LOS FRESNOS —Bayside Drive, one of the most popular features at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, will temporarily close beginning in March for road construction that will make crossing much safer for ocelots.

Two under-the-road wildlife crossings (similar to box culverts) will be installed so that ocelots and other wildlife can move about their natural ranges without having to cross on top of the road, according to a press release from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The press release states that parts of the drive that formerly made a loop will remain closed to vehicles.

The remainder of the drive will be widened to allow for two-way traffic. The entrance to the drive will be relocated to the south to avoid ocelot habitat.

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However, the construction will not prevent visitors from having an enjoyable time, said Boyd Blihovde, refuge manager.

“The (hike, bike and tram tours) are being diverted to other parts of the refuge. Virtually everything will continue,” Blihovde said. “The area we are diverting to is an area that doesn’t see much traffic so most people in many ways prefer this area because they see a lot of wildlife.”

The wildlife in this area includes water fowl and other migratory birds that use the refuge.

The tour will take visitors around the Laguna Atascosa.

“And because of that, it’s the same type of spectacular view you’d get out of Bayside Drive by going to the Laguna Madre,” Blihovde said.

Once the construction around Bayside Drive is complete, biking, hiking and tram tours will resume, and limited access will be given to private vehicles.

Vehicular access has been prohibited since 2013 due to two incidents in which ocelots were struck and killed in 2009 and 2010, Blihovde said.

Although there is no guarantee the wildlife crossing will prevent more ocelot deaths, it is a good preventive measure going forward, Blihovde said.

“We want to reduce mortality as much as possible,” he said.

Construction is expected to be completed in late 2016 or early 2017, officials said.

HARLINGEN — A pair of local men have been arrested in connection with a robbery at a motel.

Police were called Wednesday at 4:17 a.m. to Su Casa Inn and Suites on West Tyler Avenue regarding a disturbance.

While there, officers made contact with a woman who told police two men identified as Derrick James Hazelwood, 31, of Harlingen, and Pedro Saldivar, 36, of La Feria, entered the motel and demanded money while holding a knife and a handgun.

During the investigation, police were able to connect Hazelwood to a Jan. 30 crime.

Police say he stole a car valued at $23,000 from the 400 block of North O Street. A police chase ensued and ended in the San Juan area when Hazelwood bailed out of the car and managed to evade capture.

Hazelwood was arraigned on an aggravated robbery charge and theft of a motor vehicle charge with bond totaling $115,000.

Saldivar was arraigned on an aggravated robbery charge with bond set at $75,000.

Police Chief Jeffry Adickes conveyed a message to those on his Facebook page who dare to break the law in what he refers to as a vibrant, active, safe, and family orientated community that will not tolerate criminal gangs, violence, illegal drugs, theft and burglary.

“At HPD, we are open 24 hours and we have highly-motivated front-line patrol officers, area detectives, major crimes detectives, organized crime detectives, crime fusion personnel, and leadership who will work diligently with our law enforcement partners to find you, arrest you, and present you for prosecution by the citizens you have victimized,” he said.

The goal of a police department is not only to eliminate crime but also help those criminals who seek a change.

“If you choose to change your path, the Harlingen Police Department stands ready to support you without question in finding resources to make a positive change for you and your family,” Adickes stated.

“We hope you choose change.”

RAYMONDVILLE — Willacy County is turning into “the wind capital of South Texas.”

In a meeting yesterday, EDF Energy became the third company to propose a wind farm that could pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into sparse county coffers.

“It makes you the wind capital of South Texas,” developer Robert Peña told county commissioners.

The London-based company proposed building about 100 wind turbines in the Willemar area, where the Lyford school district would reap a windfall in tax revenue.

EDF is working with Raymondville developer Joe Wetegrove on the project, leasing land from about 50 property owners across a 15,000-acre area.

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HARLINGEN — Space is going to get a lot closer for some Rio Grande Valley students.

Valley International Airport, Texas State Technical College and the Harlingen Economic Development Corp. are teaming up to send 20 students to Houston on April 14 for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Johnson Space Center.

At the SpaceCom Conference in Houston in November, NASA engineers were impressed with the Harlingen Aerotropolis Propulsion Test Center 3D Renderings created by TSTC students enrolled in the architectural design and engineering graphics technology program, a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) degree program.

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SAN BENITO – Keep San Benito Beautiful has a heart for Mother Nature.

They plan to show just how big that heart is tomorrow when they give 20 trees back to the Earth in celebration of Arbor Day.

The event also is being held to encourage San Benito residents to plant a tree in February.

The event is jointly sponsored by the Parks & Recreation Department and Keep San Benito Beautiful, a relatively new committee dedicated to enhancing the City’s appearance.

KSBB Chairman Lynne Pare said she expects more than 100 volunteers Saturday-double the number from last year.

At the tree planting site, volunteers will plant 18 Oak Trees and two Sabal Palm Trees

Volunteers can still sign up now and on the day of the event.

