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Northeast Fla., Jacksonville Business Briefs - October 2010
AMELIA ISLAND — TRT Holdings, owned by Texas billionaire Robert Rowling, who also owns the Omni Hotels chain, won a bidding war in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to buy the Amelia Island Plantation resort. TRT bid $67.1 million for the property, contingent on the resort's Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization plan.
BAKER COUNTY — The County Commission approved a traffic concurrency plan with Lake Butler-based Roberts Land & Timber Investment that allows construction of a million square feet of industrial space at I-10 and U.S. 90 in Sanderson over the next five years.
GAINESVILLE — The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory chose the University of Florida's College of Design, Construction and Planning as one of 15 research partners in a four-year, $90-million project to bring energy-efficiency innovations to the U.S. residential market. Residential buildings account for about a fifth of the energy consumption and a fifth of the CO2 emissions in the United States.
» Gainesville reported the largest year-over-year jobs gain of any metro area in the state this summer, with a 1,500 increase, according to the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation. Public sector hiring was largely responsible. Gainesville's unemployment rate in July was 9%.
JACKSONVILLE — The NFL's Jaguars now play at EverBank Field, after a deal that gives the Jacksonville-based financial institution five-year naming rights to the city-owned football stadium. EverBank paid $16.6 million. The Jags will receive all of it because the City Council voted to forgo its 25% share to help out the team.
» Jacksonville's Bill Foley, the 65-year-old chairman and former chief executive of Fidelity National Financial, was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the nation's 25 top-paid CEOs over the past decade.
MARION COUNTY — Regulators shuttered Ocala-based community bank Independent National Bank. Winter Haven-based CenterState Bank acquired Independent National and its Marion and Sumter branches from the FDIC.
