MARTIN COUNTY — If the Martin County Commission approves changes to the shoreline protection law next week, 28 properties with seawalls and hardened shorelines could develop marinas and restaurants within 20 feet of the water.

The change would allow the properties in Community Redevelopment Areas to expand within the current 20-foot wide protection buffer on hardened shorelines. The amendment includes a 10-foot construction setback for principal structures.

Commissioner Doug Smith, who proposed the change, said the amendment will allow waterfront properties to complete shoreline projects that could stimulate business. The waterfront was fruitful for development before the current shoreline protection law passed in the 1990s.
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PORT ST. LUCIE — The City Council Monday night unanimously agreed to move forward with purchasing 15 acres from Tradition Outlet LLC for $10 million, a move that puts up half the state’s contribution to help a Hollywood executive set up a digital production studio.

The studio could create up to 500 jobs and bring Florida State University’s Film Studies program to the Treasure Coast.

The package includes the local governments building a 150,000-square-foot studio for Hobe Sound-based Wyndcrest Holdings, a private investment firm focused on entertainment and Internet technology headed by Jupiter Island resident John Textor.
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ST. LUCIE COUNTY — Law enforcement agencies are working to get rid of the hundreds of backlogged DNA cases to make for a safer Treasure Coast.

The Indian River Crime Laboratory hired a DNA criminalist through a $94,922 forensic science improvement grant with the Port St. Lucie Police Department from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice.

Lab Director Dan Nippes said the backlog for St. Lucie, Indian River, Martin and Okeechobee counties at the end of June was 646 cases.
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Esther A. Guzman, a scientist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, has received a $375,000 grant for a three-year project to find marine organisms that might help prevent pancreatic cancer.

The 36-year-old Guzman grew up in Mexico City and earned a doctorate in immunology from the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2004. She joined the drug discovery program at Harbor Branch, a division of Florida Atlantic University, the following year. (more…)

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

FORT PIERCE — St. Lucie County has set its sights on landing an unnamed eyeglass lens research firm that could bring 200 high-paying jobs to the Treasure Coast and create a curriculum at Indian River State College focused on training people to work for the company.

The county is awaiting Enterprise Florida, the state’s economic development arm, to approve its share of an incentive package that would require the local government to provide about $550,500 as its part of a state and local package that includes a job growth incentive grant and property tax breaks.

“This is a serious competition for us,” said Larry Pelton, president of the Economic Development Council of St. Lucie County. “I can’t give you more until we see how this all turns out.”
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FORT PIERCE — Soon residents and visitors to South Beach’s Jetty Park will get to enjoy more waterfront views, parking and easier access to a 2 1/2-mile linear park.

The City Commission, seated as the Fort Pierce Redevelopment Agency board, Wednesday approved a $1.4 million land acquisition that will double the size of Jetty Park to 2.87 acres.

The purchase is for 1 acre on the eastern side of the vacant Mariner Bay Motel property, formerly the Days Inn, at the corner of Seaway Drive and State Road A1A. (more…)

INDIANTOWN — The long-stalled Quillen Development of Regional Impact is dead and the developer is missing in action.

The Martin County Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to kill the proposal for 2,250 houses and 150,000 square feet of commercial space at the intersection of Warfield Boulevard and Allapattah Road in Indiantown.

Officials with the project’s developer, Ascot Development of Delray Beach, did not attend Tuesday’s public hearing on the fate of the project, which was first proposed in December 2005. The developer paid $58.5 million for the land.
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Hundreds of boom-time buyers in Florida have tried to use the Interstate Land Sales Act to wiggle out of real estate contracts. Some have been successful, others haven’t — but a recent ruling shines light on the risk involved in pursuing such cases.

A magistrate judge ruled late last month that three buyers at St. Lucie County’s Ocean Bay Villas who were suing in an attempt to get their deposits back must repay $76,600 in attorneys fees and costs to the developer, Stuart-based Pukka Development Inc.

“The question is: Do these lawyers explain to these buyers the risk if they lose? The developers are going to go after the attorney’s fees,” said Mark Grant, a partner at Ruden McClosky in Fort Lauderdale who represented Pukka.

In the Pukka case, the plaintiffs — Saverio Pugliese, Michael Mieves, Antonio Saladino and Stephen Matalyak — claimed Pukka violated the Interstate Land Sales Act because it didn’t file specific property reports required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The U.S. District Court Southern District of Florida ultimately ruled that Pukka was exempt form the reports.

MARTIN COUNTY — When Martin Memorial Medical Center hired a jet in 2003 to repatriate a brain-damaged patient to his native Guatemala, hospital officials “never took the law into their own hands,” according to documents filed ahead of a June 23 trial.

“They never stuffed Mr. (Luis Alberto) Jimenez in the back of a van under the cover of darkness and drove him out of town,” Martin Memorial attorney Scott Michaud stated in papers detailing Jimenez’s predawn flight to Guatemala City on July 10, 2003.

“When Martin Memorial discharged Jimenez to the facility in Guatemala,” Michaud noted, “Martin Memorial did so with the honest belief based on the evidence it uncovered, that the hospital in Guatemala was properly equipped to care for him.”
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