldozing them in their burrows. Wind. The Atlantic hurricane season begins Friday, and the National Hurricane Center predicts a rough one: 13-17 named storms, including 7-10 hurricanes and 3-5 major ones. It's t ...

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Capsized: A story of survival
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/23/2007 5:34 AM

Rodney D. Rogers has a new lease on life. Earlier this month, he and three friends survived for at least 24 hours in the rough waters of the Gulf of Mexico, clinging to his capsized fishing boat until Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers rescued them. Safe and sound, Rodney Rogers poses next to his boat in Weirsdale. Does Rogers plan to go fishing again? "Oh, yes," he said. The next time, though, he will plan better and carry an EPIRB, an emergency position-indicating radio beacon. I went to interview him last Friday on the back porch of his Weirsdale home. He is a rocker, a ...

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Wages here and around the country - how do they compare?
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/18/2007 6:25 AM

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released data showing wages for many different jobs categories, including the wages for Marion County, also know as the Ocala Metropolitan Statistical Area. It's no surprise that our pay compares poorly to wages throughout Florida and the country. Our average annual wage is $31,540, compared to $35,820 for Florida and $39,190 for the United States as a whole. This most recent data, which was released today, is for May 2006. Using the BLS interactive data system, I've created three PDF charts that you can search if you like. Or you can explore the government data yourself at www.bls.gov/oes/. Unfortunately, some of our obvious job categories - like secondary school teachers and farm managers - aren't listed for the Ocala MSA. Here are some examples of what you'll find: - Our 1,980 registered n ...

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Redefining 'utopia' in Marion County
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/16/2007 11:16 PM

Sometimes I'll come upon a word or expression that suddenly brings together a scattered assortment of old ideas. This happened to me when I was reading the County Commission meeting agenda online and found the phrase "Utopia of Marion County." It's just another planned development springing up in Summerfield, a proposed Community Development District where new homeowners will pay a fee for a quality lifestyle. Commissioners voted to skip a workshop on the subdivision, which is planned north of County Road 42 and just east of U.S. 301. The next step is a public hearing to create the CDD. Utopia is owned by Ecclestone Signature Homes of Marion and involves prominent developer Thad Boyd III. These guys have a strong track record. But the name they've come up with encapsulates for me so much of what is wrong with how we're treating Marion County - this 1,663 square miles of sand ...

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FWC proposal: Homeowners could 'euthanize' small alligators
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/12/2007 6:29 AM

Here's an update on proposed changes to Florida's Alligator Management Program - a topic of previous blog entries. Homeowners will be allowed to kill alligators less than 4 feet long under proposed rule changes that will go before the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at its June 13-14 meeting in Melbourne. The commission won't approve the new alligator management rules at that time but is expected to give its staff feedback and suggest changes in the proposals, which they'd likely bring back before the board in September. The draft proposals - to revise management of Florida's alligator population of more than 1 million reptiles - follow an Internet survey and a series of public meetings. Here are excerpts from the May 11 FWC news release about the proposals: The first of the proposals would create a statewide recreational harv ...

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Family feels a dog's death
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/9/2007 10:53 PM

In this big world full of sorrow - crowded with war, genocide and mass murder - the death last Friday of one black terrier-sized mutt named Sam is truly of no importance. For my family, though, it was hard. Sam - a foundling somewhere, I suppose, between 14 and 20 years old - had stopped eating and was coughing and could hardly stand. The veterinarian, who was very kind and patient with us, found massive internal bleeding, and we agreed that Sam had to be euthanized. Sam's master, my 20-year-old stepson, Scott, petted him in his final moments and Scott's mom, Lauri, and I were there. Just before he died, Sam raised his head, looked at Lauri and Scott, then put his head down and closed his eyes. It reminded me, for the moment, of the playful mop of black fur that Scott carried around as a boy and that shared every holiday and partook of every joyful family event over the years.

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The Paw Print: Making memories at Forest High
	By Joe Byrnes on 5/3/2007 6:11 AM

If you're a longtime reader of the Star-Banner, then Kristin Sanford has touched your life. She put the front page together the day terrorists bombed the USS Cole. On Sept. 11, 2001, she rushed into the office minutes after an airliner hit the second World Trade Center tower and worked on into the night. "I had a gruesome job that night," Sanford told me on Tuesday. "I had to go through the photos." She brought you front page layouts, headlines and images to show the effects of Hurricane Katrina. For seven years, Sanford worked on the Star-Banner copy desk, the last few years as the copy desk chief. You wouldn't necessarily know her name, but her news judgment and design decisions affected your knowledge of the world. Then, last spring, she up and quit the business - to work as an English teacher at Forest High School. &quo ...

