Talk:Brevard County, Florida

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[edit] Brevrard County Expressway Authority

The Brevard County Expressway Authority was created in 1972. By Florida Statue:

Brevard County Expressway Authority, purpose and powers. FSS 348.219(3)(m):

The authority is specifically authorized to construct a toll facility in Brevard County establishing a two-lane or four-lane bridge located in the southern area of Brevard County, south of the municipality of Melbourne, connecting existing U.S. Highway No. 1 with State Road A1A across the Indian River at such exact location as is determined by the authority to be economically feasible.

This permits them to build a bridge across the Indian River Lagoon, and from looking at the Brevard Properties appraiser, there is land owned on both sides by the State of Florida near the end of Malabar Road.

I'm not sure if I should create a new "Brevard County Expressway Authority", or put it somewhere else. The BCEA isn't really "known", and is sortof a part of Brevard County Government, but not as seperate as, say, the Orange County Expressway Authority. --Mcmillen76 00:05, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

The scope of the BCEA is limited unlike the Orange County Expressway Authority, and conceivably, the authority could be eliminated once its purpose is done, so I personally think an article would be a little overkill. Jcam 15:53, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Former Cities/Towns

I will be moving any towns that are not part of the "current" collection of known areas in the county to a seperate Brevard History page at some point in the future --Mcmillen76 00:05, 5 November 2005 (UTC) I no longer reside in the area, and have no access to local historical articles and books. The page looks rather unfinished with most of the place names not having links, or any information on how they were established. These names can be found readily in other data sources, but some are no longer represented in public sources, such as USGS data. While great from a historical standpoint, the information will probably be hard to come by, and would only serve to clutter the article. I created the information, and I vote that it is removed permanently. --Mcmillen76 23:11, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article Introduction

Is it just me, or does it seem there is too much... "junk" in the opening of this article ? To me a county article should have brief information at the top. Maybe a few things about what makes the county notable, not a dozen paragraphs about different things in the county. And then it should lead into the subsections which would be more apporpriate for that kind of information. Thoughts anyone ? Jcam 03:42, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I removed the talk about commercial flights from Orlando. This is Brevard County not Orange County. It has been revised to matchup with only Melbourne International Airport.198.151.12.8 16:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Salary Wrong

I'm not sure where they are getting the median salary. As of 11/20/2006, the median salary in Brevard County for all occupations is $25,740. Go here to verify: http://www.floridawages.com/eds.php?geocode=1202037340 67.8.238.11 03:46, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adjacent vs Adjoining

I added back in Seminole County as an ADJACENT county. It is close enough to considered adjacent. We should leave it in there as the section is titled ADJACENT and not ADJOINING. If it was Adjoining, that would be different. Plus, we should keep it as Adjacent as the county information footer lists Seminole County as being ADJACENT. 198.151.12.8 16:31, 20 December 2006 (UTC). The following was copied from Dalbury's Talk Page to be brought to the Article Talk Page.

I'm afraid you are making a distinction that doesn't hold up very well. See the Wiktionary definition of 'adjacent'. And once you go beyond 'contiguous with', it is original reasearch to say whether or not one county is adjacent to another. -- Donald Albury 16:40, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I understand Wikitionary's definition. But take a look at the bottom of the Brevard County article. Seminole county is listed as an adjacent county. Even the public domain list of adjacent counties for the 50 states [1] lists Seminole County as being adjacent. In fact, adjacent can mean contiguous, which can mean that it can be within close or near proximity without actually touching. Seminole County is "near" enough to be considered adjacent. Seminole County article also lists Brevard County as adjacent. 198.151.12.8 19:39, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
In fact, according to the USDA Economic and Research Service, "to be considered an adjacent county, a nonmetro county must physicallyadjoin one or more metro areas and have at least two percent of its employed labor force commuting to central metro counties." What the USDA ESR is talking about is functional adjacency, rather than physical adjacency. [2] Since Seminole county is functionally adjacent to Brevard due to the amount of commuters coming to and from that county.. I believe it qualifies for adjacency to Brevard.67.8.238.211
  • FWIW, Seminole, Orange, Volusia, and Brevard all touch at one point (roughly 28.612913°N,80.987079°W by Google Earth). Although I fail to see how non-touching counties can be considered adjacent (especially in this context), the whole argument is moot since they do touch. Jdoty 05:08, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Stuff March 2007

