Resolve to Volunteer in 2025
JANUARY 3 - 9, 2025
VOLUME 6 ISSUE 1
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Ocala-area Girl Scouts enjoy campout and help raise awareness about new report
Marion County’s public safety planning and operations will remain in “Gazette’s” focus By Jennifer Hunt Murty jennifer@ocalagazette.com
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Kam Knowles and Shannon Boyer get ready for the recent Girl Scout campout event in Ocala.
The ‘State of the Florida Girl Report’ measures the well-being of Florida girls in physical health, academic performance and emotional and social wellness. By Jamie Berube Special to the Gazette
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ohn Watzke ensures the grounds are clear at the Ocala Drive-In Theater on the first Saturday of December each year so local Girl Scout troops can gather for an adventure under the stars. Dec. 7, 2024, marked the 10th time that Watzke, owner of the Ocala DriveIn, hosted the annual Girl Scout campout event where projectors played movies until 2 a.m. as the troop members sipped hot cocoa and watched from their tents.
According to local Girls Scouts of West Central Florida volunteer Raey Morrison, the first campout event in 2016 brought in 150 scouts. This year there were 502. “The first year, just a small group of us camped, and John showed movies all night for them. The event is a fun, relaxing night that allows our girls, kindergarten to 12th grade, a safe camping experience,” Morrison said. The troops get a meal voucher, free popcorn, drink refills, and breakfast on Sunday morning. “There’s always coffee and hot chocolate until it runs out. This year, it was very cold, so hot chocolate was very popular,”
Morrison said. To prepare for the event, Morrison shows up early. “My team and I start showing up at noon to set up the check-in table. John and his team make sure the grounds are cleared. They look for glass and anything else from regular business nights to make sure it’s cleared up. At about 4 p.m., the troops start arriving,” Morrison said. It is important to note, however, that events like this serve a purpose other than entertainment.
ollowing a year in which the “Gazette’s” focus on public safety challenges in Marion County has led to important improvements, readers can expect even more attention to be paid to local leaders’ efforts to meet these critical needs for our rapidly growing population. Starting with the new year, the Marion County Board of County Commissioners will receive an analysis from Marion County Fire Rescue on how each proposed development will impact public safety infrastructure. This is an important move since it takes years to get a new fire station up and running, which makes anticipating where they are needed before the need arises key. Marion County’s goal is to have a fire station within a five-mile radius of every home, but that is not the case now. This means that if an engine is on an emergency call and another call comes in, there could be a delay in getting a unit to the new call, even if the emergency is only a mile from the station. Additionally, Marion County Fire Rescue has recently launched a digital dashboard of real-time analysis of response times and call volume so that leaders can monitor and move resources more nimbly. We will visit the agency’s headquarters after the first of the year to report on the new dashboard and update you on current stats. MCFR must monitor response times so officials can move assets around to increase efficiency. The agency stages units over the entire county daily and tries to meet national criteria of being en route to calls within 60 seconds of being dispatched, but with 1,660 square miles to traverse calls response times can vary. Recently, in response to our request, MCFR provided a report from their Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system showing what time each call for service was received, when the units were
See Girl Scouts, page A4
See Public safety, page A2
New year brings 10 new laws By Jim Turner Florida News Service
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smattering of new state laws will arrive with the new year, but the highest-profile change — restricting access to social media for children — will not be immediately enforced.
Ten laws passed during the 2024 legislative session will take effect Wednesday. They were among 299 bills approved by the Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis, the majority of which took effect July 1. The social-media restrictions were part of a bill (HB 3) that was a priority of then-House
Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, and became one of the biggest issues of the session. The measure seeks to prevent children under age 16 from opening social-media accounts on some platforms. Parents can give consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to have accounts, but children under 14 would be barred from
opening accounts. Renner argued that socialmedia companies have created addictive platforms that harm children’s mental health and can lead to sexual predators communicating with minors. In October, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice,
whose members include tech giants such as Google and Meta Platforms, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the restrictions. “In a nation that values the First Amendment, the preferred response is to let parents decide See New laws, page A7
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