Englewood Edge - Englewood Florida's own online daily newspaper

A quick refresher

Thursday, July 29th, 2010 by Mark Chapman

Now and then I like to give our read­ers a refresher course on get­ting the most out of Engle­wood Edge.

Through an ana­lyt­ics pro­gram, we can tell what is get­ting read and what is not, and when our read­ers are most likely to come to the site. We also can tell how often the major­ity of read­ers visit, and how many read­ers each day, week and month are unique — that is, the num­ber of read­ers who visit at least once in a given period.

Con­tinue read­ing this story…

Tortoises and other slow-moving targets

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 by Mark Chapman

Pos­si­ble Cham­ber of Com­merce bumper sticker: A gopher tor­toise ate our tourist season.

Well, not really. GT’s are not sea­soni­vores (if Palin can refu­di­ate the Eng­lish lan­guage, so can I). But because, at some point, there may have been a cou­ple of gopher tor­toises who might have had bur­rows on the Cham­ber prop­erty, a “good-to-go” per­mit got held up, a law was vio­lated and the build­ing of the Chamber’s new office and vis­i­tors cen­ter is being delayed and will likely not be ready until April or May.

Now, not only are the tor­toises threat­ened, but I am sure they are being roundly cursed in some circles.

***

Real­ity show fans: Tune in Tues­day morn­ings start­ing at 9 a.m. to Char­lotte County’s live stream­ing video of the County Com­mis­sion meet­ing. There’s anger, laugh­ter, decep­tion, snip­ing and lots of frus­tra­tion. There’s a lot of speech-making. Fac­tions form and fall apart. The pub­lic input can get rau­cous, too. It’s all great the­ater, and it’s way bet­ter than those bor­ing Sara­sota Board of County Com­mis­sion­ers meetings.

***

Seems like the knot everyone’s shorts got tied into over the pos­si­bil­ity of oil com­ing to our shore has loos­ened a bit. National focus has waned, too, as more impor­tant sto­ries — you know, like,  like Lind­say Lohan’s incar­cer­a­tion —  have cap­tured the atten­tion of  the broad­cast and cable news types.

Just won­der­ing: What­ever hap­pened to that swine flu pandemic?

***

I was all ready to make some snarky com­ment about the lack of trop­i­cal activ­ity so far despite all the dire pre­dic­tions, but a quick check shows a nasty lit­tle sys­tem between Puerto Rico and the Domini­can Repub­lic that could become a trop­i­cal depres­sion by some­time today (July 21).

My pre­ferred site, http://www.wunderground.com, is sug­gest­ing that Trop­i­cal Storm Bon­nie could be born by some­time Thurs­day, and could even approach South Florida by then. Com­puter mod­els bring it ashore between Miami and Palm Beach and put us right in the mid­dle of the Cone of  Uh-oh. Keep an eye on it. Shouldn’t  be a huge wind storm, and it’s com­ing from the east so storm surge shouldn’t be bad. But, so far, it seems to be a real rain-maker.

UPDATE Thurs­day, 7:24 p.m.: We are now on the north­ern edge of the Cone of Uh-oh, which is now expected to pass south of us late Fri­day night/early Sat­ur­day, en route to the oil spill. The heav­i­est rain is to the north­east, mean­ing we should get wet, but what else is new?

UPDATE Fri­day, 6:52 p.m.: Shoulda stuck with the snark… A lit­tle rain, a lit­tle breeze. Now, if the storm doesn’t die first, it is expected to make land­fall in Louisiana at low tide, mit­i­gat­ing the dam­age it was expected to do. All great news.

***

Hard to believe:  If you live in Char­lotte County, school starts in less than three weeks (Aug. 10). If you live in Sara­sota, stand down: You have until Aug. 23.

A bit too laid back

Sunday, July 11th, 2010 by Mark Chapman

“Another Sat­ur­day night and I ain’t got nobody; I got some money ’cause I just got paid…”

— Sam Cooke

Ah, the Sat­ur­day night blues. Those lyrics, as writ­ten and sung by the late, great Sam Cooke, expressed a young man’s frus­tra­tion at not being able to hook up with a woman in his lat­est town of residence.

Sat­ur­day night, July 10, I sat and lis­tened to sev­eral peo­ple express their frus­tra­tion about not being able to hook up with open stores at the monthly Sat­ur­day Night Live on Dearborn.

Con­tinue read­ing this story…

But, but … it’s New Jersey

Friday, July 2nd, 2010 by Mark Chapman

For­give me, oh great Gar­den State, and lovers thereof. I didn’t realize.

In my last entry in this space, I took a some­what gra­tu­itous, but not entirely inac­cu­rate, shot at New Jer­sey. Now, maybe this slipped right past all of you read­ers, as you are used to see­ing and hear­ing New Jer­sey dis­par­aged on a reg­u­lar basis.

