Are You Ready For Some Spring Football? Tate Tonight, Northview Friday
May 17, 2018
Ready for some spring football? The Tate Aggies and the Northview Chiefs are.
Thursday, the Tate High School Aggies will host the Pine Forest Eagles at 7 p.m. The Showband of the South will be manning the concession stands.
Friday, the Northview High School Chiefs will host Escambia County High School from Atmore at 6 p.m.
Image courtesy Tate High Aggie Football.
FEMA Chief Preaches Local Prepardness For Disasters
May 17, 2018
Local officials across Florida shouldn’t rely on the federal government to be on the ground everywhere a day or days after the next natural disaster, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday during the annual Governor’s Conference on Hurricanes.
FEMA Administrator Brock Long bluntly stressed that his agency and others that offer disaster assistance have been stretched thin after a series of 2017 storms and wildfires, as well as the ongoing volcanic eruption in Hawaii, so local officials should have their own plans to provide water and other essential services for the first few days following a disaster.
“If you don’t have the ability to do things such as provide your own food and water and your own commodities to your citizens for the first 48 to 72 hours, and I’m asking you to consider pre-event management concepts, I’m questioning whether or not you’re an EMAP (Emergency Management Accreditation Program) accredited emergency management agency,” Long said while appearing at the week-long training event at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach.
“If you’re waiting on FEMA to run your commodities, that’s not the solution,” Long added. “I can’t guarantee that we can be right on time to backfill everything you need.”
With the start of the six-month hurricane season two weeks away, Long said FEMA isn’t “going to back away” when disasters strike. But he said local and state capabilities need to be strengthened, such as signing deals with private water bottlers and debris haulers and hardening local communications systems.
He talked of a need to revamp the national flood-insurance program, saying that due to “affordability” about 80 percent of homeowners in Houston didn’t have flood insurance before Hurricane Harvey hit last year.
Long said he’s also trying to revamp FEMA’s business model, as he estimated the agency spent about $300 million a day responding to disasters in 2017, with hotel bills at $3.5 million a day for displaced residents due to hurricanes Irma in Florida, Maria in Puerto Rico and Harvey in Texas, as well as floods, tornadoes and fires.
“The bottom line is that my operational capacity internally does not grow with the number of events that we have,” Long said.
Long’s comment came after Rep. Jeanette Nunez, a Miami Republican who oversaw the state House’s response to Hurricane Irma, encouraged emergency managers to keep pushing for storm hardening projects. She noted many storm-related proposals failed to advance during this year’s legislative session when lawmakers redirected $400 million to respond to the February massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“We really had to struggle at the end to find a way to keep our budget balanced but also address that particular tragedy,” Nunez said.
Lawmakers approved storm-related money for such things as farm repairs, affordable housing in Monroe County and to help students displaced from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Still, many of the high-profile measures crafted in response to hurricanes Irma and Maria failed to win support. They included strengthening the electric grid, creating a strategic fuel-reserve task force, requiring the Division of Emergency Management to use certified sign-language interpreters during emergency broadcasts and using rail-tank cars to bring fuel into evacuation areas to avoid a repeat of runs on gas stations.
“Those are good baselines to start for the upcoming session, next year,” said Nunez, the chairwoman of the House Select Committee on Hurricane Response and Preparedness who will not return for the 2019 session due to term limits.
Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Scott told people attending the conference to “pray” Florida won’t be impacted by hurricanes for the third consecutive year.
“Hopefully we won’t have any hurricanes. It would be nice not to have, in my eighth year, any hurricanes,” Scott said.
Scott also praised people attending the conference for their work to restore services following hurricanes the past two years.
The governor’s office announced on Wednesday the state has submitted a $616 million request to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for ongoing Hurricane Irma recovery efforts.
HUD has 45 days to respond to the state’s request for the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program money, which would go into providing assistance to impacted businesses, repairing homes, building new affordable rental units and buying land for affordable housing.
The federal program requires at least 80 percent of the money go to the hardest-hit counties and ZIP codes. As part of the state’s request, the areas listed in the application include Brevard, Broward, Collier, Duval, Lee, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Orange, Polk and Volusia counties, as well as ZIP codes 32136 in Flagler County, 32091 in Bradford County, 32068 in Clay County and 34266 in DeSoto County.
