WAFC Local News – February 17, 2026, 8:32 AM
Transcript
I’m Charles Murphy reporting. The city of Clewiston will close the back door to City Hall to the public permanently. It’s mostly due to security reasons. City Manager Danny Williams says he wants his staff to always be at ease. In today’s world, we’ve been discussing with staff, I think what we’re going to start doing is closing the back door and have people enter to the front door. And of course we’ve asked for some extra protection. So with your approval, that’s what we’d like to do to keep the back door closed, everyone comes through the front. The One North Lake project continues to move forward in Pahokee. Aaron Taylor, the developer’s representative, told commissioners they’ve been approved for 54 units and received $3.2 million from Palm Beach County. They expect the final review to take a few months. Mayor Keith Babb says they don’t need to stop the One Lake project. We don’t want to put any undue burden on anyone who’s trying to come in and have housing for this community. Commissioner Isabel McDonald says the city needs to ask questions and raise concerns if need be and that she’s not trying to stop the project. All I’m saying is that so that we don’t have a slowdown and a lack of production with this project as we have in the past, any type of bond, any insurance policy has the potential to list an additional insured at no additional cost. So I don’t understand where you’re coming from with that. Mayor Babb says they’re trying to build housing projects in the city and one hasn’t been built in 30 years. The Everglades Memorial Townhomes project is now ongoing. $20 million will be invested in that project. Glades County commissioners plan to hold workshop meetings early this year to plan for property tax reform and the possible impacts on county services. They want residents to know how these proposals will impact them. Chairman Tim Stanley wonders if Glades County will still be around if these proposals go into law. It’s a messed up deal. It’s scary to think that if the governor seems to think that he can keep us whole, but it’s not a great thing to be having to beg the governor every year for money. Supposedly the state government is supposed to be in a deficit in 27, then what’s he going to do if he ain’t got the money to give us? County Commissioner Jeff Patterson says they need to plan ahead to see how the county would be impacted in their annual budgets. We’re going to get with our property appraiser and see how each one of these bills will affect us with our ad valorem and then have a workshop and have all the department heads and elected officials there and go through it and say, hey, if this goes through, we need to be prepared for this. Huge crop losses will easily surpass $1 billion in the winter vegetable and fruit crops in Florida due to the recent freeze. Congressman Scott Franklin proposed a law to help Florida farmers quicker who are impacted by these things. It’s called the TEMP Act that would create, like crop insurance, a specialty insurance product for our specialty crops that would provide relief in the event of freeze or frost or things like that. We don’t have that now. I’m Charles Murphy, WAFC News.
Recorded from the WAFC daily newscast (Glades Media).