Local News

Technicians completed the two and half week installation of a permanent weather station on the Big Dock tower this week, making Cedar Key the first station in Florida capable of enduring hurricanes up to category 4.

“Everybody’s been wondering what that mushroom’s been about,” said NOAA contractor Lee Chapin. “That’s why it’s built in that fashion – they hope it will withstand a category 4 hurricane.” The only others like it are in Mississippi and Louisiana, he said.

The Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant has arrived and the Cedar Key Police Department is using the $65,723 to prepare for the worst.

The grant paid for a new Ford F150 truck, three radar units, a speed trailer, one set of tactical ballistic gear, and four bullet-proof vests, said Police Chief Virgil Sandlin.

Oysters on the Gulf Coast — including those in lugged by Cedar Key water men — are safe from a proposed federal Food and Drug administration “warm months” ban for now.

Leslie Sturmer, multi-county aquaculture extension agent, briefed the Levy County Commission on Tuesday on the status of a proposed rule requiring post-harvest processing of oysters or an outright ban on the harvest and sale of oysters from Gulf of Mexico waters from April through October beginning in 2011.

Levy County Commissioners William Samuel "Sammy" Yearty and Robert Anthony "Tony" Parker were unanimously found guilty by a jury of conspiring and accepting a $10,000 bribe to pay for a trip to New York City in December 2007 in return for favorable treatment of a project proposed by an FBI agent posing as a developer.

Yearty was also found guilty on a third charge — lying to a federal agent — for denying in an interview that he had accepted a lunch, dinner or gift from anyone.