Escambia Man Arrested After Hit And Run
February 26, 2017
An Escambia County man has been arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol in connection with a hit and run crash.
The crash happened on West Scott Street. Troopers were able to locate the vehicle involved in the crash, and after a short pursuit take Brandon Edward Colley into custody.
And Escambia County Sheriff’s Office K-9 was called to search the vehicle and located illegal narcotics in the center console.
According to information released Saturday by the FHP, Colley was charged with leaving the scene of a crash involving property damage, reckless driving, fleeing attempting to elude, possession of an open container, driving on a suspended license and possession of controlled substance.
Colley was wanted on outstanding warrants for multiple counts of dealing in stolen property, passing a forged instrument and grand theft. He is being held in the Escambia County Jail without bond.
FDOT: Weekly Traffic Alerts
February 26, 2017
Drivers will encounter traffic variations on the following state roads in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties as crews perform construction and maintenance activities.
Escambia County:
· U.S. 98 East (Garden Street) City of Pensacola Parade between “A” Street and Tarragona Street- U.S. 98 East (Garden Street) will be closed to traffic between “A” Street and Tarragona Street in Pensacola from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24 and from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 25 for parade festivities. Traffic will be detoured. Law enforcement will be on site to assist with traffic control.
· State Road (S.R.) 95 Underground Utility Work from N Palafox Street and Texar Drive to N Palafox Street and Lurton Street- Southbound lane closure from 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27 to 6 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28 as crews test and repair air leaks in manhole route.
· Fairfield Drive (S.R. 727/295) Resurfacing from Mobile Highway (S.R. 10A) to North Pace Boulevard (S.R. 292) – Intermittent and alternating lane closures continue between Mobile Highway and North Pace Boulevard from 8:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. as crews perform paving operations.
· I-10/ U.S. 29 Interchange Improvements Phase I- Paving operations will require the following lane and ramp closures from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. the week of Monday, Feb. 27:
o Alternating lane closures on I-10 westbound near U.S. 29 (Exits 10A and 10B) and the I-10 westbound ramp to U.S. 29 north.
o The U.S. 29 north to I-10 westbound ramp will be closed. Traffic will be detoured to make a U-turn at Broad Street to access I-10 westbound.
· Interstate 10 (I-10) Widening from Davis Highway to the Escambia Bay Bridge – Alternating lane closures on Scenic Highway (U.S. 90), south of the I-10 ramps, 8:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. the week of Monday, Feb. 27 to allow crews to install a drainage pipe beneath the roadway. One lane will remain open at all times.
· Perdido Key Drive (S.R. 292) Resurfacing from the Alabama State line to the ICWW (Theo Baars Bridge) – Lane closures will be in effect from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27 through Saturday, March 4 as crews perform paving operations between the Alabama state line and the ICWW (Theo Baars Bridge). Drivers can expect delays.
· I-110 Routine maintenance from Interstate 10 (I-10) exit to Maxwell Street exit- Alternating lane closures from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28 through Friday, March 3 as crews repair overhead lighting.
· U.S. 29 (S.R. 95) Widening from I-10 to Nine Mile Road- Alternating lane closures continue from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. on U.S. 29 between I-10 and 9 1/2 Mile Road and on 9 Mile Road near the U.S. 29/9 Mile Road overpass as crews perform drainage operations.
· Nine Mile Road (S.R. 10/U.S. 90A) Widening from Pine Forest Road (S.R. 297) to U.S. 29- A new detour configuration has been implemented on Nine Mile Road between Stefani and Waring roads as crews construct a box culvert under Nine Mile Road. Alternating lane closures continue on Untreiner Avenue as crews perform jack and bore operations. The speed limit throughout the construction zone has been reduced to 35 MPH.
Santa Rosa County:
· S.R. 87 Widening from County Road 184 to north of the Yellow River Bridge- Intermittent lane closures between Hickory Hammock Road and the Yellow River Bridge from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. the week of Monday, Feb. 27 as crew perform paving operations.
· I-10 Resurfacing from east of S.R. 87 to the Okaloosa County Line- Intermittent and alternating inside lane closures between the S.R. 87 interchange and the Okaloosa County line from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 27 through Thursday, Mar. 2 perform construction activities. Motorists are reminded the speed limit is reduced to 60 MPH within the lane closure.
No Serious Injuries In Two Motorcycle Crash
February 26, 2017
There were no serious injuries reported in a two-motorcycle crash Saturday morning west of Century.
