New NorthEscambia.com Feature: An Events Calendar; Submit Your Events
April 10, 2008
Beginning today, there’s a new feature on NorthEscambia.com — a community events calendar listing. To see the community events page, simply click “EVENTS” in the bar near the top of the page, or click here.
We will be happy to run your church, civic or other non-profit community event taking place in North Escambia at no charge. Please submit your event(s) as early as possible prior to the event date to news@northescambia.com or click here for our contact form.
Escambia County Withdraws As Summer Feeding Program Sponsor
April 10, 2008
Escambia County will not serve as a sponsor for 2008 Summer Feeding Program for children in the county, including four sites in the North Escambia area.
For many years, the Board has, with permission from the Escambia County School District, voluntarily served as the sponsor for this program. The program has traditionally operated on grant funding, but during the last two program years, the School District has had to offset the operational deficit.
Summer nutrition for children under the Ms. Willie Ann Glenn Act requires each school district to develop a plan to sponsor summer nutrition programs. The schoolboard will offer a program to students via its cafeteria services facilities.
“The Board of County Commissioners regrets this decision but, due to the projected amount of reimbursements for the 2008 program, it will be extremely difficult to operate the program without additional funding,” the county announced Wednesday.
Last year’s program provided nutritionally balanced meals at 37 sites across the county, including the Carver Community Center in Century, Carver/Century K-8 School, the Quintette Community Center and Ransom Middle School. Those four sites all served breakfast last year, and the Carver/Century school site served a breakfast each day.
The school district’s plan for the summer feeding program have not yet been announced.
Dirt Road Committee Discusses Upcoming North Escambia Paving Projects
April 9, 2008
Paving miles and miles of dirt roads in North Escambia won’t be an easy task, and doing it on a limited budget will make it a lengthy process.
The Escambia County Dirt Road Paving Committee met Tuesday morning in Molino to address that status of paving the county’s dirt roads, most of which are in the northern District 5.
District 5 Commissioner Kevin White said that about 18 miles of dirt roads had been paved in the district since he took office.
There is about $1 million budgeted in 2008 for dirt road paving, $1 million in 2009, $1.5 million in 2010 and $1.7 million in 2011.
While a million dollars sounds like a lot of money, it will only pave about one mile of the average dirt road in the county. It is not a simple process of putting asphalt down on a ne existing dirt road. Right of way easements must be obtained, and there is a lot of engineering work to design the road and a drainage system that will meet state and local specifications. All of that must take place prior to getting bids on a road.
White says he hopes his fellow commissioners will provide more funds, but acknowledges that it is not likely to happen since there are almost no unpaved county roads in the other four commission districts.
Former District 5 Commissioner Wilson Robertson pledged that if he is relected, he will do all that he can to support District 5. Robertson, who served District 5 from 1988 to 1992 and again from 1996 to 2000, is currently running for the District 1 commission seat held by Commission Chairman Mike Whitehead.
“Basically you don’t have dirt roads in any other district other than District 5,” Robertson said. “If I get back on the commission, I promise the people of District 5 my support.”
“I even gave up playing golf today on my golf day to attend this meeting,” Robertson joked with the committee, in apparent reference to a published report that his opponent Mike Whitehead played golf rather than attending an anniversary celebration at the Myrtle Grove Volunteer Fire Department just over a week ago.
This year’s million dollars is being used to pave East Chipper Road south of Molino and Nicholson’s Drive off Molino Road, and any leftover funds will go to start the design process for paving Brickyard Road in Molino.
Right of way acquisition is also underway along Fairgrounds road, with four property owners that still have not deeded the necessary land to the county. Two of the four are expected to do so soon, but the other right of way land may have to be taken under legal eminent domain proceedings.
Dirt Road Paving Committee member Leroy Wiggins asked if there any progress toward paving Pelt Road in Walnut Hill. Pelt Road runs from Highway 97 to Pine Forest Road, a distance of almost exactly one mile.
“It is a very used through road,” Wiggins said. “School buses, mail carriers, people going to Ernest Ward (Middle School) use that road a lot. Plus there are seven houses on that road. We have all of the right of way easements on that road.”
Wes Moreno from the county’s engineering department said that Pelt Road was “not high on the current list”, but he would look into it.
“The objective is the same for all of us,” Wiggins said. “I want to see all of the dirt roads in this county paved.”
Pictured above: Pelt Road in Walnut Hill runs one mile from Highway 97 to Pine Forest Road. It was one of the roads discussed Tuesday morning at a meeting of the Escambia County Dirt Road Paving Committee. NorthEscambia.com photo.