But, as it turns out, this is Be Nice to New Jer­sey Week, and, well, I want to apologize.

Con­tinue read­ing this story…

Sounds of silence

Sunday, June 27th, 2010 by Mark Chapman

Ah, sum­mer.

Here that sound? What? You hear noth­ing? Exactly. It’s the sound of summer.

Walk, don’t run. What’s your hurry? The livin’ is easy. Fish are jumpin’, and the pick­erel weed is high (well, until the county mower swings by, anyway).

Con­tinue read­ing this story…

Cleaning out the notebook

Monday, June 21st, 2010 by Mark Chapman

It was the qui­etest of times, it was the busiest of times.

Yeah, I know. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Instead of  “A Tale of Two Cities” we have “An Off-Season of Two Counties.”

Noth­ing is sup­posed to hap­pen in Engle­wood in the off-season. If you read some news­pa­pers, noth­ing much hap­pens in Engle­wood any­time. But then, it’s hard to see what’s going on from Sara­sota or Venice.

But you really don’t have to look far to find some­thing. Some­times the news is in your face: A boat falls on a woman, blaz­ing brush fires threaten homes, care­less dri­vers cause crashes and var­i­ous lowlifes get busted for break-ins.

Those things aren’t news to “big-city” papers, but our ana­lyt­ics pro­grams tell us they are the best-read sto­ries on the web.

Then you have the more sub­tle sto­ries. For instance:

• Tues­day, the Char­lotte County Com­mis­sion is going to dis­cuss mov­ing for­ward with the Win­ches­ter Boule­vard exten­sion from South McCall to Placida Road. The four-lane divided high­way, intended as a major evac­u­a­tion route for the Cape Haze penin­sula, has been on hold because of its cost. It has also been on hold because, even if it is build, it will sim­ply fun­nel peo­ple onto two-lane, flood-prone River Road, and nei­ther the state nor Sara­sota County appears ready to make the nec­es­sary improve­ments to River Road any­time soon.

• The Char­lotte com­mis­sion­ers thought they had done their job. They stud­ied the Placida Road sit­u­a­tion. They talked about it pub­licly. They held hear­ings, meet­ings, sent out sur­veys. Then, at the last minute, lots of peo­ple decided they had just now heard about it and wanted the improve­ment project stopped. The project, to widen the road to accom­mo­date future growth, to add side­walks, light­ing, sig­nals and such, is to be done with stim­u­lus money and likely  will never again be able to be done for any­thing close to the cur­rent cost. But com­mis­sion­ers are ready to bow to the will of the peo­ple and scrap the project and spend the money else­where. Win­ches­ter Boulevard?

• Pain clin­ics have hooked hun­dred of peo­ple on Oxy­codone, accord­ing to Dr. Gary Plum­mer, a chi­ro­prac­tor who works with MD’s and who treats peo­ple in pain — with­out the Oxy. Plum­mer  and oth­ers say Oxy­codone is just like the highly addic­tive heroin. He said author­i­ties are finally crack­ing down on pain clin­ics that freely dis­pense the drug, but that it may be too late. He says peo­ple are hooked and he won­ders where they are going to find their fixes.

• It is fire sea­son and it is hur­ri­cane sea­son. That means it’s either too dry and we are in dan­ger of con­fla­gra­tions in our forests, or it will be too wet with storm surges and dri­ving rains and pow­er­ful winds. Or maybe it will be like the past few years, when dire pre­dic­tions have proved far­ci­cal. In any case, it’s bet­ter to be over-prepared than under-prepared.

• The good news, and plenty of it: Thanks to the efforts of the Engle­wood Sun­rise Rotary Club and sev­eral busi­nesses and indi­vid­u­als who have donated, Engle­wood is going to have a bang-up Fourth of July cel­e­bra­tion this year. With any luck, it will also mark the begin­ning of great things to come with the Green Main Street ini­tia­tive, the new events tak­ing hold (Buchan fly-in, Dear­born book fair, Engle­wood Music Fes­ti­val and Fourth of July Gas­par­illa Pirates Fes­ti­val, to name a few).

So, indeed, there is a lot  going on in Engle­wood, and, no mat­ter how you look at it, we are in for a long, hot summer.

Cor­rec­tion : A pre­vi­ous item that referred to how the new Man­a­sota and Sand­piper Key Advi­sory Board is to be appointed was in error. The lan­guage in the res­o­lu­tion was changed and the group will be appointed by the entire Char­lotte Board of County Commissioners.

A big hit

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 by Mark Chapman

Check out our Stone Crabs cov­er­age daily in Sports, open to non-subscribers

It’s the nature of minor league pro­fes­sional sports — play­ers come and play­ers go, and it’s tough for fans to develop the kind of long-term rela­tion­ships they have with their big-league heroes.