The accident was reported about 11:05 a.m. on Highway 168 near Wawbeek Road. One of the motorcycles came to rest on its side in a ditch following the crash.
There was no official information on the cause of the crash from the Florida Highway Patrol.
NorthEscambia.com photos, click to enlarge.
Florida Gov’t Weekly Roundup: They Will Be Back
February 26, 2017
It’s time for denizens of Tallahassee to get their last week of rest and recreation — or at least sanity — before the whirlwind of activity begins. In the words of a House video from this week: “Session Is Coming.”
And over the last week, the pieces for session continued getting put into place, even if it seemed at times like the House was preparing to knock the entire board off the table. Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’ Lakes, continued a pitched battle with Gov. Rick Scott over the fate of economic development incentives. Meanwhile, one of Corcoran’s lieutenants poured cold water on Senate President Joe Negron’s plan to buy land south of Lake Okeechobee.
Elsewhere, things were a little more settled. The Florida Supreme Court allowed capital punishment cases to proceed, even after the justices’ ruling that the way the state’s death penalty is currently imposed is unconstitutional. Lawmakers were on the track to fixing that.
It all set up one of the more unpredictable legislative sessions in a long time — and sessions have a way of being unpredictable to begin with.
GROUNDHOG DAY
It’s been a while since Punxsutawney Phil reportedly saw his own shadow earlier this month, but it looks like the Capitol is still in for at least six more weeks of fights over Enterprise Florida and Visit Florida.
The latest volley began Monday, when Corcoran — who has led the charge against business incentives — said he was willing to allow Visit Florida to remain alive, as long as it lost two-thirds of its funding and subscribed to a list of conditions
Scott’s response? A spokeswoman called the “massive cut” a threat to Florida families that rely on the tourism industry.
Corcoran’s offer was to amend a contentious bill (HB 7005) that seeks to abolish Enterprise Florida, the state’s business-recruitment agency, and Visit Florida, its tourism-marketing arm.
The amendment would place a series of new requirements on Visit Florida, which would receive $25 million in the budget year that begins July 1 if it agrees to what Corcoran’s office described as “accountability and transparency measures.”
Scott’s budget request is slightly different, in the sense that it asks for $85 million that would go to Enterprise Florida for business-recruitment incentives and $76 million that would go to Visit Florida.
Scott spokeswoman Jackie Schutz said Scott has already been working on changes at Visit Florida, including a change in leadership.
“More than a million Florida families rely on jobs in our tourism industry and are threatened with this massive cut,” Schutz said in a statement. “Unfortunately, some politicians in the Florida House think fighting for jobs is simply hysteria and don’t understand that jobs are not expendable to families who have to put food on the table.”
Nonetheless, the House Appropriations Committee voted 18-12 to approve the measure and send it to the House floor.
“Jobs and capital (are) coming to the state of Florida because we have that good business climate, not because of Enterprise Florida,” Rep. Paul Renner, a Palm Coast Republican sponsoring the measure, said after Tuesday’s Appropriations Committee vote. “You hear the discussion today, it’s almost as if all the jobs are going to go away if the government doesn’t continue to actively intervene in the markets, and that is not who creates wealth.”
That prompted Scott to continue to crank up the rhetoric, calling the House bill a “job killer.”
“I know some politicians who have voted for this job killing bill say they don’t necessarily want to abolish these programs but instead want to advance a ‘conversation,’ ” Scott said in a statement that mirrored lines from an editorial he released on Monday. “This is completely hypocritical and the kind of games I came to Tallahassee to change. Perhaps if these politicians would listen to their constituents, instead of playing politics, they would understand how hurtful this legislation will be to Florida families.”
GETTING HOT IN HERE
Economic incentives aren’t the only flash point that built up over the past week.
A key House Republican made it appear doubtful the House will take up, as written, a $2.4 billion proposal by Negron, R-Stuart, to buy land south of Lake Okeechobee to ease the impacts of polluted water releases into estuaries on the east and west coasts.
House Government Accountability Committee Chairman Matt Caldwell, R-North Fort Myers, said advancing Negron’s proposed 60,000-acre reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area — atop what is now farmland — would be “non-starter” if it displaces other projects, such as the $600 million C-43 reservoir along the Caloosahatchee River west of the lake.
Also, the House has little appetite to borrow money through bonding the state’s portion of the costs — the federal government would be asked to cover half — for Negron’s proposed land acquisition and reservoir construction.
“I’m dubious that the bill, as it’s currently structured, could actually be accomplished the way it’s envisioned,” said Caldwell, who brought U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., to a meeting Wednesday of the state House Natural Resources & Public Lands Subcommittee.
