🏡 Growing homes
Herrre's Tuesday. Welcome. Did county commissioners break the Ag Reserve? Also, subpoena golf, skidding bank stocks, banning Betty and taxpayers check FoundCare.
Today’s newsletter is a 6-minute read.
🚜 First up: ‘Unpreserving’ the county’s Ag Reserve — and maybe much more
In a nearly six-hour hearing last week, Palm Beach County commissioners dismissed the recommendations of their staff and sided with builder GL Homes to allow a 1,277-home project west of Boca Raton in the Agricultural Reserve.
Why it matters: Critics say it could be a devastating decision because it requires altering long-established rules designed to preserve farming far west of Boca, Delray Beach and Boynton Beach.
Even one county commissioner, Marci Woodward, found it hard to fathom that commissioners would make such a move at the request of a developer.
“If we are going to break the Ag Reserve, I think that we should do it in a more deliberate way,” she said. “I don't like this project, specifically because it is unpreserving the Ag Reserve.”
But facing supporters, many of whom would benefit from the project, and swayed by the offer of free land, workforce housing and a $115 million water treatment project, five commissioners backed the proposal.
Past promises can change, Commissioner Michael Barnett pointed out before voting in favor.
“I understand also that the board that existed just four months ago, let alone 24 years ago, had different priorities than this current board may have today,” he said.
To former Commissioner Karen Marcus, the vote jeopardizes not just the Ag Reserve but all the county’s many nature preserves.
“Now everything’s back on the table,” she said.
Why did this particular development generate so much concern? Joel explains how the county got to this spot, and why GL’s proposal threatens to undo decades of efforts to save farming in the Ag Reserve, full story here.
🏌️♂️Local rookie golf star swept up in PGA-LIV suit
A deadline to issue subpoenas in a bitter California lawsuit pitting Saudi Arabia-bankrolled LIV Golf against the PGA Tour came and went.
Just one more went flying out the door.
It landed on the Palm Beach Gardens doorstep of Cameron Young, the PGA Tour 2021-22 Rookie of the Year.
Players in the LIV league sued the PGA Tour in California federal court last year, charging it is using its clout to monopolize golf.
LIV’s attorneys are looking for two years of certain documents from Young. That includes records of any possible threats that may have been made to keep Young from switching to LIV.
Threats are part of the PGA monopolistic squeeze, according to the suit. For instance, Augusta National Golf Club allowed LIV golfers to play The Masters this year, but in 2022, the suit charges, the club threatened to “disinvite players from The Masters if they joined LIV Golf.”
Even Condoleeza Rice has been dragged into the case.
LIV alleged the former U.S. secretary of state and Augusta National member tried to stop the Department of Justice from launching an antitrust investigation into the tour.
They wanted to subpoena her, too. The federal judge just said no.
Attorneys for Young have filed to block his subpoena. There’s no basis for believing Young has information crucial to the case, they argue.
Unlike marquee players Sergio García, Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson, Young was not lured away by LIV’s massive payouts.
How massive? Mickelson's signing fee was reported to be around $200 million.
More on Cameron Young, here. You can read the full subpoena and Young’s response, here, and here.
🐦 What lemmings can teach us about bank stocks
Cliff-bound lemmings have nothing on last week’s plummeting bank stocks.
Was it short-sellers? Commercial real estate exposure?
It’s a flat-out puzzle. Silicon Valley Bank’s March failure was driven in part by rising interest rates and ho-hum oversight by banking regulators. But the financials of these banks are largely sound, say analysts.
Locals got pinched all the same, a look at 12 banks with Palm Beach County business found.
Each ended Friday with a share price uptick for the day, but only TD Bank and Valley Bank finished the full week on a positive note, by 3 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
Our biggest loser? First Horizon, down by 38 percent in five days. First Horizon was already having a week: TD and Horizon had called off a $13 billion merger.
This wobbly local performance is piled atop the wreckage of SVB and Signature Bank’s March failures.
Shares of the dozen banks Stet looked at dropped an average of 21.6 percent between March 1, before SVB collapsed, and March 15, five days after the FDIC seized it.
But bank stock prices didn’t always recover after the FDIC rescued its deposit holders and — more or less — stabilized the market.
They kept sliding.
