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Monday's Daily Pulse
What You Need to Know About Florida Today
› CentCom to trim MacDill personnel by 1,100
he signs of MacDill Air Force Base's transformation in the decade since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are easy to spot.
It's seen in the lines of cars backed up at the main gate as armed guards carefully check IDs. It's seen in U.S. Central Command's new headquarters and the overflowing parking lots across the base.
But at CentCom, the combatant command leading the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the days of exponential growth are done.
› NASA selects newly formed nonprofit to manage space station lab research
The promise of a diverse science portfolio including experiments that could produce valuable products on Earth helped a Florida nonprofit win responsibility for non-NASA research on the International Space Station.
NASA on Friday formally announced a 10-year agreement with the Kennedy Space Center-based Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS, which will manage the portion of the station designated a U.S. National Lab.
› Lee County mobile home parks find issue with trash fee
Residents from 23 mobile home parks are talking trash to the Lee County Commission, demanding the county keep its hands off their recycling money.
The parks claim they are being strong-armed into having the county pick up their recyclables, instead of allowing residents to use private companies to haul away the recycling, then keep the revenue from selling them.
› Deep dredge, deep concerns at port
Dredgers have deepened sections of the Port of Miami twice in the last dozen years. Both times, the digging went awry.
In 2005, a hydraulic cutting rig and leaky scow hauling rock to an offshore dump site combined to produce plumes of milky silt wafting across seagrass beds and coral reefs. In 1999, a contractor illegally gouged three acres of lush seagrass from an adjacent state aquatic preserve that is prime manatee habitat.
Now the port is on the cusp of final state and federal approval for the last — and by far largest — chunk of an ambitious, long-controversial dredging plan.
› Couple collaborate on green Venice home
We have heard this story before: New resident lands on Gulf Coast after vacationing here during childhood and visiting relatives and friends as an adult.
Joe Valerio and his wife, Linda Searl, followed this scenario a few years ago.
What is different about this couple is what they did when they got here. Both practicing architects, they raised the standard of residential design in South Venice several notches with a modernist house they designed on Seneca Drive.
› Legislators are counting on rare moment to bring resort casinos to Florida
The sponsor of the bill to bring resort casinos to South Florida believes that the arrival of gambling giant Genting, the state's dismal economy and a rush of casino cash give legislators a chance to catch "lightening in a bottle" and pass the long-sought legislation this year.
"There is an appetite now to catch these destination resorts and potentially inject $5 billion to $6 billion into the local economy — and that trickles up to the state,'' said Rep. Erik Fresen, R-Miami. "If we weren't in double-digit unemployment and a receding economy, I don't think there would be much appetite for this bill but, in this environment, it's almost an obligation to discuss it."
