Expanding Church of the Highlands

The Church of the Highlands will be opening another branch campus this weekend in Alabaster, reports AL.com’s Greg Garrison.

While it’s not closing the gap on Dollar General just yet, Church of the Highlands claims 22 locations in Alabama and two in Georgia. It’s considered one church, with sermons livestreamed from the main campus in Irondale to other locations every Sunday morning, making it by far the largest church in Alabama.

The Alabaster campus isn’t starting from scratch. Folks have been having Sunday services at Thompson Middle School since 2015. The new building on Highway 119 cost $18 million. The church says that its policy is to not use debt.

Oyster forecast

The state’s annual oyster forecast was a bit of a mixed bag, reports AL.com’s Lawrence Specker.

Scientists with the Marine Resources dive and take samples from oyster reefs to evaluate the wild-oyster population. On Thursday in Bayou La Batre, biologist Jason Herrmann gave a presentation to oyster harvesters.

According to the report, this 2023-24 season should be pretty good. Not 1990s-good but good in the context of the past decade.

That’s based on fairly stable numbers of mature oysters in Cedar Point East and West, and growing numbers in Heron Bay.

The bad news is that the numbers were uneven for younger oysters that are a year away from harvest. And the worse news is that the numbers for spat were down pretty much everywhere.

“Spat” is a word that makes oysters even more appetizing and means juvenile oysters. Low salinity levels in the water around Mobile Bay might be to blame for the spat decrease.

Also this week, a privately funded project began to lay 77 acres of limestone rock  near Dauphin Island for oyster habitat. Conservation folks insist the limestone will not be covering up any currently productive areas.

Drinking water

The Birmingham Water Works Board agreed to a settlement with environmental groups to protect 7,000 acres of land around Lake Purdy and the Cahaba and Little Cahaba Rivers from development, reports AL.com’s Dennis Pillion.

A preservation agreement had been in place previously, but the latest lawsuit was over whether the Water Works Board could sell off some of its land in the area to developers.

Who’s the bossest boss?

Southern Company leads all Alabama employers on the Forbes Magazine list of best companies to work for, reports AL.com’s Warren Kulo.

Southern Company is the parent company of Alabama Power. The companies considered had a minimum of 500 employees.

Workers who were surveyed evaluated their employers on working conditions, diversity, development potential, company image, compensation packages and more.

They were also asked whether they’d recommend other people to work for their companies. Here are the others from Alabama that made the list:

Books-a-Million, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Northrop Grumman, Wind Creek Hospitality, Home Instead Senior Care, Clayton Homes, Edward Jones, Honda Motor, Polaris, Publix Super Markets, Boeing, Hoover City School District and AIRBUS.

Born on this date

• In 1919, Gov. George Wallace of Clio.
• In 1916 Nobel-winning pediatrician Frederick Robbins of Auburn.
• In 1960, actress Ashley Crow of Birmingham (she played the cheerleader’s mom on Heroes).
• In 1965, Cornelius Bennett of Birmingham, linebacker at Alabama and in the NFL and could block a field goal on Nintendo’s Tecmo Super Bowl (if you know, you know).

More Alabama news

Poll results

We asked y’all what you viewed Wednesday evening, given that among the options was a GOP presidential primary debate as well as the frontrunner’s interview on social media. Because I chose to first watch the Braves-Mets game (which featured Braves legends handling broadcast/storytelling duties), I included that in there as well.

Of course, you might’ve watched parts of more than one thing. But you could make your pick based on whatever criteria you wanted to use.

Here’s how it went:

• GOP debate 15%
• Donald Trump interview 0%
• Braves vs. Mets 17.5%
• Something else 52.5%
• Didn’t watch TV 15%

Zero percent watched the Donald Trump interview? Was this thing rigged? Well, because the interview took place on X — The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter — it likely had trouble competing at all with the non-X audience and may have been secondary even to folks who watched it.

Anyway, I wanted to break in the polling tool to see how it would work with the newsletter. Didn’t get a huge response, but it wasn’t an exciting question, either.

We might try to work one in every now and then to take a rough pulse of where your interests or loyalties lie on a topic.

The podcast

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