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📆 Welcome 2024! For you today, fines for public officials, the national media site with its HQ here, catch up on SR 7, NextEra stock on the move, an icebreaker quiz and step inside a new town hall.
🏙️ Financial disclosure: Scofflaws in our midst?
It’s the law: Local lawmakers, appointed board members, certain government workers and even school principals are required to publicly disclose their finances.
Hundreds aren’t doing it.
What’s happening: As more than two dozen local elected officials resigned rather than fill out the state’s detailed financial disclosure Form 6, Stet Palm Beach found about 75 officials per year in Palm Beach County have failed to meet deadlines to file the far less intrusive Form 1. Many owe $1,500 fines as a result.
Yes, but: Many facing unpaid fines say they didn’t know they hadn’t met the filing deadline and had never been assessed a fine.
Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of local filers meet the deadline.
Still, Florida Commission on Ethics records paint a foreboding picture of scofflaws in our midst.
The commission says 74 Palm Beach County officials racked up $75,625 in unpaid fines in 2022.
It tallied 79 officials owing $70,525 in 2021.
The fine is $25 a day up to a maximum of $1,500. Most of those who didn’t pay were appointees to advisory boards or employees, not elected officials.
But when they didn’t pay, nothing happened. Some say they were never told.
An 18-page document on the commission’s website lists hundreds of people who were referred to a collection agency dating back to the early 2000s for failing to pay fines.
The Ethics Commission can recommend officials be removed from office for failing to pay but it requires an act of the governor, Senate president or speaker of the House.
The Ethics Commission takes extraordinary steps to make sure local officials don’t forget to file, spokesperson Lynn Blais said.
The day before the form is due, the entire staff works to contact non-filers “in a last-ditch effort to get people to file,” Blais said in an email.
Some local officials dispute that.
“I’ve never been contacted,” said Jerry Lower, who as chairman of the Briny Breezes Planning and Zoning Board has been filing Form 1 since at least 2013.
He said he recently found out about his $1,500 fine for filing two months late in 2022 and appealed it two months ago but has not yet heard back.
Some background: Form 1 simply requires officials to list liabilities and assets over $10,000, property ownership and sources of income but it doesn’t require listing specific amounts.
Form 6, newly required for all municipal elected officials in office as of Jan. 1, asks for precise figures and sources of income, including the names of large clients.
Rather than go public with Form 6 details, at least 27 elected officials resigned before the end of the year in Palm Beach County, leaving openings on city boards in North Palm Beach, Lake Clarke Shores, Manalapan, Lake Park and several other cities.
— Jessica Abramsky, with Pat Beall and Joel Engelhardt
📰 National media startup based here
The multimillion-dollar West Palm Beach-based media concern you never heard of courted new investors at Mar-a-Lago last week, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer.
The startup national digital news site The Messenger, founded last year by West Palm Beach resident Jimmy Finkelstein with a reported $50 million in seed money, has its national headquarters in a 16th-floor office at the Esperante Building in downtown West Palm Beach.
Yes, but: Its news operations are centered in New York City and Washington.
Finkelstein is courting investors amid troubling revenue trends, Fischer reported. He would give up a 51 percent stake in the company for $30 million, she wrote.
What happened? Fischer reported the company laid off 20 of its 300 workers Wednesday and she repeated news reports that The Messenger would run out of money by month’s end. A spokesperson for The Messenger called those reports “absurd.”
Among those in talks at Mar-a-Lago Wednesday, according to Fischer: Omeed Malik, a financier who backed Tucker Carlson's new media venture; Garrett Ventry, a Republican political operative; Ryan Coyne, founder of digital media agency Starboard; and George Farmer, the former CEO of Parler.
What that means: While The Messenger billed itself as an objective news source, it could swing conservative with an ownership change.
Among original investors in The Messenger: Palm Beacher Thomas Peterffy.
Finkelstein’s Esperante offices are marked JAF Communications Inc. for his namesake company. He sold the Washington, D.C., -based print publication The Hill for a reported $130 million to Nexstar Media Group in August 2021.
He paid $5.5 million in June 2021 for a 6,000-square-foot One Watermark Place condo on North Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach.
Of note: Joel provided news coverage of former President Donald Trump’s documents trial in Fort Pierce on three occasions for The Messenger.
🚧 Court tie-ups stall State Road 7 extension
Wishing for the State Road 7 extension to get built anytime soon?
Sorry, there’s been another delay.
