Editorials

Last week Gulf District School officials were blindsided, to say the least, by a proposal put on the table during a meeting of their peers in Bay County.

If anything was demonstrated last week it was that when governments bargain, taxpayers seem the only losers.

During last week's meeting of the Board of County Commissioners, chairman Billy Traylor took issue with an e-mail that had publicly circulated sufficiently to come to commissioners' attention.

While seemingly separate events and issues, the county's ongoing jostling with the looming budget and a commissioner's excursion with a Mosquito Control truck are, upon closer look, threads from the same cloth.

A positive trend to come out of the most recent meeting of the Board of County Commissioners was the apparent acknowledgement by some commissioners that they are actually hearing the public instead of simply paying lip service.

The pocketbook is already a tad bit lighter and future income appears constrained so the logical course of action is - spend and spend some more, naturally.

The recent announcement by the Jessie Ball duPont Foundation that it would partner to invest $500,000 into the community of Port St.

During the Feb.

Staff Writer Marie Logan’s report of Feb.

As voters went to the polls on Tuesday to decide the fate of Amendment 1 and the county continued its weekly meetings examining the budget as commissioners prepare for 2008-09, the breathtaking failure of state legislators to genuinely address property tax reform was on full display.