The money would also help Puerto Ricans who have relocated to Florida due to Hurricane Maria.
by Jim Turner, The News Service of Florida
Judge Weighs Ban On Patients Smoking Pot
May 17, 2018
Cathy Jordan credits pot with helping her defeat the odds in the battle against Lou Gehrig’s disease she’s waged for more than 30 years.
And although she can now legally obtain the cannabis treatment she’s relied on for decades, Jordan is prohibited from what she and her doctors swear is the best way for her to consume her medicine — smoking joints.
Jordan is among the plaintiffs challenging a state law that bans smoking pot as a route of administration for the hundreds of thousands of patients who are eligible for medical marijuana treatment in Florida.
With her husband, Bob, serving as her interpreter during a trial Wednesday, Jordan told Leon County Circuit Judge Karen Gievers and a packed courtroom that she started smoking pot a few years after she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, in 1986.
“My doctors are really not concerned with the risk because I’m still alive. In ‘86, I was given three to five years to live. And I’m still here,” Jordan, draped in a pink shawl, testified.
Wednesday’s hearing came more than 18 months after voters overwhelmingly approved the constitutional amendment that broadly legalized marijuana for patients with debilitating medical conditions like Jordan.
Lawmakers last year enacted the prohibition on joints — derided as “no smoke is a joke” by critics — largely to protect the public from the ill effects of smoking, lawyers for the state argued.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Karen Brodeen said “smoking should never be a route of administration for any medicinal product.”
“Smoking is a crude delivery system that delivers harmful substances. It is associated with various respiratory symptoms. It contains many of the same toxins as does tobacco smoke,” she said.
But Jordan said none of the dozens of doctors she’s seen over more than 30 years have ever told her to stop smoking marijuana. In fact, her current neurologist advised her to do just the opposite.
“They’re actually more interested in how healthy I am after having ALS for so long,” said Jordan.
The prohibition on smoking was included in a state law aimed at implementing the 2016 constitutional amendment, but John Morgan, the Orlando trial lawyer who largely bankrolled what was known as Amendment 2 and initiated the lawsuit, is among those who maintain that the smoking ban runs afoul of the Constitution. Gievers did not rule on the challenge Wednesday.
“The amendment itself says smoking is not allowed in public places. I don’t think you need to be too much of a legal scholar to understand that means it is allowed in other places,” Morgan told reporters before the hearing began.
Morgan and the other lawyers representing the plaintiffs also used a “slippery slope” argument, saying lawmakers and health officials could have banned a variety of other routes of administration.
“Look, if the Legislature wanted to, they could have banned edibles, which they tried to do. They could have banned oils, which they tried to do. They could have banned smoke and they could have said, ‘Listen, we’re just going to let it be done by suppository.’ What stops that?” Morgan said.
During arguments Wednesday, Jon Mills, a former House speaker and former dean of the University of Florida law school who was one of the chief authors of Amendment 2, told Gievers the law passed last year is in “irreconcilable conflict” with the Constitution.
Mills also pointed to the Legislature’s outlawing of smoking marijuana as evidence that the Constitution permits it.
“Why would you act to exclude smoking if smoking wasn’t authorized?” he asked.
Lawyers for the state, however, argue that the amendment does not expressly allow smoking and gives Florida officials broad authority to “regulate health, safety and welfare” of the public.
“It’s not anything goes,” Senior Deputy Solicitor General Rachel Nordby said.
But other routes of administration are problematic for Jordan, who grows her own marijuana.
Vaping makes her gag. Edibles give her stomach cramps. Smoking gives Jordan “dry mouth,” which offsets the excessive drooling caused by ALS, she said. And it relaxes her muscles, increases her appetite and helps combat depression, said the diminutive Jordan, who frequently breaks out in an infectious smile.
“It just makes my life a lot more bearable,” she said.
But Nordby told the judge that several provisions in the amendment highlight that “the state has a role in setting parameters” for marijuana use, including the ban on smoking.
“It is not whatever the doctor says. It is not anything goes,” she said.
The plaintiffs, in contrast, insist that the Constitution allows smokable marijuana in a variety of ways, including how marijuana is defined.
The constitutional amendment relied on a 2014 definition of marijuana in Florida criminal law, which includes “all parts of any plant of the genus Cannabis, whether growing or not.” That includes whole-flower marijuana, which is used for smoking, the plaintiffs contend.
The plaintiffs are also relying on an “analysis of intent” of the amendment, published prior to the November election and disseminated broadly to the media and the public, to bolster their argument that smokable pot always was part of the plan.
