🚔 Sheriff's opening bid
Greetings, Stetters! For you today, an $867 million budget proposal, $10 million in state money finds our science center, Disney's snub, what the Census says about us and a moment for the turtles.
Today’s newsletter is a 7-minute read.
🚨 Exclusive: Sheriff seeks $50 million budget boost
It’s not $1 billion, but it’s getting there.
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw is asking Palm Beach County commissioners to support an $867 million budget for next year.
That’s a 70 percent increase over 10 years ago and $51 million more than last year.
* To put the request in perspective, the number of calls handled by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office has increased by 3.8 percent during the same 10 years. The jail population is 25 percent lower than it was five years ago.
PBSO brings money to the table — about $100 million it collects in fees, fines and licenses.
* That includes $63.6 million PBSO charges to patrol cities, a 13 percent increase over 2021.
The county would be responsible for the remaining $768 million. That’s typically about half the county’s operating budget.
With personnel making up 83 percent of the cost, Bradshaw points in his budget message to rising bills for employee pay, health care and pensions.
“As the biggest and busiest chief law enforcement agency in the county, offering fair and competitive pay is key to keeping our experienced employees invested and attracting the highest caliber of candidates,” he wrote.
Nearly three-fourths of the sheriff’s budget goes to law enforcement, nearly a fourth to run the county jails and about 3% to the sheriff’s presence in the courts.
County officials often negotiate a reduction from the sheriff but if they disagree, he can ask the governor to overrule them. Bradshaw, a Democrat and sheriff since 2005, is running in 2024 against his former chief deputy, Mike Gauger, a Republican.
🧪 Behind the scenes, a political formula for science
What did it take to secure $10 million in state taxpayer money for Palm Beach County’s Cox Science Center and Aquarium?
Sifting through public records, Seeking Rents reporter Jason Garcia came upon a Valentine’s Day 2022 meeting with Gov. Ron DeSantis and four key backers of the center.
Palm Beachers Howard and Wendy Cox gave $20 million to the center bearing their name. Lew Crampton chairs the board of trustees. Kate Arrizza is president and CEO.
Garcia writes the meeting followed campaign contributions from Crampton and DeSantis supporter Howard Cox.
The center also hired powerhouse lobbying firm Ballard Partners, which employs a former DeSantis chief of staff.
$10 million quickly followed.
Why we care: This is how the state budget sausage gets made, but most of us don’t see it.
Behind-the-scenes lobbying on small budget items, even when they make a big local impact, is rarely visible. Neither is the politicking and connections that open the door to taxpayer dollars.
Hundreds of similar smallish earmarks are tucked between the lines of the state’s current $117 billion budget.
Arrizza said the center’s fundraising goal grew to $85 million last year after looking at projected growth in Palm Beach and surrounding counties. (Carolyn reports on the region’s growth below.)
“The $85 million will allow us to grow our attendance capabilities to serve nearly 1 million guests annually,” she said.
Among other small-budget earmarks with local impact:
$300,000 to study the impacts of herbicides on wildlife habitat in Lake Okeechobee.
$1 million to study long-term health impacts of exposure to blue-green algae and red tide toxins.
$3.35 million to remove Burmese pythons and other non-native critters.
And maybe another $5 million for the science center, Garcia reports. Read his full story, here.
🎢 Disney pullout: Political tit-for-tat or deeper troubles? And what about that fifth park?
Was it a political feud or flailing finances prompting Disney to kill off nearly $1 billion in planned Central Florida investment?
Through a spokesman, Gov. Ron DeSantis argued the company’s less-than-stellar 2022 is the real reason it is abandoning a proposed campus — not the governor’s attacks following Disney criticism of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Lending credence to his argument is the company’s horrible, no-good, very bad 2022. It ended the year with the worst stock performance since 1974.
It is shedding 7,000 jobs worldwide, about 4 percent of its global workforce.
This month, its share price fell after a second-quarter earnings report.
Yes, but: Disney’s big-money drag doesn’t reflect a broad-based failure. Disney+ is struggling with major streaming service losses right alongside fellow media giants NBC Universal and Warner Brothers Discovery, owner of HBO.
Wall Street analysts remain generally confident that Disney’s share price will climb to $123.50 in the next 12 months, a 35 percent upside from its $91 range.
So: How much did Disney save by cutting the Central Florida project?
A modest drop in a big bucket.
First, expected tax breaks of $558 million would ultimately shave Disney’s estimated $1.3 billion investment to $730 million.
That $730 million represents 0.8 percent of Disney’s 2023 annual revenue. Not peanuts, but it’s dwarfed by the scale of planned company-wide cuts.
Then there’s this: The 2,000 people who would have relocated to Florida include Imagineers. Imagineers design Disney theme parks.
Disney has long been rumored to be planning a fifth park in Orlando. CEO Bob Iger has never said Florida might lose a fifth park to politicking.
He did publicly ask whether Florida wanted Disney’s business, including 13,000 jobs and $17 billion in Disney World investments over the next 10 years.
Astute Mouse watchers pointed out that’s the kind of manpower and money needed to build a fifth park.
Long-range plans adopted just before Tallahassee disbanded the governing body overseeing Disney World include a fifth theme park, Forbes reported.
Is scrapping the Central Florida campus a warning shot?
