Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Mermaids as managers get a hosing

WEEKI WACHEE - Saddled with legal bills and under fire to fix up its fabled mermaid tourist attraction, Weeki Wachee suffered some sharp rebukes last week for not attending to business.

Hernando County School Board and Southwest Florida Water Management District officials say they have tried repeatedly to get the city to act on a rezoning to erect a $750,000 science and nature classroom, paid for by Swiftmud.

Weeki Wachee officials say they lost the paperwork needed to make the rezoning valid.

"We are just getting to the point where enough is enough," said Mark Weaver, a former Central High School science teacher hired to manage the environmental center's programs for the school district. "We have to get this thing taken care of."

Then County Tax Collector Juanita Sikes revealed that Weeki Wachee failed to deposit between 12 and 15 checks totaling about $17,000 that her office had sent the city during the preceding year.

And this was a year the city doubled property taxes.

"If we are paying taxes and the money is not even being deposited, you have to wonder who is running the show over there," said Marty Ogden, owner of Nellie's Restaurant.

Mayor Robyn Anderson and city attorney Joe Mason said their battles have been time-consuming. Both said they are enthusiastic about the environmental center and plan to resolve the matter within 30 days.

BROOKSVILLE - Hernando County school officials have assembled a committee to consider publicly whether a challenged Judy Blume novel belongs on elementary school shelves.

The committee, sidelined by a fight to keep its meetings secret, will meet Jan. 29, about four months after a mother complained that Deenie contained unacceptable references to masturbation.

The School Board agreed in early December to open the meeting to the public to settle a lawsuit filed by the St. Petersburg Times.

The committee's task is to read the 30-year-old novel and consider whether its content is acceptable for elementary school students.

According to district policy, the panel's proposal will go to the superintendent, who will deliver it, along with her own position, to the School Board. The board will make the final determination.

Blume, the author of 25 books, said she was surprised and upset after learning of the challenge from a St. Petersburg Times reporter.

"You take a book away from a child it's, well, why? You need to explain why," she said. "It isn't a book about masturbation. It's a book about parental expectations. ... When, when, when are we ever going to be done with this? Never, I guess."

ST. PETERSBURG - More than 800 people turned out recently last week to hear a novel pitch from a community college: Students can earn their high school diplomas and cost-free two-year associate's degrees before they are 19 years old.

Home base will be modest: four portable classrooms strung together on St. Petersburg College's Gibbs campus on Fifth Avenue N.

St. Petersburg College, which only in recent years expanded up to become a four-year institution, now is reaching down to 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds.

Using the charter school template, St. Petersburg Collegiate High School will take tax dollars from Pinellas County Schools to finance its own school on the campus of another public school system.

The school is the brainchild of former state Sen. Don Sullivan.

Impressed with a similar program at Okaloosa-Walton Community College in the Panhandle, Sullivan approached SPC president Carl Kuttler with the idea of creating a charter school for mature, serious students who are not interested in the social aspects of high school.

St. Petersburg Collegiate High School will open in August, initially serving 150 high school sophomores, juniors and seniors selected by random lottery.

INVERNESS - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was under attack last week in Citrus County, accused of shirking its duties in cleaning up channel-clogging weeds called tussocks.

But the Corps said it never was told a $500,000 county tussock cleanup could be jeopardized without its immediate help.

Late last year, the county began trying to remove 300 acres of tussocks, thick floating islands of grasses and mud, from the Hernando Pool area of the Tsala Apopka chain.

They have grown so thick that the tussocks are blocking connections in the Tsala Apopka lake chain, between lakes Todd and Dodd.

They also are affecting 1,000 people who have boats, boat ramps or businesses blocked by the floating islands.

County officials need the Corps' permission to expand their dumping grounds.

Kelly Finch, a Corps project manager based in Jacksonville, said that's news to her.

She said that Citrus County has not answered all the questions required for a permit expansion and that it could have sped things up by calling her before the situation became dire.

Now, securing a permit, she said, would take at least 30 days and possibly 120 days, according to procedures, which require public input.

NEW PORT RICHEY - That roar you hear is the sound of construction trucks heading to Pasco County.

Pasco set a record for housing starts in 2003, with 5,883. That destroyed the previous record of 4,800 from 1978.

Low mortgage interest rates and strong job creation in the Tampa Bay area have been key. But Pasco's surge is mainly because of a huge availability of lots in a 20-mile sweep of territory from Trinity in the west to Zephyrhills in the east. Served by such highways as the Suncoast Parkway, U.S. 41 and Interstate 75, Pasco's bedroom communities promise a quick commute to jobs in Tampa and St. Petersburg.

"Hillsborough and Pinellas are both running out of developable land, Hillsborough especially in the northwest part of the county, so that's just pushed everything up into Pasco," said Marvin Rose, who publishes the industry newsletter Rose Residential Reports.

INVERNESS - Plans are under way for a Ted Williams Museum in Boston, a "satellite," as the museum executive director calls it, to the original in Citrus Hills. Last year, Citrus County residents were outraged when Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy made a case for moving the museum to Boston. Museum administrators say the move is merely to increase the museum's visibility and will not affect the Citrus Hills collection.

Last week, Hillsborough County became the 12th sheriff's office in the state to vote for collective bargaining since last year.

On Tuesday, Pinellas County will start a $10-million project to bring treated wastewater to Indian Shores and Indian Rocks Beach. The job, expected to last 18 months, will snarl traffic on the only road in and out of the communities.

Next week is the last week to see "Coexistence," an art display marred by hateful graffiti. In December, vandals struck the billboard-size works, which carry a message of peace and tolerance. Despite damage to the internationally recognized display, or maybe because of it, the show went on as planned. It will remain on display in St. Petersburg's Straub Park through Jan. 25.

- Compiled by Times staff writer Sharon Kennedy Wynne