The Crestview City Council on Oct. 23 received an update on the planned Vineyard Village low-income housing project and approved selling several surplus properties to Habitat for Humanity in Okaloosa County.

The Northwest Florida Health Network told church and faith-based nonprofit leaders last week that it can fund their community-based social services without interfering in how those services are provided.

“Governor DeSantis has had his people do all the legal work,” the Rev. Rick Hazelip of First City Church said Thursday, Oct. 19, at a “Faith Summit” at Brownsville Church. “All we have to do is open up our services to anybody, regardless of their beliefs. And then we do what we do.”

Many of the various buildings at the decades-old Northwest Florida Fairgrounds have “good structural bones,” and the overall 20-acre site has much room for potential expansion, Okaloosa County Commission Chairman Trey Goodwin said on Oct. 23.

With a mischievous grin, Crestview Mayor J.B. Whitten tapped the shoulder of a lunchtime customer at Hub City Smokehouse on Oct. 20.
“Excuse me, sir,” Whitten said. “We don’t allow customers to fraternize with our staff.”

The home of “the world’s most famous courtroom” stands about 90 miles northwest of Crestview in Monroeville, Alabama.

Crestview officials soon hope to finally receive bids from contractors interested in performing the city’s long-planned downtown streetscape renovation.

During a public hearing at its Nov. 7 meeting, the Okaloosa County Commission plans to consider whether to approve $33,227 worth of economic development property tax exemptions to help a New York-based U.S. Navy contractor expand into Florida.
With the pending assistance, the business would lease a facility at the county-owned Bob Sikes Airport near Crestview.

Swings, as well as two new and shaded play structures, are in the works for Garden City Park.

The Bible-based, intensive and yearlong Prison Fellowship Academy program at the Okaloosa Correctional Institution “taught me to open up about a lot of things buried deep in my soul,” Richmond Fishburn III told his 13 fellow inmate graduates at the Oct. 16 academy graduation ceremony.