Time For An Honest Assessment On Wednesday, February 16, 2022, the Ft. Myers Beach will host a free drop-event for household chemical waste in partnership with the Lee County Solid Waste Department. This collection event will be from 8 a.m. to noon at Bay Oaks Recreational Campus, 2731 Oak Street. Drop off is an easy drivethrough process available to all residents managed by Lee County staff. For a list of acceptable items, visit : https://www.leegov.com/solidwaste/r ecycling/chemicals Businesses that need chemical waste disposal can call 239-5338000 to schedule an appointment for the monthly business collection held at Lee County’s permanent house hold chemical waste drop-off location. This location is off Metro Parkway in Fort Myers at 6441 Topaz Court. Lee County Solid Waste opened a Reuse Center two doors down from the county’s Household Chemical Drop-off Facility in Dec. 2018. Now, residents can drop off household chemicals they no longer need and pick up items they do. The Reuse Center offers items such as latex paint, household cleaners, and pesticides at no charge to residents. The center is open 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m.-noon on the first Saturday of each month, excluding holidays. Items are FREE. The facility is self-serve with Solid Waste staff available to answer questions. Residents are asked to limit the number of items they take to what they can hand carry out of the center. There is no limit to the number of times a resident can visit the center each month. Inventory changes daily - come check it out. 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday - Friday and 9 a.m. - noon the first Saturday of the month, excluding holidays. Phone: 239-533-8000 FL Sports Betting Fails to Qualify for 2002 Ballot The Sun Bay Paper Page 6 all the money. At least $2 trillion was given to workers and businesses to compensate them for the lockdowns that the government itself imposed. We now have pretty conclusive evidence from dozens of country and state studies that lockdowns were a highly ineffective way to combat the virus. Lockdowns may have saved some lives, but this response was the equivalent of trying to remove a tumor with a sledgehammer. Ageadjusted death rates were no lower in states that shut down their economies than states that stayed open. The rest of the money went to pay school districts even though the school doors were locked shut, to fund states and cities that closed their businesses, to fund mass transit trains and buses that operated nearly empty, and worst of all, to fund hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare programs, such as expanded unemployment benefits, that paid workers to stay off the job. And millions of workers still haven't come back. The one program that did work was President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed. But the heart of that program was to find ways to pull end-runs around drug and vaccine regulations that hold up lifesaving medicines for many years. As a result, private companies such as Pfizer invented the vaccines in record time because the government stayed out of the way. We are still paying a high price for President Joe Biden's screw-ups as we deal with the less deadly omicron variant. Late last year, Biden's Department of Health and Human Services stopped all shipments of an effective COVID-19 treatment by Regeneron because a CDC model concluded wrongly that the delta variant had disappeared. Thanks to that blunder, many thousands died or were hospitalized because the government denied them treatment. Other promising therapies, such as by GlaxoSmithKline, have run into regulatory hurdles preventing or delaying their use. Wouldn't it have been more competent and more humane to let doctors and patients make these decisions rather than Washington bureaucrats and politicians? There have been a multitude of other snafus by the government that only validate the utter incompetence of big government. Some $300 billion was stolen by fraudsters who ripped off the Medicaid and unemployment benefits programs. Now here we are, two years from the start of COVID-19, closing in on 1 million dead and $5 trillion more in debt. Millions of children have suffered, perhaps irreparably, from a loss of schooling (some of which still goes on in some districts). There are some 50,000 to 100,000 deaths of despair caused by the lockdowns. And the virus is still out there, though thankfully in retreat. Big government didn't save us. On the contrary, big government has left us weaker as a nation in every way, and we will spend decades cursing the fact that we panicked and handed over so much power to so many incompetent people in Washington. Stephen Moore February 4, 2022 - February 10, 2022 Cont. from pg 1 collected from at least half (14) of the state’s 27 congressional districts. Florida Education Champions announced on Jan. 28, 2022, that the initiative would not meet the signature requirements and would not qualify for the ballot, stating, “We are extremely encouraged by the level of support we saw from the more than one million Floridians who signed our petition and thank them for their efforts in wanting to bring safe and legal sports betting to Florida, while funding public education. While pursuing our mission to add sports betting to the ballot we ran into some serious challenges, but most of all the COVID surge decimated our operations and ability to collect in-person signatures.” The Florida Division of Elections showed that elections officials had validated 514,910 of the signatures submitted by the campaign as of Feb. 1. It did not meet the distribution requirements in any of the state’s 27 congressional districts. Another committee, Florida Voters in Charge, sponsored an initiative concerning casino gaming expansion in Florida. The Division of Elections showed that county elections officials had validated 814,266 signatures submitted by the campaign as of 5:00 p.m. on Feb. 1. The campaign met the distribution requirement in 10 of the 27 congressional districts, short of the 14 districts needed. Florida’s initiated constitutional amendment process was added to the constitution in 1968. The first citizen-initiated measure appeared on the state’s ballot in 1976, and since then, there have only been seven election years in which no citizen initiatives qualified for the ballot: 1974, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1990, 1998, and 2012. If the casino expansion measure does not qualify for the ballot, 2022 will be the first general election year in which a citizen-initiated measure did not appear on the statewide ballot in Florida since 2012. Jackie Mitchell The Center Square Cont. from pg 1 Fort Myers Beach FREE Drop-Off Event for Household Chemical Waste
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