The trial to determine if the 8-mile expansion from Okeechobee Boulevard to 60th Street and construction of a new four-lane road from there to Northlake Boulevard would ruin the West Palm Beach water supply has gone into overtime.
Why it’s important: The road has long been promised to The Acreage, a bedroom community of more than 15,000 homes, as an alternative to Royal Palm Beach Boulevard and other roads. But it’s opposed by West Palm Beach because it would run along the west side of the city’s surface water source, the 23-square-mile Grassy Waters Preserve.
What happened? The trial started Oct. 16 and went for three weeks but was far from done.
Plans to continue the testimony from about 100 environmental and transportation experts for a fourth week on Nov. 13 got postponed after the lawyer for West Palm Beach, Edward de la Parte, suffered a back injury on Nov. 9.
Administrative Law Judge Francine Ffolkes has set aside another three weeks for trial, starting April 1.
A second trial to consider the city’s challenge of the project’s water use permit is set for one week starting May 20.
After that, it likely will take months for Ffolkes to sort through more than 2,000 trial exhibits and rule.
The challenge to the environmental resource permit granted by the South Florida Water Management District is a primary reason behind the Florida Department of Transportation’s decision to push back construction from last year to 2029. As Stet Palm Beach reported in October, the roadwork would have cost $87 million in 2023 but FDOT puts the future cost at $134 million.
⚡️ NextEra: Building back to a buy?
It was a tough 2023 for Florida Power & Light’s Juno Beach-based parent company, utility behemoth NextEra Energy (NYSE: NEE). Rising interest rates kneecapped its green energy subsidiary last year, and NextEra’s stock lost more than half its value, tumbling from a 52-week high of $86.47 to a low of $47.15.
But it’s on the rise now, trading in the $62 range. Better yet, NextEra recently advised investors that what has been described as its “shockingly strong” $10 dividend remains on track for this year. It expects earnings growth of 6 percent to 8 percent.
Credit Florida for a chunk of that money, both our influx of residents depending on FPL to turn on the lights and the generosity of state utility regulators, which have greenlit robust — and controversial — rate hikes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Given the dividend and earnings outlook, stock watchers at Motley Fool last week practically swooned over NextEra’s modest share price gain. At its Monday close of $62.92, they argue, NextEra is practically a fire sale for investors.
🍊 The juice
Headlines with no added sugar
🚃 Details on Tri-Rail’s plan to launch service to downtown Miami this week. (Axios Miami)
🏗️ West Palm Beach’s Planning Board on Dec. 19 denied a plan for Apogee, a 25-story waterfront condominium tower at the eastern edge of the Northwood Harbor historic neighborhood, Kimberly Miller reports. Board members warned that the project will likely go forward with some modifications. (The Palm Beach Post $)
⚖️ West Palm Beach lawyer Sia Baker-Barnes to become the first Black female president of Florida Bar. (WPTV)
🍽️ Eater Miami’s list of the 14 best new restaurants in Palm Beach County features several New York and South Florida transplants. (Eater)
❄️ The quiz: Winter weather wimps
No one is breaking out the mukluks just yet, but even January’s 50-something-degree dips represented a South Florida deep freeze. Firepits fired up, orchids refused to bloom and residents were forced to abandon flip-flops for at least five days, though not all in a row.
Among West Palm Beach Januarys between 1890 and 2022, one stands out as the frostiest of them all.
🆕 561 insider: Jupiter opens town hall
Jupiter residents will have a chance to check out their new $24 million town hall next week.
The building, at 210 Military Trail, is part of the municipal complex that includes the town police department and the El Sol Neighborhood Resouce Center.
Flashback: $9 million came from the penny added to the sales tax that Palm Beach County voters approved in 2016. The rest came from property taxes and the town’s water fund.
Details: The two-story town hall includes meeting chambers, overflow space and staff offices and is larger than the old building to serve the town’s 61,000 residents.
What’s next: A ribbon-cutting open to the public is planned for 4 pm Tuesday, Jan. 16, followed by the opportunity to tour public areas of the building.
Members of the town’s Art Committee will highlight work by local artists to be installed in the new building.
🎣 Floundering Fins: The Dolphins met their match in the season finale Sunday, falling to the Buffalo Bills 21-14. The win gave Buffalo the division championship in a tie-breaker (Buffalo beat Miami twice this season) and spared the Dolphins having to play Buffalo again next week in the first round of the playoffs. Instead, Miami travels to sub-zero Kansas City to take on the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs. The Fins have nothing to lose as they opened as 3.5 point underdogs.
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