Gas Prices Continue To Rise
April 9, 2008
Gas prices continue to rise across North Escambia, remaining more than a dime higher per gallon for regular unleaded than the cheapest Pensacola prices.
Tuesday morning, at least eight major Pensacola gas stations were at $3.21 per gallon for regular unleaded. The best price we found in the North Escambia area was $3.32 per gallon at the Tom Thumb at Highway 28 and Highway 97 in Molino. Prices in Davisville and Century were running about $3.35 per gallon of regular unleaded.
Diesel prices across North Escambia were approaching the four dollar mark Tuesday, with a gallon of self serve diesel at $3.89 at the Tom Thumb in Molino, once again the cheapest station we found in the area from Quintette Road to the Alabama state line. Other stations in the area we surveyed were at about $3.92 per gallon.
Pictured above and below: The Tom Thumb in Molino had the cheapest regular unleaded and diesel prices we could find in the North Escambia area on Tuesday. NorthEscambia.com photos.
Walnut Hill Man Called As Pastor Of Brooks Memorial Baptist Church
April 9, 2008
Brooks Memorial Baptist Church in Atmore has called Rev. James Boyd of Walnut Hill as their new pastor, and he is ready to go to work for the Lord.
“I am extremely excited to be called as the Brooks pastor,” Boyd said. “I have a vision and a plan for Brooks, and I am ready to go to work.”
Boyd, 64, retired about a year ago after serving as pastor at Walnut Hill Baptist Church.
“I was retired, sitting in that barber shop in Walnut Hill getting my hair cut when my cellphone rang, and it was the chairman of the deacons at Brooks asking if I would preach that Sunday,” he said. After preaching that Sunday, heerved for 10 months as the interim pastor at Brooks Memorial prior to be called as their pastor this past Sunday.
He said he was looking forward from the very beginning to serving the Lord at Brooks. He said he was glad the moment had arrived when he and his wife Ellen were standing outside the sanctuary last Sunday morning, waiting for the church to vote on their new pastor.
“When the doors opened after the vote, it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life,” he said. “They whole church just clapped for us.”
The vote? 106-0.
“I’m ready now; that vision takes me to the community and to the mission field, and with things in the church,” he said Tuesday as had lunch with 43 others at a Senior’s Luncheon at the church. “It’s about worship. Worship is not something we do. It is not something that you just do; it is something you have and experience each and every time.”
That mission field work Boyd mentioned in already underway at Brooks Memorial. Six church members just returned last week from Reynosa, Mexico, after helping to build three homes in the slums, just across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas.
Those missionaries will give their testimony at 6:00 this Sunday evening at the church, including a slideshow of pictures from the Mexican mission trip.
“There are just so many ways to spread the gospel,” Boyd said. “God is not nearly concerned about the technique as he is about the spreading of the gospel.”
As Brooks Memorial moves forward, Boyd said he is looking forward to working on growth in the church’s children and youth programs, and the church plans to hire a youth director in the not so distant future. And he said is looking forward to the church’s “Outrigger Island” Vacation Bible School to be held in June.
A special Commitment Ceremony where Boyd will be officially installed as the Brooks Memorial pastor will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 20, with a fellowship luncheon to follow.
The Boyds currently reside on their “Dream Acres Farm” in Walnut Hill.
Sunday School is at 9:30 every Sunday at Brooks Memorial Baptist Church on McRae Street, followed by morning worship at 10:30. Sunday evening services are at 6:00, and Wednesday evening services are at 6:30.
Boyd will preach a Spring Revival at the First Baptist Church of Century Friday and Saturday, April 25 and 26 at 6:30 and Sunday morning, April 27 at 11:00.
Pictured above: Rev. James and Ellen Boyd of Walnut Hill at Brooks Memorial Baptist Church in Atmore Tuesday afternoon. NorthEscambia.com photo, click to enlarge.
Cyber Safety Tips For Parents
April 9, 2008
This week NorthEscambia.com is running a series on Cyber Safety. Today, we take a look at some tips for parents.
- Prepare your children for the online world just as you would for the real world.
- Establish guidelines and rules.
- Know who communicates with your children
- Learn about the Internet.
- Familiarize yourself with the programs your children are using.
- Consider using Internet filters or blocks.
- Place the family’s computer in a common room where supervision and guidelines are met.
- Limiting your children’s computer time is not enough to safeguard them on the Internet.