It is also the nature of the beast that teams come and teams go, although that is less true with base­ball than it is with, say minor league hockey.

When it comes to the Char­lotte Stone Crabs, how­ever, one gets the sense that the only thing that could move the Florida State League team out of the Char­lotte Sports Park is politics.

The team started as the Vero Beach Dodgers, play­ing in the fabled Dodger­town com­plex on the East Coast. When the Rays  bought the team it became the Vero Beach Devil Rays. Then Cal Rip­ken and Rip­ken Base­ball bought the team and moved it to El Jobean Road.

There are a few good rea­sons that the Stone Crabs have to love play­ing at Char­lotte Sports Park. It is rel­a­tively close to the big-league club in Tampa, and there aren’t many lines at restau­rants this time of year.

But the big rea­son is atten­dance. Last year, in their first sea­son, the Stone Crabs drew an aver­age of 2,855 fans per game, tops in the Florida State League. This year, they are aver­ag­ing 2,938. Those are excel­lent num­bers for Sin­gle A ball no mat­ter how you slice it.

“As with any sports fran­chise, our crowds on week­days (espe­cially before the school year is over) are usu­ally going to be lower,” said Stone Crabs mar­ket­ing chief Jonathan Gantt. “Our Mon­days through Wednes­days gen­er­ally see about 1,500 fans per game. But we make up for it with big Fri­days and Sat­ur­days with pro­mo­tions like fire­works, enter­tain­ment acts, etc. We also have a very large sea­son ticket-holder base that helps boost our week­end dates.”

A quick check of ran­dom single-game atten­dance fig­ures from around the league show that some teams are doing a whole lot bet­ter than oth­ers. Lake­land, for instance, seems to fre­quently draw fewer than 1,000 (or fewer than 500) fans.

““We’re not like most teams in the FSL” Gantt said. “A major­ity of the teams draw less than 1,700 fans per game, with three draw­ing less than 1,000 per game. We pride our­selves on being the pre­mier fran­chise in the Florida State League, and we’ve done that so far. The goal is to lead the FSL in atten­dance for the sec­ond straight year and bring in more total peo­ple than last year, which ended up at 171,000.”

It doesn’t hurt that the Stone Crabs are one of the best teams in the FSL. In fact, as I write this, they are the sec­ond best, record-wise, and may be the hottest team in the league. They sent eight play­ers (tops in the league) to Saturday’s  All-Star game. Henry Wrigley is tied for the league lead in homers, sec­ond in RBI and is in the top 10 in bat­ting.  Isa­iah Velasquez is sec­ond in stolen bases. If Stephen Vogt had a few more at-bats to qual­ify, he’d be lead­ing the league in hit­ting. And the bullpen — I think Barack Obama has been to the Gulf Coast three times since the ‘pen gave up its last run.

But all of this suc­cess comes with a price for the hard-core fans. There is one rea­son and one rea­son only that these young ballplay­ers are in Char­lotte, and that is to get OUT of Char­lotte and up to, say, Mont­gomery, Ala., and Dou­ble A ball, or per­haps the famed Durham Bulls (Triple A) before mak­ing the leap to Tampa. So while fans may get attached to a Wrigley or a Vogt or a Velasquez, it is likely that they could be gone before the end of the sea­son. It is a bit­ter­sweet situation.

“Play­ers com­ing and going is def­i­nitely com­mon in the Minor Leagues,” Gantt said. “Guys could be car­ry­ing the team one day and at Dou­ble A the next. But I think a decent amount of fans real­ize that the goal for these guys is to make it to the big leagues, so the pos­i­tive feel­ings for the play­ers mov­ing up always out­weigh the neg­a­tive feel­ings of los­ing one of our star guys.”

The Crabs are close to clinch­ing the first-half divi­sion title, which would guar­an­tee post-season play. If there are pro­mo­tions in the sec­ond half, that could mean the team that clinches might not be the one that goes into the playoffs.

“While it’s cer­tainly pos­si­ble that sev­eral of our play­ers will be pro­moted, the Rays farm sys­tem is packed with tal­ent right now and there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of spots for guys to get moved up,” Gantt said. “That being said, I’m sure you’ll see some of our stand­outs moved to Mont­gomery before season’s end. But we had the same sit­u­a­tion last year with most of our star play­ers and still made it all the way to the Cham­pi­onship Series. While we’ll lose some guys, we’ll also get some guys from Low-A Bowl­ing Green who are also very tal­ented. So, it’s bit­ter­sweet to see guys go, but we’re very happy to see them closer to their career goals and we’re happy to see fresh faces come to play for us, as well.”

But doesn’t that move­ment hurt atten­dance? Gantt says no.

