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Author: Joe Byrnes Created: 10/3/2006 12:31 PM
All about news and life in Marion County, Fla.
Smokers need not apply
By Joe Byrnes on 7/24/2007 5:14 PM
This entry ran as a Wednesday column in the Star-Banner.

The city of Ocala is offering one more reason to tell your kids not to smoke, and, if you're a youngster, another reason to avoid the nasty habit.

This minor, local incentive is in addition to the obvious ones: the prospect of a long, lingering, painful death from heart disease or lung cancer and the daily waste of hard-earned cash, money that literally goes up in smoke.

Ocala's new reason to quit is this: If you do smoke, the city won't give you a job, not with the Police Department, Ocala Electric Utility or Public Works or as a clerk or manager in City Hall. City Manager Paul Nugent told me the fire department already doesn't hire smokers, because of the added dangers from smoke inhalation during firefighting.

Let me be clear. I'm an ex-smoker, and I know that smoking - though I still, absurdly, fin ...
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Lessons learned in naming schools
By Joe Byrnes on 7/11/2007 4:43 PM
Hammett Bowen Jr. Elementary stands out as a recent exception when it comes to naming schools.

The School Board named it after a person, a Medal of Honor recipient who gave his life to save others in Vietnam. But nationwide the trend is to name public schools after things in nature, not heroes or presidents. That's according to a study by the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Its authors, led by University of Arkansas professor Jay P. Greene, looked at seven states, including Florida. Here are some of their findings:

- Among 2,998 Florida schools, only five are named for George Washington while 11 are named after the manatee.

- In Florida during the past 50 years, schools with nature-related names have increased from 18.7 percent to 36.8 percent. Meanwhile, schools named for people have decreased from 43.9 percent to 25.7 percent.

- The majority of districts ar ...
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Nancy Stacy deserves a trophy
By Joe Byrnes on 6/27/2007 1:47 PM
Republican Nancy Stacy has taken some heat for the political stunt she pulled. As a write-in candidate in House District 24, she blocked Democrats and independents from the June 5 GOP primary and forced a meaningless general election on Tuesday that wasted tens of thousands of dollars.

Some people have railed against the "disenfranchisement" of those non-Republicans. Because of Stacy, they have had no say in selecting their representative.

There's some truth in that.

It's no less true that she deserves a trophy as Marion County's political operative of the year. She got in there and won the case for her partisan interests - her niche group in the political battle - by taking advantage of a technicality.

She's like a good defense attorney exploiting a loophole to help her client.

The cause of justice is not served when the criminal walks free on ...
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First responders recognized for a special delivery
By Joe Byrnes on 6/20/2007 8:41 PM
"Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you," Terry Neverman declared into a video camera Tuesday.

He was trying for the impossible - to fully express his feelings of gratitude toward the seven first responders who helped deliver his son at his home in western Marion County.


Baby Tyler sleeps in his mother's arms on Tuesday, June 19, 2007.

On Mother's Day, Baby Tyler was being born in a hurry and he was turned around the wrong way - not head-first as he was supposed to be.

"I mean, I can't express it enough," Neverman said, his eyes moist with emotion. & ...
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FWC: No killing little gators or burying gophers
By Joe Byrnes on 6/15/2007 2:10 AM
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission made important decisions this week affecting alligators and gopher tortoises. Gators and gophers were topics of previous blog entries - so this is an update.

Alligator Management

The commission decided Wednesday "not to open the door to allowing homeowners to dispose of small nuisance alligators on their own. Rather, they decided to continue the requirement that people contact the FWC, and the agency will dispatch nuisance alligator trappers to remove the reptiles," according to an FWC news release.

The staff's proposal had included the option of allowing homeowners to "euthanize" the smaller gators.

"FWC Commissioners, meeting in a two-day session in Melbourne, also turned thumbs down to a proposal to issue statewide permits to recreational alligator hunters and agreed to continu ...
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Something to celebrate: Re-opening of the Marion Theatre
By Joe Byrnes on 6/14/2007 1:16 AM
Here's something to celebrate: the Aug. 11 grand re-opening of the 65-year-old Marion Theatre downtown.

I tried to imagine what it was like on opening night, Sept. 11, 1941, when patrons shelled out 39 cents to enter the brightly lit theater and view “Aloma of the South Seas.” As usual, when it's a question of local history, I called David Cook, historian and former Star-Banner editor.

Cook was there on opening night. He was 13 and was fascinated by the penny-sized moths that seemed to be everywhere outside the building at 50 S. Magnolia Ave. They were drawn, perhaps, by dazzling lights brighter than the town had seen before.

“In those days, Ocala rolled up its sidewalks at 6 p.m., and everybody went home,” Cook said. I asked him about the city's other old theaters, and Cook laid out for me, in a matter of minutes, the early history of local movie houses.
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Take a scenic drive that's worth your time
By Joe Byrnes on 6/7/2007 12:35 AM
There is sometimes a certain deep purplish blue in the western sky just after sunset that surprises me and is, to my eyes, a breath-taking hint of the piercing sweetness of heaven.

It has caught me off guard at unexpected places, like the parking lot at Target on State Road 200. I'll be about my business - my busy-ness - and happen to glimpse the sky. Just that color, seen through the power lines and above the headlights and the silhouettes of storefronts, and suddenly I'm back at a campsite in the Smokies, listening to the endless music of a mountain stream.

As I see it, our Marion County sunsets are shot through sometimes with intimations of eternity. Our sunrises, though, bring a feeling of new beginnings and second chances. The early morning, with its foggy grays and misty golden hues, has the best light in which to appreciate the beauty - and the pos ...
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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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