I want to apologize for all this new stuff coming all at once without footnotes. I intend to supply them later. Got them for another reason and didn't preserve the original footnotes. Will take awhile to retrieve them but they are all legit. Whether it all belongs here or not is another matter! Student7 00:27, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay. Finally through the massive updates. I will need to eliminate redundancies. If you have any idea on organization, please suggest them or start moving stuff around. If you would like to help with footnoting, I would appreciate it. I got most of the info online or on Florida Today, which doesn't seem to have a decent online catalog of articles anymore.
Otherwise, I will footnote, but it will take "awhile." Student7 22:31, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requested Assessment

About time we had an assessment of this article to point us in the right direction for the future. I have requested one.Student7 11:12, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Needs serious pruning

This article is absolutely enormous, but there is little truly relevant content. There are entire sections that should be moved to separate subarticles, or simply deleted because they are not encyclopedic in scope. There are no Good or Featured Articles for counties to use for comparison, but I'd suggest moving the environment section to its own article, consolidating all of the social issues (including the "status of women and minorities" and the "social services" section) and moving them to a separate article, nuking the "Volunteer" and "filmmaking" sections, pare down the religion section, kill the "democracy" section (the important information for that section is the incorporated and unincorporated cities data, which is covered later in the article, and eliminate some of the Public Relations-style writing that dominates this piece; it currently reads like a Chamber of Commerce or Tourism Board boosterism piece. Horologium t-c 00:02, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions. Tried to respond by following most of them. Except the "booster" part. I tried to do this as I was editing. Obviously not that successfully, or you wouldn't have mentioned it. Will have to run through it again.
Unlike higher level government, there isn't that much that goes unnoticed for very long. We have in the sunshine government which seems to work most of the time. We are nearly north enough to be "in the South." People don't "confront" government quite so much as they do in urban areas. The area tends to be fairly homogenous. Except for roads, and gripes about developers, there are few complaints that last very long. Schools are in a separate article. Like everywhere, "my school is fine, but everyone else's is screwed up!"  :) Not much to report there. Keeping up with people moving in is a concern but we have plenty of room, so no real problem. It's often sunny. People are happier in the sun, I think. Everyone hates evacuating for hurricanes, but what are you going to do? And it doesn't happen very often. Most local articles sound sales-y unless they are NYC or something. There are always "Bush haters" or "Clinton haters" around but this doesn't seem to extend down to the local level. Apathy is bad, but what can you say about that? No worse than anywhere else.
A lot of visible things are run with volunteer help. True "self-government," democracy in action, etc.
Twenty year olds hate it! "Not enough going on." (Maybe that's why the rest of us like it!  :) And, of course, teens hate it, but they hate everyplace!
Specifics on sections to edit for c-of-c Pov would be appreciated. Student7 03:08, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Sorry for the delay, I have been traveling today (and will be traveling again tomorrow), and am on dial-up (which makes loading large pages like this one extremely tedious).
Your edits removed some of the worst material (as far as PoV is concerned), but the whole article needs to be rewritten as complete paragraphs; right now, it's filled with one-sentence paragraphs that resemble a bulleted list, with the bullets missing. Take a look at some of the Good or Featured Articles in WikiProject Florida (or elsewhere) for examples of fairly well-written prose, or look at Wikipedia:What is a Good Article? for more concrete ideas on improving the prose. You should also visit Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Counties for an example of how to organize the article, and what should be in each section; there are still a lot of headings that I've never seen in any county article (as another editor had noted as comments in the original text). The schools section is the worst remaining section for non-neutral PoV, and needs to be scaled back a bit as well.
Generally speaking, any article that is larger than 40KB needs to be broken up; before last night's edits, this article was 92KB (it's now about 70KB). The transportation section could be spun off (or seriously scaled back), and the list of radio stations (which are mostly redlinks anyway) can be replaced by a link to List of radio stations in Florida, which has a section for the Melbourne radio market. The TV section does not need to mention which specific companies provide service, and any stations that don't have Wikipedia articles should not be listed. (If they are notable, work up at least a stub on them.)
In the Education section, the information about vocational programs offered by BCC should be eliminated, as every community college in the country has similar programs. Change the link for Florida Tech to Florida Institute of Technology, its proper name, and eliminate the "typical" from its description. Leave out all mentions of specific degree programs from the universities unless they are in some way significant; the articles for the universities themselves should have more detailed information. The Justice and Juvenile Justice sections need to be pared back, and the reference to the bombing belongs in the (underdeveloped) history section. I hesitate advocating enlarging any part of the article due to its current size, but the history section is very small, and the area has a lot of history. There is no mention of the pre-Columbian civilization in the area (the Ais) or their fate, and the reference to Mosquito County is incorrect, as Mosquito County became Orange County, not Brevard. The whole space program thing might be just a little bit relevant to the history section as well. (grin) It would probably be a good idea to spin an expanded history section off into another separate article too. (Fort Lauderdale, Florida is a good example of an article with lots of subarticles, if you are curious; long lists of links generally will kill any hope of getting an article to GA status, let alone FA.)
Hope this helps. Horologium t-c 20:49, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
FIT is also officially known as Florida Tech and prefer the name in most pubs and media. This was established about 5-6 years ago.68.202.100.14 20:18, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Newspapers Section

To standardize this section, I recommend the following change. This includes renaming the section to "Print" & adding two papers that serve Brevard County. It also includes some edits, such as italicizing names of all publications.