After planting is over, Pare said every volunteer will receive a small package of melon seeds, a “thank you” from KSBB and the city.

“We invite everyone during the month of February to plant a tree as a means of beautifying our community,” said Parks & Recreation Director Art Garza. “It’s a perfect way to commemorate a loved one, or just to improve the looks of your own yard.”

Through education and awareness KSBB aims to get the word out on the efforts of their organization.

Master gardeners will be there to hand out educational reading material on everything you need to know about trees.

“Our mission is to educate and engage San Benito community members, residents and visitors to take responsibility for improving our community environment,” Pare said.

“A share of our overall plan is to help our community to be responsible for their community and give them even more incentive to assist us and being a part of our programs and events. Tree planting is another great opportunity to bring together our community of San Benito.”

BROWNSVILLE – With a little help from UTRGV, scientists have detected gravitational waves, ripples through the fabric of spacetime, experimentally verifying Albert Einstein’s last prediction of general relativity made a century ago.

Months of social media rumors were confirmed during a Thursday news conference, introducing a new way to observe the universe.

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley physicists, some who’ve worked decades on the project, are among more than 1,000 international collaborators with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The Brownsville-based research center has been home to more than 20 authors of a paper published Feb. 11 by the peer-reviewed Physical Review Letters.

“It takes a lot of people to do this,“ said Gabriela González, spokeswoman for the LIGO scientific collaboration, during the news conference.

Last September, LIGO completed an upgrade to its pair of gravitational-wave detectors located near Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. On Sept. 14, both facilities recorded nearly simultaneous, historic readings.

“What was amazing about this signal is that it was exactly what you’d expect that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity would predict. (There) were two … massive objects, like black holes, inspiraling and merging together,“ said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO Laboratory.

LIGO scientists documented the reverberations from the first confirmed binary black holes, two black holes caught in each other’s orbit. The pair of about 150-kilometer-wide black holes, each with masses about 30 times the sun, accelerated to half the speed of light 1.3 billion years ago. They spiraled into each other, bending time and space, ultimately colliding to form a larger black hole.

“That’s what we saw here,“ Reitze said. “It’s mind-boggling.“

General relativity hypothesizes accelerating masses should distort spacetime, sending gravitational waves through the universe at the speed of light.

Each detector contains state-of-the-art laser systems built specifically to observe gravitational wave length fluctuations the diameter of an atom, and are “most precise measuring device(s) ever built,“ according to Reitze.

“You can’t buy low-noise, high-power devices,“ said Volker Quetschke, UTRGV assistant professor of physics, adding LIGO was defining state-of-the-art in the field.

Lasers stable enough for the dual four-kilometer arms of the interferometer didn’t exist when the project began, said Quetschke, who has worked on gravitational-wave sensing hardware since 2000. Development of LIGO technologies were research projects for professors and students, Quetschke said.

“The universities basically take the development role of the project. It is not a turn-key project. You don’t go to RadioShack and say, ’I want a $1,000,000,000 gravitational wave detector. There are a lot of small aspects.“

UTRGV’s Brownsville campus streamed the announcement live, and the event was followed by comments from current and past university officials, as well as physicists involved in the research.

Havidán Rodriguez, UTRGV provost and vice president of academic affairs, congratulated faculty and student researchers who contributed to the achievement, and Parwinder Grewal, UTRGV College of Sciences dean, emphasized the rarity of the moment.

“Discoveries of this magnitude don’t happen every day,“ Grewal said. “This is an exciting time for humanity, for science (and) scientists.“

Grewal highlighted the collaborative nature of the project and the competitive funding record of the physics faculty, calling it comparable to any institution in the nation.

“On average, the dollars that our faculty has received over the last five years is over $500,000 per faculty member,“ Grewal said. “This is impressive. I come from Ohio State University. It is the same, so I’d say we’re already a research institution,“ referring to the physics department.

Mario Diaz, director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, was in Washington, D.C., for the news conference and echoed Grewal’s sentiment, calling the department one of the most competitive in Texas based on research and publication.

The center was made possible by a NASA grant in 2003, and has since brought research in cutting-edge technologies to the Valley, according to Diaz.

“I thought it was important to develop something more applied. That’s the way we constructed the optics lab and we opened a line of research into lasers, optics (and) photonics — that is precisely the technology being used at LIGO.“

While the discovery will likely contribute to a Nobel Prize, Diaz said the university’s investment in this research has already been rewarded.

“In 2006, we hired a new faculty member to come into our center who is a radio astronomer,“ said Diaz, referring to Fredrick Jenet. “This same faculty member is the same one that led an initiative that attracted SpaceX to the Valley … because he’s going to be developing radio tracking systems for SpaceX spacecraft.

“I think this is a good example of things that are unforeseeable, but are based in the knowledge that you generate and develop.“

LYFORD — The expressions on their faces said it all.

They were amazed with the inside of an eye and their excitement and interest was obvious.

The 21 Lyford students who participated were junior physics students.

