• Mayor John Peyton’s budget has another group of detractors — the Libertarian Party of Duval County. In a written statement, the group’s executive committee agreed that the budget, “with its new fees and taxes, is in sharp contrast to the values of fiscal responsibility he (Peyton) has professed.” The group claims they will follow with a list of how the budget’s 26.5 million deficit could be corrected with spending cuts to “unnecessary and counterproductive programs.”
• Republican Presidential candidate Fred Thompson made quite an entrance when he arrived in Jacksonville Wednesday evening. He stepped off the plane wearing a Tennessee Titans ball cap and kept it on all the way to his hotel. When he got on the elevator, Thompson remarked, “Maybe this was the wrong place to wear this thing.”
• Former City Council Member Lynette Self was appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist Monday to the state Department of Community Affair’s Florida Communities Trust Governing Board. Each year, Florida Communities Trust provides $66 million in Florida Forever funds to local governments and environmental non-profits to purchase land for community parks and open space. Self, who served on the Jacksonville City Council from 1999 to 2007, fills the position of a former elected city official on the six-member board, which is chaired by DCA Secretary Tom Pelham and also includes the Department of Environmental Protection secretary, a former elected county official, an environmental non-profit representative and a development industry representative.
• Jacksonville families could soon enjoy inexpensive and educational boat rides down the St. Johns river thanks to the St. Johns Riverkeeper, who this week hired Danielle Dolan as part-time education and outreach coordinator. According to Riverkeeper Director Jimmy Orth, Dolan’s first duties will be to set up family river tours, create lesson plans and teacher resources for river education in schools and develop educational components for the group’s Web site.
“There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign.”
– Theodore H. White