- Talking about the benefits and dangers on the Internet and making sure your children are making smart decisions while online is also important.
- Explain to your children that Instant Messenger (IM) is only for chatting with school and family friends who they know by face and are approved by you.
- Make sure they can put a face to every screen name on their IM “buddy list.
- Reinforce that people are not always who they say they are when online.
- Make sure your children know how dangerous it is to give out personal information such as their name, mailing address or E-mail address.
- Stress the fact that it is not safe to get together with someone they first “meet” online.
For more tips, visit http://www.safeflorida.net/safesurf
To read our installment in this Cyber Safety series from Monday, click here. To read our blog on the subject, click here. To read yesterday’s story about the Attorney General’s Office CyberCrime unit visit to Northview High School, click here.
Many Century Departments Over Budget; Council Concerned About Spending
April 8, 2008
“We’ve already shot this budget to hell and back,” is how Century Town Councilman Henry Hawkins described the current condition of the town’s budget. “If we ain’t careful, we are going to be flat broke.”
Century Town Council members spent nearly 40 minutes at their regular meeting Monday night questioning bills and budget items presented to them by Town Clerk Dorothy Sims.
Hawkins pointed out that the town’s water and sewer department was nearly $3,000 over budget for employee bonuses.
“You mean they paid over what is in the budget,” Council Member Anne Brooks said. “They paid more than was budgeted?”
Sims said that in the past the council would amend the budget after too much was spent to reflect the overage, all after the fact. “We don’t just do them (budget admendments) everytime we go over,” she told the council.
“I think we need to amend before we spend,” Brooks said.
“When you look at this, we are overspent in every department,” Hawkins said. “You don’t do that and then amend the budget…than a red flag needs to be raised. Then we amend the budget, or we don’t do it.”
The town had budgeted $9,350 for capital outlay, or improvements, to town parks. As of the end of January, the department had spent almost $30,000. Some of that money will be repaid by grants, Mayor Freddie McCall told the council.
$2,500 was budgeted for office supplies. The town had spent $3,600. $1,500 was budgeted for street department equipment maintenance. As of the end of January, $3,865 had been spent. The water and sewer department is $4,200 over budget for plant and pump maintenance. The water and sewer department is $2,500 over budget in their miscellaneous category.
“It’s just that so many of the accounts are over,” Brooks said. “It looks like we did not do a good job budgeting.”
Each month, the council receives a bill list of the bills to be paid. It is just that: a list of bills and amounts. But Hawkins said he wants the council to start seeing the actual bills.
“I think it would be fair to us (the council), if we got a copy of all of the bills,” Hawkins told Sims.
“You want a copy of every bill…can you not come in and look at them,” Sims responded.
“I called and left messages for you twice today to see the bill list,” Brooks said.
“I didn’t know that,” Sims said.
After 38 minutes of discussion, a motion by Council Member Nadine McCaw to pay the town’s bills passed 4-0, with Council Member Sharon Scott absent.
Pictured above: Century Town Clerk Dorothy Sims holds an accordion file full of the town’s bills for the month at Monday night’s Century Town Council meeting.
Northview Students Learn Cybersafety From AG’s Office
April 8, 2008
Kathy Pacheco from the Florida Attorney General’s Cybercrime Office painted a chilling picture for students at Northview High School Monday morning. A young girl meets someone she believes to be a young man online. They chat; she begins to trust him. She has personal problems that he seems to understand. He has the right answer for all her problems.
They being to chat online five, six hours per day. She hurries home to chat with him; he gets angry if she’s not online. She wants to make him happy. He admits that he was a little dishonest about his age. Maybe he’s in his twenties, not a teen. She does not care; she likes him. After a little more time goes by, he admits his real age…56. But she’s OK with that, because she really loves him; after all, he understands all her problems at home. In fact, she mentions that maybe she just might run away from home.
LMIRL.
Those five letters appear on her screen. Attorney General Bill McCollum has called those the five most dangerous letters in the alphabet. LMIRL — Let’s Meet In Real Life.
The girl in our story runs away with the 56 year old man. They are finally caught in Reno. He goes to jail for 25 years. She get a letter from him, threatening to kill her when he gets out. That’s not the part of the letter she notices. She’s more concerned that he did not tell her how much he cares for her in the letter.
It’s real life, a real story, Pacheco tells the Northview students. A sexual predators on the Internet is like a lion stalking his prey, she said, adding that you never really know who you are talking to on the other end of an online chat.
Pacheco showed them a drawing of of a man that was extremely ugly, to the point of being comical. “Would you chat with him?” The juniors and seniors laugh.