Ben Pollara, who was the campaign manager for Amendment 2 and is president of Florida for Care, a non-profit organization advocating for patients and the medical marijuana industry, testified Wednesday that the public was fully aware that the proposal would have legalized smoking of medical marijuana.
“It was just assumed by most, if not all, that when we were talking about marijuana, we were talking about the green, leafy stuff that you smoke,” Pollara, one of the authors of the analysis, said.
Speaking to reporters after Wednesday’s hearing, Morgan called Cathy Jordan a “Florida hero” and urged the state to back down.
“Enough is enough. Let’s stop the politics. Let’s let these people live their final years with dignity,” he said.
In a separate marijuana-related lawsuit, Gievers telegraphed how she is likely to rule in the smokable pot case. Gievers last month gave the go-ahead to Tampa strip-club owner Joe Redner to grow his own marijuana for use in juicing. The 77-year-old Redner’s doctors ordered the juicing treatment to keep his lung cancer in remission.
“Nothing in the amendment authorizes the Department of Health (or any other part of Florida’s government) to ignore the rights of qualifying patients to access the medical marijuana treatment to which they are entitled under the Florida Constitution, or to exclude any method by which qualifying patients may take their medicine,” Gievers wrote in a 22-page order, in which she also scolded health officials for being “non-compliant” with the Florida constitutional requirements.
The state has appealed Gievers’ decision in the Redner lawsuit, and Redner has asked the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in on the case.
by Dara Kam, The News Service of Florida
ECSO: Cantonment Man Charged After Pulling Gun
May 17, 2018
A Cantonment man was arrested after allegedly pulling a gun at a local VFW post.
Larry Wayne Goodwin, 65, was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Goodwin got into an argument with his wife at the VFW on Lillian Highway, according to an arrest report. While across the room from his wife and her friend, he pulled out what the friend “observed to be” a handgun before putting it back in his pocket. The friend said he then pointed at her with his hand, making gesture as if he was pulling a trigger to shoot her.
He was released from the Escambia County Jail on a $10,000 bond.
Mary E. “Doodlebug” Ferguson
May 17, 2018
Mary E. “Doodlebug” Ferguson, 85, of Escambia Cty., FL passed away on Monday, May 14, 2018.
Doodlebug was a graduate of Tate High School class of 1951 and a member of Klondike Baptist Church. During her life, Doodlebug enjoyed serving at church, bowling and cooking. One of her greatest joys was teaching Sunday school and playing on the church softball team. She also served as church secretary for over 40 years. On Friday and Saturday nights you would find her at Felton Bowling Alley where she was a member of the bowling league and served as secretary for over 50 years. She enjoy traveling the country and bowling in tournaments, annual family vacations to Minnesota and Texas. Doodledug also enjoyed spending time with her best friends Nona Tisdale, Minnie May Dunaway and Sue Farthing.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Eugene “Bruce” Ferguson; daughter, Susan Martinez; grandson, Zachary Martinez; father, Pete Olsen; mother, Effie Olsen; sisters, Helen Cole and Ruby Moore; and brothers, Peter Olsen and Willie Olsen.
Doodlebug is survived by son, David (Pattie) Martinez; daughters, Janey Ferguson and Felicia (Jeremiah) Johnson; grandchildren, Anamarie (Lincoln) Mixson, Britin (Jason) Baber, Jaiden, Jainae, Makayla, and Tristian Johnson; great grandchildren, Maria and Jaxson Baber and Evie and Wyatt Mixson; brothers, Eben Jerry Olsen and Mike Olsen; sisters, Nellree Williams, Frances Hampton, Janis (Larry) Scott, and Janey (Tom) Hood; and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins.
Visitation will be held Saturday, May 19, 2018 at 10:00am at Klondike Baptist Church, 7201 Klondike Road, Pensacola, FL 32526, followed by services beginning at 11:00am. Officiating will be Pastor Joshua Wallnofer.
Pallbearers: Tim Parker, Kevin Cole, Tim Holland, Dale Olsen, Larry Scott, and Tom Hood.
Honorary Pallbearers: Ricky Ward, Richard Searles, John Cobb, Clearance West, Jr., Greg Parker, and Randall Baker.
In lieu of flowers, please make donations to Klondike Baptist Church (Project Fund).
Atmore Woman Killed In Highway 31 Accident
May 16, 2018
A two vehicle accident Tuesday afternoon claimed the life of an Atmore woman.
