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By Compiled by SHARON KENNEDY WYNNE
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 20, 2000
Conference on gays may spur protest
TAMPA -- "Tired of being a Baptist?" asked fliers placed last week on the windshields of cars parked in downtown Tampa. "Then, try to coexist with diversity in this secular & free country . . . Try being GAY! Love wins!"
The fliers echoed the message spray-painted on Seminole Heights Baptist Church a few days earlier, when someone used pink spray paint to write, "Tired of being a Baptist?" and "Never again" on the side of the building.
Tempers are boiling on both sides as next Saturday's conference, organized by Focus on the Family, approaches at Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon. Conference organizers have taken out newspaper advertisements that say, "Tired of being Gay?"
Organizers say they hope to attract teachers, administrators and parents to the one-day conference on preventing teenage homosexuality.
Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, a statewide activist group for gay and lesbian rights, based in Tampa, said the fliers were a better approach than the graffiti.
"I'm glad they've put down their spray cans. I would always recommend satire over vandalism," she said.
SAN ANTONIO -- When residents of the Tampa Bay Golf and Country Club need emergency medical care this year, the first person they see may be a neighbor.
Think of it as a Neighborhood Watch for medical scares.
In what could become a model for other large housing developments, Pasco County officials are starting a pilot program that would enlist dozens of residents from the development to form a volunteer first-response corps.
Neighbors trained in CPR, first aid and in the use of a defibrillator for heart patients could dramatically reduce response times and help stabilize patients until an ambulance arrives, Assistant County Administrator Dan Johnson said.
"We're in the 10- to 11-minute range, but we'd like to be faster," Johnson said. "This puts people on the scene faster."
DADE CITY -- Rocker Nikki Sixx may create a Behind the Music moment and enlist the aid of the entire Motley Crue band this spring to combat a lawsuit claiming he tossed a guitar from stage that hit a woman in the head.
Expected to appear at the scheduled April 10 trial are Mick Mars, Vince Neil and notorious Tommy Lee, a regular tabloid news target who did jail time for striking his wife at the time, Baywatch star Pamela Anderson Lee.
Hudson resident Josephine Allen, 35, says Sixx hurled his bass guitar into the crowd at the 1997 Livestock rock festival in Zephyrhills, striking her on the head. Her suit says she suffered brain damage and has trouble concentrating.
The Allens' attorney, Palm Harbor lawyer Michael Reeser, said he expects the case to go to trial.
Band attorney Kent Whittemore agreed the two sides are far from settling the issue but said he would make a good faith effort in mediation.
CRYSTAL RIVER -- From a financial point of view, they're a steal. Whether horses will make Crystal River a safer place remains to be seen.
On Monday, the City Council voted to give police Chief James Farley two years to prove mounted horse patrols are worth the trouble in a community bisected by two major thoroughfares.
Resident Mary O'Brien is backing the effort.
"I don't know the ramifications . . . but horses are spectacular," she said. "Our city would look gorgeous."
The effort will cost the city nothing for the trial period, unless an accident forces the department to tap its liability policy. Local groups and residents will donate everything needed for a mounted patrol, including the horses.
Farley said he hoped the unit could be ready by April. The horses will wear special markings. The riders will carry folding shovels to clean up the horses' mess.
CLEARWATER -- The Clearwater Marine Aquarium is ready to embark on its most ambitious expansion in a decade after christening a campaign last weekend to raise $3-million over the next five years for the work.
Underlying the expansion and renovation project is the aquarium's commitment to education, with a major goal of raising about $400,000 to triple the number of educational classrooms from two to six at the aquarium.
There is a dream of adding a snorkel tank that would allow visitors to swim with some aquarium residents.
Other items on the wish list include $320,000 for a new coral reef exhibit, $250,000 for a cypress swamp exhibit, $200,000 to improve the habitat of Sunset Sam the dolphin and $225,000 to improve the holding tank for stranded marine animals the aquarium rescues every year.
The fundraising campaign kicked off last weekend when special paving blocks for a redesigned entranceway were offered for sale at half-price.
The stones, with sea life designs on them, regularly cost $100 each.
Donors will get their names etched in the paving markers. For larger check-writers, there are multiple naming opportunities.
DADE CITY -- Pasco County commissioners are willing to put a desalination plant in their own back yard if it means groundwater pumping will be cut in three Tampa Bay Water counties.
Commissioners, who blame the pumping for the dry lake beds in Pasco, crafted their water philosophy last week at a workshop intended to protect Pasco in case Tampa Bay Water fails to meet its deadlines for reducing total regional groundwater pumping by about 40 percent. The final deadline is Dec. 31, 2007, and most of that pumping is being done in Pasco.
Some communities have been concerned about the brackish discharge from a desalination plant. But commissioners said they would rather see a second desalination plant on the Anclote River than new well fields in neighboring Hillsborough County.
The Florida Power plant at Anclote was one of the sites under consideration for the region's first desalination plant, which would turn seawater into drinking water. The idea had few allies among Pasco's fishers, who claimed the plant would damage the environment and their livelihood. The Tampa Bay Water board last year picked a Hillsborough site.
The Florida Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday on whether Thomas Provenzano is crazy or just eccentric enough to put to death. Provenzano, who has claimed to be Jesus Christ for years, can't be executed yet because the issue of his sanity has to be determined.
But on Wednesday, Terry Melvin Sims is set to die, the first in Florida to be executed by lethal injection. The Supreme Court cleared the way last week for Sims, who killed a retired New York police officer who walked in on a robbery. That is expected to be followed on Thursday by the execution of Anthony M. Bryan, 40, for a 1983 Panhandle murder.