The two chambers are also at odds over gambling legislation. One plan, the Senate’s, would vastly expand the state’s gambling footprint; another, the House’s, would essentially maintain the status quo.
The overwhelming endorsement of the House and Senate plans by key committees sets the stage for critical negotiations between the two chambers, Gov. Rick Scott’s administration and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The Appropriations Committee voted 14-2 to approve the Senate bill (SB 8), while the House Tourism & Gaming Control Subcommittee voted 10-5 to approve the House measure (PCB TGC 17-01).
One positive sign: Unlike in previous years, the bills are moving early in the process, receiving critical votes before the session begins — something legislative leaders are quick to point out. But the vastly different approaches, and a lack of a sense of urgency on the part of the House, keep the chances of a successful outcome a crapshoot.
“I’m not 100 percent sure where the middle ground’s going to end up, but I can tell you if it comes down to expanding gaming, that’s going to be a non-starter in the House,” House Tourism & Gaming Control Subcommittee Chairman Mike La Rosa, R-St. Cloud, said.
The House plan centers on cementing a new agreement, called a “compact,” with the Seminoles, who last year won a federal court decision regarding a 2010 agreement with the state that gave the tribe “exclusive” rights to operate banked card games, such as blackjack, at most of its casinos.
The Senate’s industry-friendly proposal, meanwhile, includes a variety of factors — including an expansion of slot machines and blackjack at pari-mutuels — that the House, at least for now, maintains are off-limits.
Sen. Bill Galvano, the Senate’s chief gambling negotiator who also was instrumental in crafting the 2010 deal with the tribe, likened the current situation to the three-way stand-off in the finale of the classic Western movie, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
“The House has a product out there. There was a time the tribe was waiting to see where each chamber was. But now we know,” Galvano, a Bradenton Republican slated to take over as Senate president after the 2018 elections, told reporters after Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “It’s time to reel it in.”
DEATH PENALTY BACK ON TRACK
The state law allowing the death penalty might be unconstitutional, but cases where capital punishment is on the table can still go forward, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. The decision was the latest twist in a year-long saga about Florida’s method of imposing executions.
In a pair of October rulings, the state court ruled that a new law — passed in response to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case known as Hurst v. Florida — was unconstitutional because it only required 10 jurors to recommend death “as opposed to the constitutionally required unanimous, 12-member jury.”
The October majority opinion in the case of Larry Darnell Perry also found that the new law “cannot be applied to pending prosecutions.”
But in an apparent reversal of that decision Monday, the majority ruled that capital cases can move forward, even before lawmakers fix the statute.
The majority in the 5-2 decision was comprised of Chief Justice Jorge Labarga and justices R. Fred Lewis, Charles Canady and Ricky Polston, along with newly seated Justice Alan Lawson, who joined the court at the end of December.
The majority on Monday decided that the new law can be applied to pending prosecutions — and is constitutional — “if 12 jurors unanimously determine that a defendant should be sentenced to death.”
But in her dissent, Justice Barbara Pariente argued that what could be a “temporary” fix, until lawmakers address the issue, could lead to more litigation.
“Such concerns are precisely why it is for the Legislature, not this (Supreme) Court, to enact legislation curing the act’s fatal 10-2 provisions, assuming the Legislature intends for the death penalty to continue to be imposed in Florida,” Pariente wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Peggy Quince.
The Legislature, in the meantime, is looking to fix the problem. The House Judiciary Committee voted a day after the court’s ruling to require a unanimous jury decision to condemn defendants to death. The measure (HB 527) is part of a fast-moving process aimed at getting a bill to Scott by the end of the first week of the legislative session.
“One thing I found that disturbed families more than anything else is uncertainty,” House Judiciary Chairman Chris Sprowls, a Republican from Palm Harbor who is a former prosecutor, told the committee. “It really truly revictimizes them once again. … We will do our small role for those families in ensuring that we have a death penalty statute that is legal and those cases can move forward.”
But Herman Lindsey, who was convicted of murder in 2006 and who spent more than a year on Death Row before being exonerated by the Florida Supreme Court in 2009, told the committee that, while the measure would fix the issue regarding unanimity, the law is still troubled.
“The problem that I have with this bill is that it’s sort of like putting a Band-Aid over something that needs to be stitched up,” he said.
