PORT ST. LUCIE — In years of legal battles, Martin Memorial Health Systems has jumped every hurdle standing in the way of its plan to build an 80-bed hospital in Tradition.

This month, it cleared a critical one.

Hospital officials announced today that the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration accepted the recommendation of an administrative law judge to allow the $100 million project to move forward over the objections of HCA Inc., which owns St. Lucie County’s two existing hospitals.

“We feel that this is really a major step,” said Mark Robitaille, Martin Memorial’s president and chief executive officer.

HCA, which has run out of options with the state, now will have to pursue its case through the court system. HCA officials said today that they were disappointed with the decision, but hadn’t decided whether to appeal.

An appeal could take at least a year to resolve. (more…)

FORT PIERCE — “The Don Corleone of the Port St. Lucie marijuana grow house operations” was sentenced Wednesday morning to 45 years in prison.

Roberto Alberto Cepero

Sonia Del Risco Polls

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FORT PIERCE — The owners of a new antique mall expect to open Hidden Treasures of the Treasure Coast in a few weeks on U.S. 1. (more…)

Port St. Lucie Civic Center

Mayor Patricia Christensen called it the “beginning of a new era.”

Since its opening, though, the $25 million facility has had more success as a recreation center than as the economic anchor of a burgeoning “downtown” in a city built without one.

Its surrounding streets, with names such as Progress Lane and Main Street, are flanked by empty fields.

Its rental facilities have been used 180 times. Rental rates were cut in half late last month.

“The whole idea for this was to stimulate the development of a downtown and obviously the economy has had an effect on that,” said Chuck Proulx, the city’s parks and recreation director.
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Workers build pieces of FPL's new solar plant near Indiantown.

These frames will eventually hold mirrors to collect the sun's energy.

With the first mirrors set to arrive this week, that promise is starting to take shape.

“We want to harness all that free energy,” said John Gnecco, FPL’s director of project development.

The idea of solar-thermal energy sounds easy enough, and it is. Kind of.

In the most basic terms, the process works like this: The sun’s light strikes a mirror and is beamed into a pipe, which “catches” the energy and moves it, via molten liquid, into a power plant where it boils water into steam. The steam is used for power.

Jose Suarez, a spokesman for FPL, explains it this way: “When the sun comes up every day, you’re able to take your foot off the gas and let the sun generate steam.”

What seems simple on paper, though, is far more complex on the ground. (more…)

TALLAHASSEE — Two safeguards on a secretive process that turns tax dollars into cash incentives for private corporations were quietly removed in the final days of the 2009 legislative session to help a Jupiter Island investment manager quickly secure $20 million for his digital animation company.

An amendment gave Gov. Charlie Crist’s office, which helped craft the language, sole authority to award $42 million in economic development money. As a result, nine companies, each identified only by a code name, were awarded shares of the money within a week this summer. One $7.4 million project in Taylor County was never discussed in public.

Nearly half of the summer’s total went to Project Bumblebee — a proposal from John Textor, who is targeting Port St. Lucie for a spinoff of Digital Domain, a visual effects company he owns with Hollywood blockbuster producer Michael Bay.

Textor has promised that the spinoff, Wyndcrest Holdings, will create 500 jobs by 2014, and the recession-ravaged city is considering a separate incentive package worth $10 million in cash, land in Tradition and additional stimulus money from the city and St. Lucie County for a building.

But while the city considers its offer, the last-minute state budget amendment has already benefited the election campaigns of Crist and state Reps. Kevin Ambler, R-Tampa, and David Rivera, R-Miami, whose support was critical for the amendment.

Just days after the legislative session in May, which ran into overtime as lawmakers squabbled over the budget, Textor gave $5,000 to the Republican Party of Florida’s federal campaign account to help Crist, who has raised more than $6 million for his U.S. Senate race next year.

In June, Textor gathered $2,000 in donations for Ambler and $1,500 for Rivera. Textor also helped arrange for former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, one of Textor’s business partners, to attend Ambler’s kickoff fund-raiser last month for Ambler’s state Senate campaign. Textor said he hopes to host a fund-raiser for Ambler in Palm Beach County. (more…)

J.J. Taylor Companies, the second largest beer distributor in Florida, plans to start construction this week on a warehouse and beverage distribution center in Fort Pierce.

About 57 employees are working out of a temporary location in the city, said Jose E. Rivera, vice president of finance and administration for the company. Those employees will move to the new 25,000-square-foot center when it opens next year in the Crossroads Park of Commerce on Okeechobee Road, he said. (more…)