“We always say that base­ball is the back­drop for the fam­ily enter­tain­ment that we pro­vide, and, while most fans who come enjoy base­ball, we think you can have a great time at the ball­park even if you don’t watch a sec­ond of the game. But for our most loyal sea­son ticket– hold­ers who are here on a daily basis, they def­i­nitely develop rela­tion­ships with the play­ers and come to see them on a daily basis. Although they’re sad to see them go, they under­stand it’s what best for the player.”

For infor­ma­tion about the Stone Crabs, go to http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=t2730

Squeaky wheels

Thursday, June 10th, 2010 by Mark Chapman

Those who shout the loud­est get the most attention.

It’s been that way for as far back as I remem­ber, which, some days, could mean about 15 min­utes ago.

Unfor­tu­nately, due to the state of our media and our soci­ety today, the major­ity is in dan­ger of hav­ing the agenda con­trolled by the shout­ing minor­ity. Rather than report­ing facts and real­ity, much of the media sim­ply reports on the yelling and scream­ing and name-calling.

You see it every­where. Power block vot­ers with bulk-dial pro­grams con­trol the win­ners and losers on Amer­i­can Idol, which breath­lessly touts the num­ber of votes it receives each week. But those 34 mil­lion votes may be com­ing from 20 mil­lion peo­ple, and the crazed power vot­ers seem to break toward adolescent-girl fan­tasy hearthrobs rather than those with the most talent.

The recent nation­wide pri­maries are another exam­ple. All we’ve been hear­ing from the media and from cer­tain seg­ments of the ampli­fied pop­u­lace is that incum­bents are fin­ished. And it isn’t just the cable news chan­nels any­more. The major news­pa­pers seem to have bought into the sto­ry­line. Anti-incumbent fever was sup­posed to chase sev­eral well-known politi­cians out of office Tues­day. But almost all the incum­bents won. It will be inter­est­ing to see if that trend holds in November.

Anti-incumbent rage? It is real It is out there. And the rage against some is quite jus­ti­fied. But it seems that, lurk­ing under the sur­face, there is a silent major­ity that can, when it chooses, make itself heard.

And that brings us to the cur­rent local hot potato: Placida Road.

Let me say up front, I have no dog in this fight. I don’t live on or off  Placida Road. I don’t work there. I drive Placida once or twice a week. I patron­ize some busi­nesses along Placida. But I have no prob­lem with the road as is, and I can see how it would need to be wider in the future if all those vacant con­dos became unva­cant. If.

I will say that I cringed when I saw the round­about plans, because, with the excep­tion of the proposed-but-not-planned round­about at West Dear­born Street and Old Engle­wood Road, I really have no use for them.

But I digress.

Groups of unhappy, anti-project res­i­dents have been mak­ing their feel­ings known in no uncer­tain terms to the Char­lotte County Com­mis­sion­ers. They don’t want the four-lane high­way, or the reten­tion ponds, or the side­walks, or the light­ing, or the round­abouts, or the fancy lighting.

But those groups — one wield­ing a peti­tion with 466 sig­na­tures — have caused com­mis­sion­ers to step back and rethink their posi­tions, not to men­tion their careers. If, indeed, those 466 peo­ple are the tip of the ice­berg, then the com­mis­sion­ers want no part of forc­ing their will, even if that will is based on hard data.

But Chair­man Bob Starr indi­cated Tues­day that e-mails to the com­mis­sion are run­ning in favor of the project. Com­bin­ing those e-mails with the pre­vi­ous group anti-project efforts, he is see­ing about a 50/50 split, he said at the Tues­day com­mis­sion meeting.

So is it pos­si­ble that what we have here is a very vocal minor­ity shout­ing “No!” to the project while a silent major­ity sit back and think, “well, that will be nice when it’s done.” ?

Starr has mailed out a one-question sur­vey ask­ing if res­i­dents want the road widened. Period. All the other things — the reten­tion ponds, the light­ing, the side­walks, the round­abouts (already cast aside) — can be nego­ti­ated, changed or dumped, he said. At its base, this is about tak­ing the money that has been granted to the county and widen­ing Placida Road.

Starr said he believes the major­ity wants the road widened and sees the value in doing it now, when the money is avail­able from the fed­eral stim­u­lus pro­gram. It will only be more expen­sive in the future, he says.

But he also said that, should the “nays” out­weigh the “yeas” when the sur­vey comes back, he will vote to pull the plug on the project and take the money else­where in the county, pos­si­bly to Burntt Store, although Comms­sioner Robert Skid­more says he will fight to keep the money in West County.

Again, I have no stake in this. Engle­wood Edge has no offi­cial or even unof­fi­cial posi­tion on this.

But it will be inter­est­ing to see if there is a silent major­ity out there that Starr’s sur­vey can moti­vate to come for­ward, or if the com­mis­sion­ers sim­ply mis­judged the pub­lic will on this one.

Much like last Tuesday’s Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­ate  pri­maries in Ken­tucky and Nevada — and the last three Amer­i­can Idol sea­sons — this one may be too close to call.