STORY OF THE WEEK: Gov. Rick Scott and House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’ Lakes, continued escalating their feud about how much to spend on business incentives in the budget year that begins July 1.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “You want to know the difference between our country and all those other nations out there; (it) is the fact that we have a judiciary that keeps everybody else in line.”—Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, on legislation that would impose term limits on state appellate court judges.
by Brandon Larrabee, The News Service of Florida
Northview Chiefs Football Players Clean Up Century Health And Rehab
February 26, 2017
Members of the Northview High School Chiefs football team volunteered Saturday morning at the Century Health and Rehabilitation Center. The cleaned out both around and in the fishing pond, and cleaned up and cleared out around the center’s courtyard.
“We are now ready for spring and fishing,” Century Health and Rehab Activities Director Mae Hildreth said. “Big thank you to all the guys. They worked hard….They made work fun.”
Photos for NorthEscambia.com, click to enlarge.
Early Morning Fire Destroys Flomaton Home
February 25, 2017
An early morning destroyed a home on in Flomaton.
The home, on Pecan Leaf Lane off Highway 113, was fully involved when the first 911 call was received just after 5:30 a.m.. The home was total loss.
Authorities said the home was currently unoccupied. There were no injuries reported.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
The Flomaton Fire Department, multiple additional Alabama volunteer departments and the Century and McDavid stations of Escambia (FL) Fire Rescue responded to the blaze. Escambia County (FL) EMS, the Flomaton Police Department and the Escambia County (AL) Sheriff’s Office also responded.
Reader submitted and NorthEscambia.com photos, click to enlarge.
IP Explosion Caused $50 Million In Damage; Repairs Not Complete
February 25, 2017
It will take up to three months and $50 million for International Paper to recover from the January 22 explosion at their Cantonment mill.
The explosion caused significant structural damage to the largest pulp digester and the power house, bringing operations at the mill to a halt for just over a week.
The power house has been restarted, and the Cantonment mill was able to resume partial operations producing fluff pulp using a series of small batch digesters within a couple of weeks of the explosion.
However, IP said in an annual report to investors that they will not be able to resume full operations in Cantonment producing containerboard during the first quarter of 2017.
“It is currently estimated that the total impact will be in excess of $50 million, but that property damage and business interruption insurance will cover a significant portion of these costs,” International Paper said in a federal filing this week. “The timing of these costs and potential insurance recoveries in unknown.”
The company said it has property damage and business interruption insurance to cover some of the losses.
Pictured: The International Paper mill in Cantonment sits idle following a January 22 explosion. NorthEscambia.com photo, click to enlarge.
U.S. Marshals Arrest Molino Man Wanted In Two States
February 25, 2017
A Molino man wanted in two states was captured in Pensacola Friday with the help of U.S. Marshals.
Jeremy Clint Hatfield, 26, was wanted on outstanding warrant in Escambia County, AL, and Escambia County, FL.
U.S. Marshals said earlier in the week authorities in Escambia County, AL, tried to serve a warrant on Hatfield, but he assaulted an officer and escaped.
He was captured by U.S. Marshals, Escambia County Sheriff’s Office deputies and Pensacola Police at the Quality Inn on Pine Forest Road Friday early Friday afternoon.
Hatfield was booked into the Escambia County Jail in Pensacola on Florida charges of grand theft, burglary and criminal mischief with property damage. He is awaiting extradition back to Alabama to face additional charges.
Sawmill Pageant Registration Underway
February 25, 2017
The Century Lions Club will present the 25th Annual Sawmill Pageant on March 18.
Registration dates will be held March 4 from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. at Southern Treasures (across from Whataburger) in Century. Ages 0 through high school.
Registration forms are available at Byrneville Elementary and Southern Treasures.
Middle School Teacher Busted For Marijuana Found Under Her Desk
February 25, 2017
An Atmore middle school teacher was arrested Friday morning after marijuana was found under her classroom desk, according to the Escambia County (AL) Sheriff’s Office.
Kimberly McKay Downey, 49, was charged with second-degree possession of marijuana. She was booked into the Escambia County Detention Center in Brewton and was later released on a $6,000 bond.
Authorities responded to a call at the Escambia County Middle School after the principal reported that there was a strong odor of what she believed to be marijuana coming from a specific area inside the school. As deputies entered the school, they also detected an odor that they believed to be marijuana in the hallway of the school.
A K-9 began to search the school and alerted on Downey’s classroom. The students were removed from the classroom and a search was done of the room.
The K-9 alerted on a bag that was located under Downey’s desk. When questioned about the ownership of the bag, deputies reported Downey claimed ownership.. Deputies searched the bag and located a plastic bag containing three partially burned-hand rolled cigarettes believed to be marijuana.