Get that SunPass ready – tolls are coming back
Toll collections will resume at 12:01 a.m. Thursday on most state toll roads after being lifted Sept. 5 in advance of Hurricane Irma’s trek across Florida.
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Panther found dead in southwest Florida
Officials say a Florida panther has been found dead from what appears to be a fight with another panther in southwest Florida. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reports that the 4-year-old-old male cat’s body was found Saturday on private property in Hendry County. The remains will be taken to a Gainesville facility for a necropsy. This is the second Florida panther death recorded in 2017. Florida panthers once roamed the entire southeastern U.S., but only around 180 remain…
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Company praised by Rick Scott hasn’t lived up to promises
A company Gov. Rick Scott was praising more than a year ago for creating jobs is now delinquent in its property taxes and has never met its hiring goals. The Fort Myers News-Press reported Sunday that Altair Training Solutions was supposed to be a multi-million dollar enterprise with facilities in Hendry and Collier counties where it would offer training for law enforcement and military combat personnel. Altair’s owners, Michelle and Brian Jones, said they would bring 150 jobs, with an…
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Public records suit on research monkeys is dropped
A public records lawsuit involving a company that provides monkeys for animal research labs has been withdrawn. Primate Products, Inc. of Hendry County, the Florida Department of Agriculture and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on Thursday jointly agreed to drop the case. That means documents the company said contain “trade secrets” are now public record. The department released the records Friday. Primate Products breeds and sells “nonhuman primates for use in biomedical research,” the suit said. “Now we may be able to find out…
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U.S. Sugar calls recent EPA cane burning complaint “baseless”
An environmental activist group has filed a complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seeking a challenge to an air emissions permit from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to the U.S. Sugar Corp. Attorneys for Earthjustice filed the complaint Thursday, which seeks to include cane burning as part of DEP’s purview when issuing air emissions permits. In August, a similar petition by the Sierra Club was dismissed by DEP, which noted that the prescribed burns used for cane burning…
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Florida’s unemployment rate drops slightly in June
Florida’s unemployment is dropping slightly. The June unemployment rate was 5.5 percent, compared to 5.7 percent the month before. The state added 7,000 jobs last month, according to figures released Friday by the Department of Economic Opportunity. The state’s jobless rate remains higher than the national rate of 5.3 percent. There are approximately 529,000 unemployed Floridians, out of a labor force of nearly 9.6 million people. June’s rate was a 0.6 percentage point drop from a year ago. Hendry County…
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Monkey farms in Florida under scrutiny from officials
Tucked away in Florida’s Hendry County, amid the scrub brush and saw palmetto grasslands just southwest of Lake Okeechobee, are three monkey breeding farms containing thousands of primates. A fourth is in the works, and the possibility that the small, rural county will become the country’s biggest supplier of research primates has some neighbors and many animal rights activists howling. “Who would want this? This is a black eye in our community. What community wants to be known as a…
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