[edit] Print

Florida Today - major daily newspaper serving Melbourne, Brevard County and the Space Coast region of Florida. It is owned by the media conglomerate Gannett.

Brevard Business News - weekly circulated newspaper that serves the business community.

Brevard Technical Journal - monthly circulated industry newspaper for business management, engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, and staff. It contains news & features about the business and the science of technology in Brevard County - Florida's Space & Technology Coast.

El Playero - monthly circulated newspaper that serves the Spanish-speaking population of the Space Coast.

Hometown News - weekly circulated free newspaper, supported by advertising, that has versions in other Florida counties. It presents local news.

Space Coast Parent - monthly circulated magazine with news and articles of local interest for families.

Thanks FieldMarine 14:20, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Mostly uncontroversial. I would recommend omitting "Parent." We have a LOT of specialized magazines with niche audiences. There is, incredibly, a glossy home decorating magazine with "Indialantic" on the cover. Whether it changes for each town, I don't know. But my thought is that it just clutters up what is already a cluttered article. My thought is to insert, as per most of your suggestions, mass-circulation stuff and blatantly omit the rest. Student7 23:58, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article format restructuring

I was wondering, I just read through the article and notice quite a bit of the article is structured awkwardly, if it didn't just sound down right misplaced.

Is there a Florida county article that has FA/GA status which we could model after? I'll start looking for proper formatting from relevant WikiProjects. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 12:03, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

There may be good county articles now. I looked a long time ago and the only comparable volume of material was us at the county level. Perhaps structure like a small state? City of similar size? It is poor. I am good at organization but unfortunately am too close to this material to be of help. A lot should be forked. I was thinking maybe forking economy with a summary. The trouble with forking is that it becomes a pesky problem of fighting with newbies about what goes in the summary in the main article and what gets forked.Student7 (talk) 13:16, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
I'd be happy to work with you on this topic after finals week (yes... it's that time of year again... hahahah I'm sure you of all editors here would understand) Remind me though. I might be in one of those moods after finals. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 13:25, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
Speaking of which, I knew there was a WikiProject somewhere that could help us. - See Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. counties. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 13:27, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
Followed the above at the high level a long time ago. Unfortunately not well developed since then. They need more help than we do. This is why we can't find another Florida county that is similarly well-developed. We have richer detail, but too much. Where we need help is on forking out some of this "rich detail." The Wikiproject creeps. We are already toddling and need help running IMO. We are well beyond the project level unfortunately. They need to take clues for their outline from us! But not denying that this article needs help and work. Student7 (talk) 19:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm from San Francisco, so I'll use the distinct coincidence that San Francisco is its own City and County and just follow San Francisco, California's format, especially since it's a featured article. The SF article provides pretty much a similar format, but it does give some pretty good insights as to what to fork. We should start taking a look at what they forked and perhaps do something similar with notable and forkable topics. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 08:32, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Side note on areas that require attention

  • graph looks like some weird LaTeX graph, perhaps thumb?
  • presidential election table looks out of place, perhaps moved to side + word wrap?
  • general wording and tone restructuring.

- Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 08:38, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Hadn't noticed election tables. Probably graph needs to be compessed somewhat. It is a bit dominant. One thing I didn't put there! Happy to have something other than prose! I think the weaknesses though are on volume and wording. My "bullet" items need to be prose. The years were there for a reason, but maybe if footnotes can be found (didn't put them in originally cause I was doing it from personal notes and I didn't have the original references). So the user can get the year from the footnote if year actually doesn't make a whole lot of difference and sometimes it doesn't.
We also need pictures. Space Center, Disney ship, manatees, stadium full of people, parade in downtown Melbourne, aerial photo of causeways, etc.
Would appreciate a heads up here before forking. Thanks. Student7 (talk) 12:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merging Brevard County Emergency Operations Center

Please do not merge this article back into Brevard County. Please see the above discussion on this article being too long. One of the successful forks was to get rid of BCEOC without any annoying fallout in this article. Please see the discussion above about being too long. With a hurricane or two, the EOC will grow, believe me! It won' take long! Student7 (talk) 23:37, 4 May 2008 (UTC)