Their purpose — to cut into a sheep’s eye to dissect it in an effort to learn and see how it works.

“These lessons have been designed around what area physics teachers have reported having trouble developing — hands on activities,” said Claudia Gutierrez, Region One ESC STEM specialist.

The activity was brought in through the GEAR UP initiative, which provides a knowledge pipeline to post-secondary success.

“Today’s activity was great,” said Alexandria Lupercio, Lyford High School GEAR UP facilitator. “This is a hard concept for them to understand and I think it will really help them grasp the idea of how an eye works.”

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HARLINGEN — Harlingen will receive slightly less sales tax revenue this month from the Texas Comptroller’s Office than it did last month.

The city is receiving $2.386 million, a decrease of 1.53 percent from the same month last year when it received $2.423 million.

Mayor Chris Boswell wasn’t too concerned about the decrease, which amounts to about $40,000. That’s a pretty small decrease in the overall picture, he said.

“We’re still in the black for the year thus far, while some communities are not, so I’m pleased about that,” Boswell said. “So far it looks like the peso devaluation is affecting other communities more than ours.”

This month’s “decrease” is actually a significant increase from last month when the city received $1.713 million. Boswell said at that time the peso devaluation had caused a decrease in Mexican shoppers.

Raudel Garza, chief executive officer for the Harlingen EDC, also addressed the affect of the peso devaluation.

“The recent peso devaluation is certainly hurting retailers along the border and in communities highly dependent on the Mexican consumer,” Garza said. “Some Harlingen retailers have experienced slower months, but overall we have steady growth in the retail sector.”

In eight of the the last 12 months, Garza said, Harlingen has experienced the highest taxable retail sales ever.

“Harlingen is a retail hub as is evidenced by our numbers,” he said. “We continue to gain more in sales tax receipts than all other Valley cities except for Brownsville and McAllen.”

The sales taxes received in February reflect sales in December.

Statewide, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar is sending cities, counties, transit systems and special purpose taxing districts $867.1 million in local sales tax allocations for February. This is a 0.7 percent decrease from February 2015.

“Energy-centric cities such as Odessa, Midland, Corpus Christi and Houston continued to see decreases in sales tax allocation,” Hegar said. “Other areas of the state helped to somewhat offset those losses as cities such as San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth and Dallas saw moderate increases in allocations.”

Locally, San Benito and Raymondville both did very well.

H San Benito is receiving $432,718, a 5.98 percent increase from last year.

H Raymondville is receiving $171,649, a 14.88 percent increase from last year.

McAllen’s sales tax receipts decreased from what it received in February 2015. The city is receiving $7.601 million for sales made there in December. This is a 2.5 percent decrease from 2015 when it received $7.833 million.

Mercedes’ monthly sales tax revenue saw a significant decrease.

The town is receiving $1.063 million this month, a 5.94 percent decrease from last year.

Other cities also posted sales tax increases and decreases.

H Brownsville is receiving about $4.116 million, a decrease of 2 percent from last year.

H Edinburg is receiving $2.219 million, 6.32 percent more than the $2.087 million it received in February 2015.

H Weslaco posted a 13.4 percent decrease and will receive $1.227 million. A year ago, the city received about $1.417 million.

HARLINGEN — Tudor Uhlhorn announced he will be seeking re-election to a second term as Harlingen City Commissioner for District 2.

He made the announcement yesterday to a group of supporters at the Jackson Square Events Center in downtown Harlingen. So far, nobody else has filed to run against him.

Uhlhorn cited his business experience and the accomplishments of the last three years as his primary reason for seeking the post a second time.

“My business career started here in Harlingen after graduating from Texas A&M University with a bachelor of science in agriculture economics and a Master of Business Administration from Southern Methodist University,” he said.

“I came back to Harlingen in 1983 to assume management of my family’s business. Harlingen is a great place to live, work and play. I want to serve another term in order to assist in finishing up several projects that will enhance the quality of life we enjoy here.”

He said his accomplishments on the commission include working with city staff, the Mayor and his fellow commissioners to approve the past three years operating budgets without a tax rate increase.

“I am particularly proud of my work in helping to draft and pass a new smoking ordinance for the City that protects employees from the effects of second-hand smoke in the workplace,” he said.

Along with serving as Commissioner for District 2, Uhlhorn lists his other current organizations and activities, including Texas State Bankshares, Inc. Board of Directors, Texas Regional Bank Board of Directors, Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Inc. Board of Directors, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Development Board and Valley Zoological Society (Gladys Porter Zoo) Endowment Board of Directors.

In the past, he has served as chairman of the Valley International Airport Board, Tip of Texas Girl Scout Council Board of Directors, Rio Grande Council of Boy Scouts of America Friends of Scouting Campaign, President of the United Way of Northern Cameron County, Cameron County Irrigation District 11 President and many other organizations here in Harlingen and Cameron County.

He and his wife, Katherine, have three children, Cutter, Hubbard and Seton.