Or is it a feint, a far-future idea dusted off and subtly weaponized? Maybe, but Iger doesn’t have a lot of time to play multi-dimensional chess.
He has committed to only two years helming Disney. In that time, he will need to deal with streaming losses, boost share price, decide what to do with ABC and ESPN (some want them sold), plan for his succession, and more.
And he only has eight fiscal quarters to do it — about the same amount of time left in DeSantis’ second term.
🌞 The juice
Fresh-squeezed news from all over
👩🏽⚖️ Gov. DeSantis has appointed Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott II of Wellington to serve as a judge on the 15th Judicial Circuit Court and former Assistant State Attorney Danielle Sherriff, of Boynton Beach, to serve as a judge on the Palm Beach County Court. (WPTV)
🏀 A friend considers why Michael Jordan would want to sell the Charlotte Hornets. (Fadeaway World)
⛳️ Tiger Woods is now a billionaire. (Insider)
📚 Martin Amis, a British novelist acclaimed for his sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, died Friday at his home in Lake Worth Beach. He was 73. (The New York Times)
🪴 We told you last month about the movement to get a recreational marijuana ballot initiative in front of Florida voters. The drive now has more than the 222,881 signatures needed to put it to a vote, but Attorney General Ashley Moody says she will fight to get it killed. (News Service of Florida)
🧐 Quiz answer: Turtles in limbo!
Last week, we asked: Which Palm Beach County facility took in Gumbo Limbo Nature Center turtles?
The answer: B) Juno Beach’s Loggerhead Marinelife Center is the only Palm Beach County facility to receive turtles from the Boca rehab center; others landed at Zoo Miami and the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart.
To read the official story, injured and recuperating sea turtles at Gumbo Limbo were farmed out as part of a congenial administrative handoff, as the nonprofit Gumbo Limbo Coastal Stewards take over the program from the city.
It’s been a bumpy ride, though, The Coastal Star reported; involving the abrupt resignation of the veterinarian and the firing of the program coordinator.
Without a vet, the facility’s Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission-issued permit to house the turtles is temporarily in … limbo.
There’s light at the end of the turtle tunnel. Loggerhead Marine had to relocate its own turtles in 2022. The hospital staff quit, citing in part concerns over water quality. The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission suspended permits.
Loggerhead has recovered, with a new vet, new management and new turtles.
🌴 561 insider: Palm Beach County is growing, but it’s not crazy growth
👋 Carolyn here. After decades of editing stories tracking the growing ranks of Floridians (and knocking on doors as a Census worker in 2020), I was eager to dive into last week’s release of 2022 population estimates.
Why it matters: The new report documents the continuing migration to large Southern cities. No surprise: They’re coming to Texas and Florida. (Six of the 15 fastest-growing large cities are there; three are here: North Port, Cape Coral and Port St. Lucie.)
Stats to know and tell:
🤗 Florida was home to 21.8 million people in 2021. In 2022, it was more than 22.2 million. That’s an annual growth rate of 1.8 percent or 396,754 new neighbors.
🏌🏼♂️ Many of them settled in The Villages in central Florida. The Census reports that the baby boomer retirement destination was the fastest-growing U.S. metro area between 2021 and 2022, increasing by 7.5%.
🏠 None of the fastest-growing sizable U.S. cities is in Palm Beach County, but Port St. Lucie’s boom endures. The bedroom community just 40 minutes north of Jupiter was the seventh fastest-growing city in the country last year, with 13,887 new residents. PSL is now home to 231,790 people.
What is happening in PBC? We grew by about 1 percent or 15,254 people from 2021 to 2202.
🚚 That’s more than the 9,050 people who moved here the previous year.
🧠 If you are asked to recite Palm Beach County’s 2022 population, you can confidently estimate it at 1.52 million.
🐟 The county’s newest city, Westlake, is the fastest growing by percentage, with a population of 4,255 in 2022, nearly double the 2,170 from the year before. Westlake is a Minto housing development expected to top out at 11,000 residents.
☀️ Among larger Palm Beach County municipalities, West Palm Beach saw the most growth, coming in at 120,932 residents, up nearly 3 percent, or 3,041 people, from the previous year.
See the Census Bureau population estimates for all 39 Palm Beach County cities here.
🥇 BONUS: Read Joel’s deep dive into the 2020 Census Palm Beach County data that appeared in OnGardens here.
✍🏼 Martin Amis on the writer’s voice: “It’s all he’s got. It’s not the flashy twist, the abrupt climax, or the seamless sequence of events that characterizes a writer and makes him unique. It’s a tone, it’s a way of looking at things. It’s a rhythm, it’s what in poetry is called a sprung rhythm. … Really, it’s an internal process, a tuning-fork process. You say the sentence or you write the sentence again and again until the tuning fork is still, until it satisfies you.”
May all of your work satisfy you this week.
🥳 And speaking of rhythm, there’s no stopping South Florida fan favorites the Miami Heat and Florida Panthers. Look for them both to play for their league championships soon. And a tip of our golf cap to Cardinal Newman High 2008 grad Brooks Koepka on winning his fifth golf major, the 2023 PGA Championship.
Thank you to our paid and free subscribers. Help us continue to reach readers by sharing this newsletter.
Do you have a story idea or a news tip? Reply to this email, and tell us.