A new farm is coming to Highlands County – but they won’t be growing anything. Officials of Duke Energy have announced they plan to put a solar farm in north of Lake Placid. The sprawling 380-acre facility is set to go in off St. John’s Street across from Lake June-in-Winter with some 180,000 tracking solar panels.
Duke Energy is slated to own and operate the plant, they say it will save Lake Placid customers about 22-cents per kilowatt hour. It’s scheduled to be in operation by December.
It appears that Highlands County has a stinkin’ problem. Reportedly, equipment issues at the Avon Park wastewater treatment facility has stopped them from accepting any solid waste from outside sources and local haulers say they have no place now to dump their loads.
They say after an exhaustive search, there’s no place in the state of Florida that will take their product for treatment and they have full trucks and have stopped pumping area facilities.
Avon Park city officials say it appears their equipment will be down for the next 10-days to two weeks.
The Sebring Wal-Mart was closed down again yesterday afternoon for about three hours, while law enforcement officials looked for a bomb. Dogs were called in from the Polk County Sheriff’s office and the State Fire Marshal’s office was summoned to the scene.
They found nothing.
It’s the second time such a threat has closed the local big box store and lawmen say they are quite keen to find the culprit. Anybody with any information as to the suspect is asked to call the Sebring Police Department.
After a public meeting earlier this week and a private committee meeting yesterday, the Sebring Strong GoFundMe page has taken a leap, and now stands at just short of $400,000.
The goal has been set at a half-million for the families of the five victims of the January shooting at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring. The shot infusion of cash came from a $50,000 donation from the BB&T Charitable Contributions Committee yesterday.
Today is World Theatre Day. In honor of that, the Highlands Little Theatre will be hosting an open house. The doors will be open at the Lakeside Playhouse in the Alan Altvader Cultural Center off West Center Avenue in Sebring from 11am until 4pm today.
Planned are backstage tours, question and answer sessions and light refreshments.