Santa Rosa County will receive $525,000 in state grants to design an expansion of Whiting Aviation Park and to buy land near NAS Whiting Field to protect the base from encroachment, according to a news release from Santa Rosa County officials.

U.S. Rep. Jimmy Patronis has asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to study establishing a national veterans cemetery in Okaloosa County and announced a steering committee to build a case for a roughly 200-acre site in Northwest Florida.

The Navy will begin asking homeowners near Naval Air Station Whiting Field for permission to sample their private drinking water wells in August, including wells the Navy tested years ago and found within safety guidelines.

Santa Rosa County Commissioners moved forward July 7 with plans to apply for two state defense grants worth up to $750,000 to support NAS Whiting Field.

Randy Roy is paid, in part, to think about a war that hasn’t happened yet and the pilots who’ll fly it.

It has been more than 10 years since Eglin Air Force Base opened its gates to the public for an air show. In April 2027, that will change.

Most naval bases take their names from their location, or the towns nearby. Naval Air Station Whiting Field is different. The Navy’s busiest training base, tucked into northern Santa Rosa County, carries the name of a man, one who never set foot on it.

Local base commanders and Rep. Jimmy Patronis (R-FL1) made the case on May 27 that the area’s congested roadways are not just a quality-of-life problem, it is also a threat to national security.

While heavy rain may have forced event organizers to change the venue to the Gracey Community Center on Memorial Day, the City of Milton still showed up to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

For retired Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. David Post, getting from the bedroom to the bathroom used to mean crawling on his hand and knees.
Post lost his left foot to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2011. A recent ankle fusion has made him rely more on a wheelchair to get around. In a regular home, that meant narrow doorways his chair couldn’t clear and a bathroom that felt more of an obstacle course than a relaxing getaway.
“I’ve crawled on my hands and knees to safely transition into a shower and then crawled back on the same floor to exit, in situations more than I’d like to admit,” Post said in a presentation outside his new home.
With help from a national nonprofit, those instances are now a memory.