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A map to save your life
	By Joe Byrnes on 4/27/2007 10:32 AM

Maybe it's a guy thing, but I love maps. And the map of Marion County that Deputy County Engineer John Goodknight showed me Tuesday morning had the added attraction of being designed to save lives. The spider's web of roads was loaded down with colored dots - including orange and red ones for fatal traffic accidents during the previous two years - and with traffic counts and little diamonds indicating dangerous shoulder drop-offs. Tacked to Goodknight's office wall, it laid out a challenge and helped pinpoint areas where the county Transportation Department will make simple changes to prevent accidents: improved signs, rumble strips and reflectors, cleared sight lines and wider asphalt shoulders. For example, a county crew of about 13 workers - armed with a grader, asphalt-laying road widener, roller, sweeper and several dump trucks - have added to the sides of County Road 25. Narrow roads with ...

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A second chance at a better life
	By Joe Byrnes on 4/19/2007 7:16 AM

The small, white-and-ginger kitty in cage S17 sat as proper as a porcelain statue, with his head tilted forward, his eyes half closed and his tail curling like a spring vine at his front paws. And he had come from a scene of such ugliness - the wretched, feces-encrusted Florida Highlands home of Jonathan Terpstra, where investigators saw perhaps hundreds of cats, some of them wild, some dead, some barely alive. By Tuesday, the county recovered 90 live cats but euthanized most of them. They were sick, feral or otherwise unadoptable. When Multimedia Editor Doug Engle and I visited the Marion County Animal Center on Monday, at least 24 were on the path to possible adoption. We found a quiet band of tattered survivors, looking more like kittens than cats, in their metal cages. Christy Jergens, the center's animal program coordinator, was our guide, and she kept showing us disturbing pictures on the back of he ...

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Jenkins got a fair deal
	By Joe Byrnes on 4/11/2007 4:42 PM

The squirrelly excuse was a bad beginning – how he accidentally used the wrong debit card 67 times and gambled with a nonprofit agency’s cash. (You have to punch in the right PIN, for goodness sake!) Now Whitfield Jenkins, a respected community leader, has admitted his gambling problem and his guilt and signed a Pre-Trial Intervention Program contract to avoid criminal prosecution. Investigators said Jenkins took (and later returned) $10,043 from Ocala Leased Housing Corp. while he was its president. He was charged with grand theft. But after perhaps six months, if he follows the PTI rules, the case will be dropped. Jenkins has long stood up courageously for a lot of important things I believe in – voting rights, social justice, equal education – and I’m glad the law allows him to avoid a criminal record. He should be thanking his lucky stars and patting ...

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Chasing my cheese
	By Joe Byrnes on 4/5/2007 7:34 AM

I won't pretend I like the dumbed-down fads of corporate culture or that it was not at all degrading a few years ago to be told I'm a mouse chasing its cheese. Like the good little mouse from "Who Moved My Cheese?" - I'm chasing it still, right across the page and on to the Internet. But last week my editor had her managers do a little company exercise that I found - and I mean this sincerely - quite eye-opening. Unless you avert your eyes now, you're going to read about it, and that could ruin some future corporate retreat, compromise someone's PowerPoint presentation or undercut a highly paid consultant's "aha" moment. You're still reading, and that says something about you. At the meeting, before we watched a short video, our boss told us the exercise was about counting basketballs. She gave us strict instructions to count the basketballs passed from one white-s ...

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'All things counter, original, spare, strange'
	By Joe Byrnes on 3/28/2007 2:24 PM

The young eagle coasted gracefully just 40 feet above Lake Wauberg. From my boat shortly after dawn, it seemed to me as if I held it by a kite string. On dark, gray-flecked wings, it glided down, oh so slowly, to the rippling surface of the lake and, swinging its talons with an easy indifference, scooped up a squirming fish. Then, with a few strokes of its wings, it rose and flew beyond the tree-lined banks. The lake is just north of Marion County in Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, but I hope this scene from my trip there a couple of weeks ago will help make a point about the experience of nature in this county and this part of Florida. It can surprise you any ...

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They know the Lunsfords' loss, pain
	By Joe Byrnes on 3/22/2007 5:27 AM

Dooley Hopper and I sat talking on Monday afternoon in her lovely parlor, with its floral wallpaper, piano and fine, upholstered furniture. Hopper, who is 81, savored the memory of Christmastime 1977 and her granddaughter Trisa Gail Thornley at a church service. The pastor had asked Hopper to tell the Christmas story. As she did, Trisa, who was 8, clung to a chair in front of her and listened with rapt attention, tears of joy glistening in her brown eyes. Afterward, when Hopper returned home, Trisa hugged her tightly around the waist, Hopper recalled. "She said, 'Mamaw, your story about the baby Jesus was so good I cried.'" I had gone t ...