“What about her,” she asks, showing a picture of an attractive young lady that several guys described as “hot”. Many admit that they would.
“But what if this she was really a he?” Pacheco asked, drawing lots of comments from the students.
“That would suck,” one student says.
That was the case, she told them, of Paul Parker in Bay County. Parker, 42, enticed young boys over the internet by pretending to be a teenage girl or boy and persuaded them to perform sexual acts via webcam. Parker would then record these acts and make pornographic videos from them. He also placed additional child pornography videos on the internet, where they were discovered by an undercover CyberCrime investigator who was able to trace them back to Parker.
He would threaten to send the videos to the victim’s friends if the did not further comply with his requests. He bribed a young boy to meet him at a hotel. He’s now serving 14 years in prison.
“That’s it? God that’s awful,” a student says.
Pacheco then showed the students a MySpace page belonging to a user named “Danny”. Danny’s page looks fairly normal, other than he has just a handful of MySpace friends. A few students admit that they might chat with Danny, or add him if he made a friend request on MySpace.
Danny actually created the page while a serving time in an Arizona prison.
Pacheco also told students that dangers exist everywhere there is person to person contact on the Internet, not just on MySpace. Places like Facebook and gaming websites can also lure predators because there are minors online there.
Students played a game of “Pick the Perp” where they were shown four pictures at a time. Some where convicted sexual offenders, others were Cybercrime Unit officers. They were generally unsuccessful in picking the sexual predator over the officer, allowing Pacheco to make the point that it’s not possible to tell who is good and who is bad by the way they look.
One of the “Pick the Perp” pictures was of a seemingly innocent looking hardware salesman. He thought he had arranged an in person meeting with a teen, but he had actually arranged to meet an investigator. He was arrested when he showed up at the arranged meeting site. He had duct tape, rope and a machete in his possession at the time of his arrest.
The Northview students also learned that when something is posted online, it may never go away…even if the student deletes it.
“Do you really want the rest of the world to know your business?” Pacheco asked the students.
She said collegess will often do an Internet search before admitting a student, and employers will often do the same before hiring someone. Those are cases, she said, where something posted now can come back to haunt students in the future.
She encouraged the students to send a friend request to the Cybercrime Unit’s MySpace (pictured above) at http://www.myspace.com/florida_cpcu. When added, it will place a Cybercrime badge in the student’s MySpace. That will potential frighten away predators, she said.
- For more information about cyber safety, visit http://www.safeflorida.net/safesurf or http://www.myspace.com/florida_cpcu
- Those who receive unwanted photos, messages or solicitations on the Internet are advised to call: (800) The-Lost or visit www.cybertipline.com
To read our installment in this Cyber Safety series from Monday, click here. To read our blog on the subject, click here.
Century Care Center Residents Make Special Memories
April 8, 2008
Residents at the Century Care Center made memories at a special ceremony Saturday afternoon.
The residents and their families worked together to create memory boxes, under the supervision of Janet Lee (picture right in the above photo) from Covenant Hospice.
“In spite of the rainy weather, we had a pretty good turn out,” Activities Director Mae Hildreth said. “The residents, families and staff enjoyed it.”
Scroll down for more submitted photos.
Homeless Woman Will Have To Leave Century Park; Town Will Put Up Signs To Forbid Overnight Camping
April 8, 2008
The Century Town Council voted to place “No Overnight Camping” signs at the town’s Wayside Park located next to the Country Bumpkin on North Century Boulevard.
The woman, who Mayor Freddie McCall described as “sweet” and “apparently a Christian lady”, has been sleeping in her car in the park for some time. But council members said they were concerned about her living in her car in the park.
McCall said he had tried to get her to go to a homeless shelter in Pensacola, but she refused. McCall said she had been staying in a Flomaton Park until they ran her out of town.
“She had somebody working on her car right there in the park,” Town Clerk Dorothy Sims said.
In other business, the council approved the lone bid on replacing a sign at the town’s industrial park. The sign was destroyed back in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan roared through the area.
The eight by ten foot sign will cost the town $7,905 from Markham and Sons, but most of that money will come from insurance proceeds the town received back in 2004.
The council was scheduled to hear a presentation from Dale Long of Fabre Engineering according to the agenda, but he was not present. McCall said Long was to inform the council that the state had approved a water pressure tank system at near the Century Correction Institute. The total bill on the project will be $18,695, but the council took no action on moving forward. McCall said a decision did not have to be made on the project right away.