The Salt Line, Vol. 57: A Bayou Losing an Argument With Old Plumbing, Farmers Objecting to a Map of the Future, and a Welcome Party for the Only People Who Know What's Coming
Welcome back to The Salt Line, written this morning from a porch where the ceiling fan is doing roughly forty percent of the job it was hired for.
Tropical status report first, because it’s August and I know you’ve got a tab open: nothing out there but ambitious clouds and a wave off Africa — which is the unofficial state motto of the entire Gulf Coast from June through October. The water’s flat enough this morning that the cam looks like a photograph somebody forgot to hang. Enjoy the slick calm; the beach report will be the first thing to stop agreeing with me. The generator guys are getting restless and they can smell weakness.
On to the news.
🚜 Baldwin County Wrote Down What It Wants to Be When It Grows Up, and the Farmers Have Notes
Thursday, a coalition assembled in Baldwin County: farmers, mayors, and — this is my favorite phrase in any news story this year — future county commissioners. They turned out to oppose a proposed county master plan that would set zoning and development guidance for what the story accurately calls one of the fastest-growing areas in the nation.
Sit with future county commissioners for a second. These are people who do not currently hold the office, giving up a weeknight to argue with a document about land they’ll be in charge of later. That’s not a public meeting. That’s a prophecy with a sign-in sheet.
And underneath it is the oldest disagreement on the Alabama Gulf Coast: everyone agrees Baldwin County is filling up, and nobody agrees whose field goes first.
🗳️ An Election About Elections
On the Aug. 18 ballot, Escambia County voters get a school superintendent referendum, and I want to be precise about what it does, because WUWF was: it will not choose a superintendent. It decides how future superintendents get chosen.
So it’s a vote about voting. You are being asked to select the selection method, which is either the purest expression of representative democracy or a Russian nesting doll with a scantron inside, depending on how your morning is going.
I’ve got no dog in it and I’m not going to fake one — go read the explainer, it’s short and it’s clear. I just find it quietly beautiful that somewhere, a person had to write the sentence this will not choose a superintendent in plain bold English, because they knew. They absolutely knew.
🦠 Between Us: Bayou Chico Would Like a Word About Your Septic Tank
Lean in, because this is the exact species of local news that is deeply unglamorous and also completely determines whether the water you swim in looks like a brochure or a smoothie. ECUA says septic tanks in nearby Escambia County neighborhoods are harming Bayou Chico.
Here’s the part that never makes the brochure, and you and I both know it: how clear the water is around here was mostly decided decades ago by whether somebody’s subdivision got hooked to a sewer line or got a tank in the yard and a handshake. Rain falls, ground does what ground does, and eventually it all reports to the same bayou.
Nobody has ever taken a vacation photo of a lift station. Nobody has ever named a condo after one. And yet the lift station is out there doing more for your water clarity than every “Protect Our Coast” bumper sticker in the county combined.
🍎 A Party Thrown for the Only People in the Building Who Know What’s Coming
School is days away, and Baldwin County Public Schools gathered educators from across the county for the district’s annual teacher institute — described, correctly, as one big back-to-school welcome party.
A welcome party. For teachers. In August. On a coast where the water is eighty-something degrees and the beach is right there, visible, free, and not asking anybody to grade anything.
I’m not being cute about this one. Every other institution in this column is arguing about a document. These folks got a room, a sound system, and some enthusiasm, and then they go hold the line for 180 days against a crowd that has just spent ten weeks feral. Whoever booked the music: thank you. Whoever handled the coffee: you’re the actual hero.
That’s your week on the Gulf Coast. A bayou waiting on pipes, a ballot about ballots, and a county trying to write down its own future while the people who’ll inherit it stand up to object to it in advance.
Which is, honestly, the most coastal thing imaginable. We plan for hurricanes we can’t see yet, subdivisions that don’t exist, and superintendents nobody has nominated. Somewhere in Baldwin County a future county commissioner is objecting to something that hasn’t happened, and they’re probably right. That’s not cynicism. That’s what living down here does to a person’s sense of timing.
Fans on high. See you next week.
— Chris
