MARTIN COUNTY — A $4 million federal grant announced Tuesday should mean restored oyster beds, cleaner water and about 100 jobs in Martin County.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has allocated $4,024,969 to the Martin County Commission. At their meeting Tuesday, commissioners are scheduled to award a contract to build about 200 acres of oyster bed reefs in the St. Lucie River between the Roosevelt and Evans Crary bridges and in the Northwest Fork of the Loxahatchee River near Tequesta.

The money for the project comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, part President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. More than 800 applications for grants were made and 50 approved. Of the four projects funded in Florida, Martin County’s was the largest.

To qualify for the stimulus money, said Kathy FitzPatrick, a Martin County coastal engineer, the project had to be “shovel-ready.”

FitzPatrick said bids from contractors are expected Wednesday.

“If the commissioners award the bid on July 7,” she, “we’ll be out on July 7, 8 or 9 doing surveys on the St. Lucie and Loxahatchee rivers to see exactly where to put the oyster beds.”

Work could be completed in about a year.

FitzPatrick said “seven or eight” sites in the St. Lucie have already been permitted for beds. Patch reefs 30 feet in diameter and made of old oyster shells will be placed in the water near Martin Memorial Medical Center and Rio.

Closer to the Crary bridge, smaller reefs made of oyster shells in mesh bags will be placed in the water both as oyster habitat and to protect shorelines from erosion by boat wakes. Several landowners have signed on for mangrove plantings along their shorelines, FitzPatrick said.

County officials have identified 106 jobs that will be involved in the project, “everybody from marine contractors, barge operators, quarrymen for the huge amount of shells we’ll need, to nurserymen, scientists and ecologists,” FitzPatrick said. “There will be a lot of people employed by this over the course of the year, and almost all of them local.”

Oysters once thrived in the St. Lucie River, said Vincent Encomio, an oyster research specialist at the Stuart-based Florida Oceanographic Society.

“But over the years the St. Lucie has lost about 75 percent of its living oyster bed acreage,” Encomio said. “Creating more habitat for oysters will improve the habitat for all the other organisms that depend on the reefs to live.”

Oysters filter water at a rate of 40 gallons per oyster per day. With about 600,000 oysters per acre of reef, that’s 24 million gallons of water a day.

FitzPatrick said the bivalves will be able “to filter the entire volume of the river every month. That improvement to the water quality is very substantial.”

By Tyler Treadway

PORT ST. LUCIE — Hundreds of Tesoro property owners aren’t waiting around while their subdivision’s developer grinds through bankruptcy court: They’re filing their own lawsuits against Ginn Resorts and its affiliates.

Property owners are charging Ginn with a host of wrongdoings, including selling lots through Ponzi schemes, fraudulently inflating property values, lying to and duping clients, failing to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership dues and missing escrow accounts and backing out on promises to build amenities.

Timothy Vetrano, 72, a retiree from Manhasset, N.Y., who lives at Tesoro with his wife Marilyn, said his experience falls under “buyer beware.”
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The White House is reviewing the merits of the proposed Indian Street Bridge as a response to a U.S. senator who included the span in his list of 100 questionable federal stimulus projects.

The review is being conducted only because it was raised by U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., not because it is a concern of the White House.

The review could be quickly wrapped up as the White House has already determined that one-third of the items highlighted by Coburn in a report released Tuesday are not stimulus projects or are misleading characterizations of stimulus projects.
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FORT PIERCE — Cindy Robbins, once president and chief operating officer of Riverside National Bank of Florida, was let go Thursday as the financial institution continues its restructuring.

Robbins’ position had been eliminated and no agreement could be reached with her taking another position at the independent bank based in Fort Pierce, said Riverside Executive Vice President Alan Polackwich.

“We just had one person impacted, it was nothing widespread, nobody else was involved,” Polackwich said.

Robbins could not be reached for comment.

Robbins had been reassigned as senior executive vice president and director of retail banking in January, when a bank reorganization cut 35 positions and Vernon D. Smith, who founded the bank in 1982, announced his retirement. She had been president and COO since 2006.

The bank has 65 offices in 10 Florida counties.

Recently listed by analysts as a problem institution, Riverside continues to work under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.

The FDIC program was created to strengthen confidence and encourage liquidity — the ability to convert an asset into cash quickly — in the banking system.
Jim Turner, TCPalm.com

STUART — Two weeks after a natural-gas pipeline rupture shut down the two major thoroughfares leading to South Florida, more than 20 miles of the pipe remain closed and investigators are still trying to figure out why it failed.

The May 4 blast along Florida’s Turnpike in Martin County caused a 113-foot-long segment of the pipe to be ejected from the ground and hurtled alongside the highway, according to an initial report from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Though the cause of the rupture remains unclear, the report raises the possibility that a seam in the pipe may have been a factor. The 18-inch-wide pipe was manufactured by Youngstown Sheet and Tube in 1959. (more…)

FORT PIERCE — Not much will change Friday when Lawnwood Regional Medical Center & Heart Institute begins serving as a provisional state trauma center.

Much of the $15 million Lawnwood invested in five trauma surgeons, staff training, new equipment and emergency department renovations was earmarked two years ago when hospital officials proposed St. Lucie County taxpayers chip in $7 million a year to pay for the regional, Level II trauma center.

Trauma tax opponents said then Lawnwood’s parent company, Tennessee-based HCA Inc., would find the cash if it really wanted to care for trauma patients. Nearly 75 percent of voters rejected the trauma tax.
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STUART — Martin County’s lowest-paid workers will keep fighting the county’s furlough program because they can’t afford a 5 percent pay cut, a union leader said Tuesday.

Teamsters Local 769, which represents 275 of the county’s clerical and blue collar workers, will ask the Public Employees Relations Commission to resolve the contract dispute through binding arbitration, said Mavis Curley, the union’s chief steward in Martin County.

The furlough program requiring all county employees, except fire rescue workers, to take one unpaid day off per month starting Friday violates the Teamsters contract, Curley said. Under the contract, a workweek is 40 hours.
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PORT ST. LUCIE — A 22-year-old Port St. Lucie man has been charged in federal court with transporting child pornography after authorities found more than half a million child pornographic images on his computer hard drive, according to a news release Friday from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Jason David Bingham was detained Friday in Miami without bond and his arraignment is set for April 28.
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VERO BEACH — Absenteeism has doubled at Vero Beach High School in the last week with bomb threats starting off four school days.

And for many students who did show up for school this week, the decision came after a serious conversation at home.

“My daughter tried not to go Monday because of the Columbine anniversary,” parent Darby Dickerson said. “But I told her you can’t let two dead folks from 10 years ago stop you.”
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TALLAHASSEE — The long-sought Indian Street Bridge, along with 16 other transportation projects expected to bring money and jobs to the Treasure Coast, got the green light from the state Joint Legislative Budget Commission Wednesday.

The 14-member commission comprised of Senate and House members agreed, without debate, to accept $3.8 billion in federal dollars that will pay for a cornucopia of projects targeting transportation, health and education.

Backers say the package will help the state recover from the worst recession in decades.
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