Alabama State Troopers said 25-year old Tracie Shenaye Young was killed when her 2009 Chevrolet Cobalt collided with a 2004 GMC Envoy driven by Carolyn Jean Bartley of Bay Minette. The accident occurred about 5 p.m. on Highway 31 near West Road.
Young was pronounced deceased at the scene, according to state troopers. She was not wearing a seat belt.
Bartley was transported to Atmore Community Hospital. Her condition was not available.
The accident remains under investigation by Alabama State Troopers.
ECSO: Century Man Arrested With Ecstasy, Marijuana And Cocaine
May 16, 2018
A Century man was arrested on multiple drug charges after a Pensacola traffic stop.
The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office stopped Ladarrious Lett’s vehicle on Pensacola Boulevard at I-10 due to a seat belt violation. The officer reported smelling marijuana coming from the vehicle during the traffic stop.
After Lett was placed into custody, a search revealed marijuana, spice, Ecstasy pills, cocaine and $3,208 in cash on his person, according to an arrest report, along with a partially smoked marijuana blunt. The cash and drugs we’re seized.
Lett was charged with two counts of possession of a controlled substance, possession of cocaine, and possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute.
Lett was released from the Escambia County Jail on a $2,000 bond.
Escambia Charter School Closing
May 16, 2018
Escambia Charter School in Gonzalez is closing after 22 years.
“Over the last six years, student enrollment has been low and it has been a struggle financially for the school. Due to this continued low enrollment, it is not fiscally responsible to keep the school open,” the school said in a press release.
Escambia Charter was designed for high school students who have excessive referrals or have a case for expulsion. The program provided high school students the opportunity to complete their academic work and receive counseling services as well as other interventions, according to the Escambia County School District.
The school district will assist in the placement of current students.
“Escambia Charter School will be missed not only by the students and parents, but by the faculty and stakeholders that have worked so hard to educate the students that have come through the doors. It has not always been easy, but it was always worth it,” the school news release said.
The graduation for the 2017-2018 school year will be held on May 22 in the University of West Florida’s Conference Center, Building 22.
Taxwatch: Property Taxes Could Rise $700 Million In Voters Reject Amendment
May 16, 2018
Florida TaxWatch released a study Tuesday projecting property taxes could increase by more than $700 million on non-homestead properties like businesses, apartments and second homes. According to the group, the increase would happen if voters reject a proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot.
Known as Amendment 2, the proposal would extend a current 10 percent cap on annual increases in assessed values of non-homestead properties, a cap that voters approved in 2008.
TaxWatch Vice President Kurt Wenner said many Floridians are not aware of how much taxes could go up if the cap is lifted. “If Amendment 2 fails to pass, it doesn’t mean that the cap is just no longer going to be in effect going forward,” Wenner said during a media event at the Florida Press Center.
“It means that all of this property will suddenly be assessed at full value. This can be quite a big sticker shock when some people get their tax bills.” Wenner said he expects potential tax increases would be passed along to renters and business customers, making the issue important whether someone owns property or not.
Supporters of the amendment say it is currently polling at just under 60 percent, which is the threshold for amendments to pass.
The Legislature in 2017 decided to put Amendment 2 on this year’s ballot. Senator Tom Lee, a Thonotosassa Republican who sponsored the proposal in 2017, estimated at the time that failure to extend the cap would effectively lead to a $688 million tax increase. In all, the November ballot will include 13 proposed constitutional amendments.
Warm, Humid, Chance Of Showers
May 16, 2018
Here is your official North Escambia area forecast:
Wednesday: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 1pm. Partly sunny, with a high near 88. Calm wind becoming north around 5 mph in the morning. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.
Wednesday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 67. Northwest wind around 5 mph becoming calm.
Thursday: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 89. Calm wind becoming southwest around 5 mph in the afternoon.
Thursday Night: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 68. South wind around 5 mph becoming calm in the evening.
Friday: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 88. Calm wind becoming south around 5 mph in the morning.
Friday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly cloudy, with a low around 69. South wind around 5 mph becoming calm after midnight.
Saturday: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 88. Calm wind becoming south around 5 mph in the morning.
Saturday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly cloudy, with a low around 68. South wind around 5 mph becoming calm in the evening.
Sunday: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 88.
Sunday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 68.
Monday: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 88.
Monday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 67.
Tuesday: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 88.