Local News

Col. Mike Johnson surely must wish he had accompanied Sheriff Johnny Smith on his religious mission to Romania rather than stand before the Levy County Commission Tuesday asking for a 3 percent pay raise in the annual budget.

The county commission, which has asked departments to cut their budget requests by 5 percent from last year’s budget sent Johnson on his way with the direction to cut the sheriff’s budget by 5 percent.

Over the last several years, conferring valedictorian and salutatorian honors on Levy County’s top-achieving high school seniors has been a process fraught with controversy and dissatisfaction.

Complications in recent years include large numbers of co-valedictorians with identical GPAs, and unweighted GPAs causing students taking less-difficult standard high school courses to be honored over students taking honors and dual-enrollment courses.

Sustaining a severe burn is one of the most painful and devastating injuries a body can endure. More than 250,000 of burn injuries occur every year in the United States and more than 10 percent of those injuries result in death. The Williston Fire Department is working to lower those statistics by first changing behaviors in our own community through a new nationally recognized and distributed burn education and prevention program called To Hell and Back: Community Awareness.

Volunteers across Northern Florida are organizing a T.E.A (Taxed Enough Already) party to be held on the 4th of July at Forest Capital Park in Perry, Florida, on U.S. 19 from 10:30 a.m. until noon.

The T.E.A party is a national movement to protest the spending of trillions of dollars “which will leave future generations with a huge debt they must pay” according to one of the local organizers, Jan Hopkins. “It’s time to let the voice of the silent majority in this country be heard across the country.”