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‘The Biggest Impact’ When President Jim McCarthy joined the North Florida Land Trust in 2014, the non-profit conservation organization had a $233,000 budget and a staff of three. In seven years, the trust has grown to 14 full-time employees and a budget of $8 million and has secured protection for more than 25,000 acres. “The secret to that (success) is finding really good people,” McCarthy says. “But, we have also stayed focused on where we could have the biggest impact.” The organization achieves its mission of preserving the natural resources, historic places and working lands of North Florida by purchasing or receiving donations of land, as well as by helping public agencies with real estate transactions. ....
Gainesville will negotiate with a local company instead of a South Florida firm to develop a mixed-use downtown project on city property known as “Lot 10.” City Commissioners opted Thursday night not to go with a recommendation of a real estate consultant at least for now to hire the Boca Raton-based Predesco Property Investment to develop the site at 100 SW First Ave. Two other local firms had submitted proposals to develop the site after the real estate firm Colliers International, on the city’s behalf, put out the development request. Instead, the commission authorized city officials to negotiate with the locally based AMJ Group Inc., which has extensive Gainesville development experience and had also put in a development proposal for the city-owned land in front of Loosey s Downtown. ....
Janet Coats has a daunting task as the first managing director of the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida: helping to mend the deep wounds in our civic life and head off the next pandemic of disinformation. An interdisciplinary group of scholars have been studying these issues: “how media and technology can become more trustworthy, and develop programs for the application of new knowledge and tools and the creation of new policy and law,” as its website frames the mission. Coats has been on the job for less than three months. A former editor at the Sarasota Herald Tribune, more recently director for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and dean of faculty at Poynter, Coats brings more real-world experience and less of an academic background to the role. ....
Sound Off for Feb. 14, 2021 The Gainesville Sun What s on your mind? Call Sound Off, our weekly column of community comments, at 352-337-0368. • I’d like to comment on the city of Gainesville trying to take over University Avenue and 13th Street, which I think is a terrible mistake. If you can’t control bad drivers, that is the problem with the road, not road design. So you need more law enforcement, not more road design, and the city can’t even upkeep the streets they now own, much less the state roads that require a whole lot more work. ....