48th Street loses its bridge over I-95
A year-long I-95 crossing closure, Saturday backpacks at Tigner, and packages nobody ordered.
The NW/NE 48th Street bridge over S.R. 9/I-95 closes to all traveling traffic at 9 p.m. Sunday, August 2, and the city's notice puts the closure at a year. That is the whole span, not a lane and not a weekend. Anyone whose route across the interstate runs over 48th Street loses that crossing Sunday night and does not get it back this school year, this hurricane season, or this winter. The city posted the notice on July 27, less than a week before the barricades go up. Everything that used 48th Street to get from one side of I-95 to the other now has to go somewhere else.
The packages nobody ordered have a name
A Deerfield Beach woman kept receiving packages she never ordered and brought it to 7Investigates, which is how the deliveries got a name: brushing. The scheme runs on items you did not order showing up anyway, and what the senders are after is your identity rather than anything in the box. That is the part that reorders your instincts. An unexplained parcel reads like a shipping mix-up, or a small windfall, and the people behind it are counting on it being taken that way. If boxes keep arriving that no one in the house ordered, the pattern is the story, not the merchandise.
Two cities, opposite directions on the water
The Real Deal put Deerfield Beach and West Palm Beach side by side on waterfront development and found them heading opposite ways: Deerfield loosening its rules while West Palm tightens its own. Zoning text is the least readable thing a city produces and among the most predictive — what the code permits along the water now is what shows up along the water later. Nobody talks about a rules change while it is still a rules change. They talk about it when the construction fence goes up, by which point the argument is over.
Backpacks at Tigner on Saturday morning
Saturday brings the fifth annual Back-to-School Backpack Giveaway, held in memory of Deputy Harold Morrison, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Johnny L. Tigner Community Center at 445 SW 2nd Street. "Fifth annual" is the detail doing the work here — this is a fixture, not an experiment, and it lands in the last stretch of summer before classes start again. Two hours, one address, backpacks for kids heading back to school. If you have kids, or you know a family that could use the help this month, that is the morning to be out the door early.
The Visitor Welcome Center needs people who know things
The city is staffing its new Visitor Welcome Center with volunteers and is recruiting now. Shifts run Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the city would prefer at least four hours at a stretch. The assignment is to greet visitors and share local information — which is to say, to be the person who actually knows where things are and what is worth the walk. That knowledge tends to accumulate quietly in people who have lived here a while, and it almost never gets asked for. Here, someone is asking, on a schedule that leaves Mondays alone.
The county's trash plan gets its Deerfield hearing
Tonight at 7 p.m., the City Commission takes up Broward County's countywide solid-waste master plan at a public workshop in the Johnny L. Tigner Community Center, with the Solid Waste Authority presenting and the public able to attend. The authority's governing board has already approved the plan; the Deerfield workshop is the local review step, the point where a city either raises something or lets a countywide framework move through quietly. Waste planning is the least glamorous item on any agenda and one of the few that eventually turns up at every curb in town.