For example, SouthState shares dropped by 8 percent in the week following the SVB failure. But in the roughly eight weeks that followed, they fell by 16 percent from their pre-SVB share price — and then dropped another 2 percent last week to close at $65.50.
Even with the Friday bump, as of May 5, our 12 banks’ average share price was down 30.3 percent from pre-SVB collapse levels.
The Fed blames … the Fed. The Federal Reserve released hundreds of pages documenting failed oversight of SVB, itself “a textbook case of mismanagement.” Read it here, or The New York Times’ take on its findings, here.
🥕 The juice
Fresh-squeezed news from all over
📍 A magistrate has backed warehouses at the shuttered Palm Beach International Raceway. The road leads back to the County Commission, Joel reports. (OnGardens)
🛑 Tickets for loud music are nearly three times more likely to be issued to Black drivers under a new Florida law. (Fresh Take Florida)
🧘🏽♀️ Beach yoga teachers in Delray must stop while the city develops event policies. (The Coastal Star)
It’s all over but the shouting. Jason Garcia breaks down what the Florida Legislature did, and some things it didn’t do, before it adjourned last week. (Seeking Rents)
👩🏼🏫 Quiz answer: Say it isn’t so, Ms. Betty!
Last week, quizmasters, we asked which of three notables would be spinning in their well-appointed graves after a Florida school district pulled a book about them: Toni Morrison, Prince or Betty White.
The answer: Betty!
“That’s Betty!” tells the story of a boy who chooses to write a school essay on beloved actress Betty White. Researching in the library, a mystery woman helps him figure out details.
Escambia County School District pulled the award-winning book for review following a complaint by teacher Vicki Baggett, Florida Freedom to Read reports.
Known for her embrace of the Confederacy and aversion to mixed races, Baggett has pushed to remove dozens of books from Escambia schools.
Baggett’s objection to Betty: The boy has two fathers, an “introduction of alternate lifestyles and characters” not permitted under current Florida law, she wrote.
Meanwhile, in Martin County, a graphic novel of Anne Frank was challenged in part because it contained illustrations of Frank walking among female nude statues. Read more at TC Palm.
👩⚕️561 insider: The promise of FoundCare
Today we meet two community gems: FoundCare and the Promise Fund of Florida.
Both deliver health care to underinsured and uninsured women. FoundCare treats all adults and children as well.
They converged May 1 when Nancy Brinker of the Promise Fund joined with U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick to tour Palm Springs-based FoundCare’s second Palm Beach County location.
FoundCare spent more than $6 million buying and renovating a former bank building at 5867 Okeechobee Blvd.
Cherfilus-McCormick gave Brinker a check for $894,000 from her allotment of community project funding. The money will go from the Promise Fund to FoundCare to be used on equipment, renovation expenses and operations, including fees for reading radiology reports and sending out mammogram results.
The Promise Fund is getting an additional $2.7 million total from Congress, with earmarks also coming from Democratic U.S. Reps Lois Frankel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Brinker, a former ambassador to Hungary, is famous for starting the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer organization and its international Race for the Cure.
“We are incredibly grateful to FoundCare that they built this type of facility to welcome people who had first arrived in fear and then leave smiling,” Brinker said in her remarks.
The Promise Fund pays for “navigators” who “reach into underserved communities to find women who often haven’t set foot in a doctor’s office in years and convince them to re-engage with the medical system,” Brinker says on the fund’s website.
Some are stationed at clinics such as FoundCare or the Caridad Center west of Boynton Beach.
Others go into communities, forging relationships with churches and placing flyers in food pantry bags.
“We have educated, screened, navigated, and treated over 18,000 women in Palm Beach County,” the Promise Fund website says. Its goal is to reach all 80,000 uninsured women in Palm Beach County by 2024.
The Promise Fund helped FoundCare, which is raising $10 million to build a clinic on city-owned land in Riviera Beach, obtain a mammography machine two years ago.
“We went from screening 100 women to 3,000 women,” FoundCare CEO Chris Irizarry said.
🎺 Carolyn is making her way back from New Orleans, where she *says* she’s been seeking stories with Palm Beach County angles at the Jazz and Heritage Festival.
🔥Kudos to our hot Heat and Panthers, surprise playoff runs picking up where FAU basketball left off.
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