Council to tackle education, fine dining

Monday night, the Destin City Council will honor Vicki Mathews of Destin Elementary School as the city’s Teacher of the Year.

Destin City Council established the Mary Ann Pate Award last year as a way to acknowledge the community’s best teachers. The award comes with a $1,000 check.

Originally, the city anticipated another educational topic as well: The council had asked the Okaloosa County School Board to send a representative to the meeting to discuss calls from Destin residents for the creation of a Destin High School. The board has rescheduled the discussion, however, to 9 a.m. Thursday at the School Board office in Fort Walton Beach.

Destin parents have said they want a high school in town to minimize the travel time, to keep DMS students from being scattered among different out-of-town high schools and as a matter of civic pride.

Superintendent of Schools Alexis Tibbetts has said there are many reasons why a high school would be a bad idea — the student body would be too small to support much extracurricular activity or many advanced courses — but high-school proponents say these problems could be overcome.

Also on Monday’s agenda:

•The creation of a blue-ribbon committee on affordable housing in Destin. The council recently postponed voting on an ordinance that would require developers seeking approval of a new project to either provide housing units affordable to Destin workers or contribute to a city housing fund.

At a workshop earlier this year, the development community objected and called for the city to explore alternative solutions to the high price of local housing. The council voted to set up a new committee — the city’s third — to explore some of the alternatives developers had proposed.

•A discussion of “accessory dwelling units” such as a garage apartment or guest cottage, built on a single-family lot. Residents have complained to the city that one developer has built several such units and turned them into crowded boarding houses that disrupt the neighborhood.

•The council will meet at 5:30 p.m., before the regular meeting to resolve some of the remaining issues in a longstanding lawsuit over the BeachWalk Cafe in Crystal Beach. The restaurant remains open, but Chef Tim Creehan has told The Log that many customers assume because of the legal problems that it must have closed.

The executive session will be closed to the public, since discussions of legal strategy are exempt from Florida’s open-government laws.

The Destin City Council will meet 6 p.m. Monday at the City Hall Annex, following a 5:30 executive session. Fraser Sherman will liveblog from the meeting at frasersmind.freedomblogging.com.