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…)

Land doesn’t get cheaper than this.

Two years ago, Martin County commissioners approved plans for a 139-acre industrial park in Indiantown under rules that allow for quick development.

Now, Venture Park is still empty — and a developer is offering 2.6 acres for free in a bid to jump-start the local economy.

The parcel has a value of about $679,000, or about $6 per square foot. (more…)

MARTIN COUNTY — Dorothy McManus got her own personal chauffeured bus from Halpatiokee Regional Park to West Palm Beach to start her work week Monday.

The Stuart resident, who takes a train from West Palm Beach to work in Broward County, had the bus to herself on the inaugural 5:10 a.m. Palm Tran Commuter Express. McManus was the first rider on the area’s first mass transit service offered between Martin and Palm Beach counties on Monday.

Four people hopped on the bus for the service’s 6:10 a.m. departure to Palm Beach County.
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INDIANTOWN — For years, the owners of J&R Outfitters ran a hunting lodge featuring exotic game such as Asian water buffalo, Nilgai antelope and Pere David deer thinking they had all the required Martin County permits.

But several code violations were discovered at J&R Outfitters last fall after the opening of a shooting range that outraged nearby homeowners with incessant gunfire.

Now Bill Richey and Joe O’Bannon are aiming to keep their hunting lodge open by jumping through all the regulatory hoops that apply to their business at 7600 S.W. Fox Brown Road.

“We never dreamed that what we were doing was illegal and we never tried to get away with anything,” said Richey, a former state prosecutor. “We have been no secret in Martin County. We have been here for 20 years.” (more…)

STUART — Signs of economic distress abound in Martin County and the outlook for next year doesn’t appear to be much better.

Martin County’s population dipped slightly since last year, school enrollment is expected to decline for two years, government revenues are down and new construction has dropped, several local and state officials said this week during government meetings.

The housing market is so bad two developers asked Martin County to rescind their hard won final site plan approvals for new subdivisions so they can delay paying impact fees and utility connection charges, said Growth Management Director Nicki van Vonno.

“That is a recent trend and it’s directly tied to the applicant’s ability to go forward or not,” van Vonno said. “Money is tight.”

The County Commission voted unanimously on Tuesday to rescind the final site plan approval for the Pentalago subdivision, 42 ranchettes on Citrus Boulevard near Interstate 95 in Palm City Farms. (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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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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The odds are better than picking all six Powerball numbers — but still pretty slim.

Of the 8,000 or so job-hunters that flooded tiny Indiantown last month with hopes of landing work building a solar-power plant, about 50 to 100 could get offers in July.

That’s when Lauren Engineers & Constructors — the contractor overseeing construction of Florida Power & Light Co.’s solar-thermal plant — expects to need the first batch of employees, mostly concrete helpers and finishers. (more…)

INDIANTOWN - Three new fires have been reported in western Martin County where between 2,000 acres and 3,000 acres have burned since Sunday.

The three new fires - making it a total of 16 fires - were small and two were quickly extinguished, said Melissa Yunas, a spokeswoman for the state Division of Forestry.

No homes are being threatened, Yunas said. One of the fires destroyed two homes in Indiantown and damaged several others, she said.

Three children, ages 7, 8 and 10, were arrested earlier this week for allegedly setting at least one of the larger fires near Indiantown. The children were charged with a third-degree felony and released to their parents.

INDIANTOWN — If ranchers had been permitted three years ago to conduct a controlled burn on lands involved in the fires that began around this rural community Sunday, there might have been less damage for Indianwood residents, a rancher said after the big fire.

But some Indianwood residents opposed the controlled burn. That figured in the decision not to conduct the burn, along with the large amount of trees blown down by the 2004 and 2005 hurricanes.

Terry Wilkes leases land owned by the Post family for his cattle to the east of the golf course community, and normally burned off range and scrub lands every two to three years. The Post family are long-time managers and owners of the Indiantown Company, which provides many municipal type services in the unincorporated area. (more…)