The Salt Line, Vol. 10: A Fish, A Pool, And A County That Said No To Robots
Welcome to Volume 10 of The Salt Line, your coastal news therapy session disguised as a comedy column. We’ve made it to double digits, which is more than can be said for Foley’s pool, which has been clinging to life since 1953. More on that shortly. Grab a cold one. The seagulls are watching.
A Fish Named Cam Saves Pensacola From a Very Embarrassing Tuesday
The Pensacola Blue Wahoos — a minor league baseball team named after a fish, which remains the most on-brand thing this region has ever done — opened the second half of the Southern League season with a nail-biting 4-3 victory over the Chattanooga Lookouts. The hero of the evening was Cam Cannarella, who had literally just been named Southern League Player of the Week the day before, meaning he spent about 24 hours as the most celebrated human in Pensacola before having to go out and do it again. That’s like winning Employee of the Month on a Monday and having your boss knock on your door Tuesday morning with new TPS reports. No rest for the excellent, Cam. No rest.
Foley Finally Admits It’s Been Pooling Its Problems
After 73 years of faithful, chlorinated service, Foley’s outdoor pool is finally being put out to pasture. The city plans to replace it with a new indoor aquatics center at Max Griffin Park. The pool was built in 1953, meaning it has survived Korea, disco, the mullet (both the fish AND the haircut), and at least eleven rounds of “maybe we’ll fix the filtration system next budget cycle.” An indoor facility means year-round swimming, which in coastal Alabama raises an important philosophical question: why would you swim indoors when you live here? The answer, apparently, is June through September, when the Gulf feels like soup and the sun is actively trying to settle a personal grudge.
Pensacola State Forms The Most Exclusive Committee in Higher Education
Pensacola State College is searching for a new president, which is normal. What’s not normal is that they’ve formed a trustees-only search committee — a rare structure that cuts faculty, staff, and students out of the formal search process entirely. Most presidential searches involve broad stakeholder input. This one is described, with a straight face, as rare. Which is a very polite word for “we’ve checked, almost nobody does it this way.” To be fair, have you ever tried to get a committee of several hundred college humans to agree on lunch? The trustees may be onto something purely from a logistics standpoint. They’re still wrong, but they’ll finish faster.
Santa Rosa County Builds a Wall — Against The Internet
In a move that sounds like a sci-fi plot summary, Santa Rosa County has voted to develop a 12-month moratorium on new data centers. They’ve joined a growing list of Florida counties essentially saying: not here, not yet, slow down, let us think about this. Data centers, for the uninitiated, are giant climate-controlled warehouses that eat electricity, drink water, and generate heat — which, on the Gulf Coast in June, is a little like asking us to host a second sun. Santa Rosa’s position is essentially “we need a minute.” Frankly, after the last few years, same. The county is just out here guarding the vibe, and honestly? Respect.
UWF Gets Into the Elementary School Business (The Blue Wahoos Are Still Named After a Fish, For Context)
The University of West Florida’s board of trustees has approved a new role authorizing a Somerset Academy charter elementary school. A research university is now also, kind of, in the K-12 game. Which means UWF is simultaneously training the teachers, teaching the students, and presumably at some point teaching the teachers to teach the students to eventually attend UWF. It’s vertically integrated education. It’s a pipeline. It’s either visionary or the academic equivalent of a snake eating its own tail, and I genuinely cannot tell which one yet. Neither can the trustees, I suspect, but they voted yes anyway. We love confidence down here.
Seventy-three years, one fish, and a county that just said “no thank you, servers” — that’s your Gulf Coast in June. If you need me, I’ll be at the new indoor pool when it opens, sometime around 2029, assuming the data centers don’t get here first.
— Sully