Larkins center redesign turns to what happens inside

Superintendent Howard Hepburn wants to be an early customer: he invited Blanche Ely students to bring SoFlo Delights by district headquarters at lunchtime and promised to cover the first 10 lunches. The solar-powered kitchen on wheels, worth more than $200,000, arrived at the school last week through an Intuit donation program. Students named and designed it, and now they're working out the menu, the prices and the money side. Culinary students will cook; students in accounting, hospitality and digital design handle the rest. School events come first, with the hope of eventually taking it out into the community. For the roughly 130 sophomores, juniors and seniors expected to take part, that means a real business to run, plus a shot at QuickBooks, First Aid and small-business entrepreneurship certifications.

At 2380 Martin Luther King Blvd., Our Father's House Soup Kitchen hands out steel-toed work boots to anyone with proof they've landed a job. Several other area soup kitchens have shut down, so more people now depend on this one. A bike program teaches repair and lets people earn refurbished bicycles, and some of today's volunteers and workers once came in for meals themselves. The food still matters: 190 to 240 lunches and dinners can go out in a day, with one cook handling every entree while six or seven helpers pack hot meals and salads. Soup is on five days a week. None of it runs on government money; churches, schools, businesses, food drives and individual donors keep it going. To help, visit ofhsoupkitchen.org, call 954-968-7550 or mail P.O. Box 668571 (ZIP 33066).

Laddawan "Tammy" Boon-long has done this before: she opened a seafood boil near Washington, D.C., in 2018, and it closed during the pandemic. Her next one, RimLay Seafood, is headed for 3428 E. Atlantic Blvd., with a target of December. She lives in a Pompano Beach condo, kept noticing the vacant space beside a bar she often visits, and pitched the landlord, who liked the idea. The boil is New Orleans style, but Thai herbs go into the Cajun butter sauce of garlic, chili and spice, and salt goes on top to finish. The name comes from RimLay, a beachside place in her native Thailand. Expect 80 seats in roughly 2,300 square feet, half indoors and half out. She chose the spot for the beach and the foot traffic. Her read on the local field: "I have no one to compete with." That's her own assessment; diners get their say once it opens.

Running for the District 4 seat, Beverly Perkins ranks affordable housing as the district's top issue and says she will "continue expanding" state SHIP and city CRA housing grants. She backs plate readers for targeted use against violent crime and hit-and-runs, with privacy guardrails, including firm city rules on retention so irrelevant data gets purged. Her yes on the new downtown comes with strings: prime retail space for local small businesses, and local residents first in line for construction work and permanent jobs. Amendment 3 worries her. Property taxes pay for city services, she notes, and wider homestead exemptions would shrink the general fund District 4 leans on for drainage, streetlights, illegal dumping enforcement, Apollo Park upgrades and senior programs. The risk, as she tells it: cut services or delayed projects. Her bottom line: "Based upon these factors I am opposed to impacting the local residents."