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Ocala pilot earns a new set of wings
	By Joe Byrnes on 3/14/2007 4:58 PM

Among the many particulars — be they chance or providence — to which Bob Hughes, of Lakeville, Mass., owes his life, you can count the fact that one courageous Ocala teen is hooked on flying. As a toddler, Jason Schappert watched planes at the Ocala airport. At 16 he took lessons. At 17 he got his pilot's license. So it was that last year, after graduating from West Port High School, he entered Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts to study aviation. On Feb. 10, he was out on frozen Long Pond in Lakeville with his landlady, Pam Perrotta, and her friend Ted Dubois, watching small planes touch down and take off from the lake. Schappert fell hard and bruised his hip. But the next day, a Sunday, the two friends coaxed him back on the ice, where he shuffled about in his bedroom slippers. Dubo ...

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Legislation would help safeguard Florida springs
	By Joe Byrnes on 3/8/2007 1:41 PM

Any day on the Rainbow, someone said, doesn't count against you. Photographer and underwater filmmaker Glen Lau, the award-winning creator of "Bigmouth," quoted that line to me recently at the dedication of the Florida Bass Conservation Center near Webster. Lau should know. He has recorded more than 15,000 hours diving in Rainbow Springs. So even though the west Marion resident is 71, you've got to subtract about two years. The next day at dawn, I was on the Rainbow myself, holding against the current of time, watching a huge sun ascend between the cypress trees and casting my line into a golden mist rising from the water. The river, however, isn't holding its ground, especially not against increasing levels of nutrients from farming, golf courses and housing developments. How much, indeed, will be lost when the crystal-clear Rainbow loses its luster! At ...

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Don't judge the press, Your Honor
	By Joe Byrnes on 3/1/2007 2:58 PM

Circuit Judge Richard Howard has a bully pulpit at the trial of John Evander Couey, the sex offender charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford. That doesn't mean Howard should act like a bully. I'm talking about how he went off on reporters and the Star-Banner's lawyer Monday when she urged him to stop the private questioning of prospective jurors. Video excerpts of that hearing can be viewed on ocala.com. Howard, red-faced and argumentative, seemed to feel the media doesn't have proper respect for his office. I don't believe there's any disrespect. The reporters are obliged to know and report what's going on at the trial, and Howard's strategy essentially closed part of the proceedings and made their job impossible. He and the trial lawyers were interviewing each prospective juror at his bench, where the press and other jurors coul ...

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Nature's landlord on burrowed time
	By Joe Byrnes on 2/22/2007 4:19 PM

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Friday announced a draft management plan to protect the state's gopher tortoises. They are, ironically, the housing developers of natural Florida, building 15-foot-long, underground, temperature-controlled burrows for themselves and about 360 other native species. That's where the gopher frog lives, the eastern indigo snake, the Florida pine snake and the Florida mouse. Florida still has perhaps 750,000 of the lumbering little tortoises, the long-living, late-mating, leaf-chomping landlords of upland forests. But their numbers have declined 60 to 80 percent in the past century. The biggest concern is "habitat destruction, fragmentation, and degradation," according to the FWC. Our sprawling cities, housing developments, farms and mines - the same kinds of human progress that, for other reasons, imperil the freshwater springs - are bu ...

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Two roads, 2 paths of honor
	By Joe Byrnes on 2/22/2007 4:17 PM

What's in a name? In this case, two names signify just a little bit of the honor and recognition due two young Marion County men who gave their lives for their country. In January, the County Commission designated County Road 42 from Pedro to Weirsdale as the Robert E. Blair Memorial Highway. Blair's parents, Allen and Karen Blair, had requested it. "This would be a great honor as our son grew up and lived right on Highway 42," they wrote to the commission. The family has a long history along the highway. Blair's great-great-grandfather ran a grocery at CR 42 and County Road 25 in the 1930s and '40s. On May 25, 2006, the U.S. Army specialist was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. "As Robert grew up in the area and is well-known and respected by many residents, who still reside along the highway, we feel this [should be] deemed appropriate," h ...

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Victim’s mother shares thoughts on alligators
	By Joe Byrnes on 2/20/2007 4:11 PM

Dawn Marie Yankeelov -- whose daughter, a talented artist, was killed last May by an alligator while she was snorkeling in Juniper Creek in the Ocala National Forest – has sent an e-mail to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on its review of alligator management. Yankeelov agreed to share that letter with all of us. The well-written thoughts of a former journalist who lost her daughter on Mother’s Day speak for themselves. Here's a picture of her daughter, Annmarie Campbell: I urge you, also, to share your views on alligator management — whether your concerns are conservation or public safety, or both – with FWC Alligator Management Program Coordinator Harry Dutton by e-mailing him at h ...

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