Many of you will not be opening this until Tuesday. Of all the "modern holidays" to take time off for, Veterans Day has to be one of the best. This holiday isn't based on race, creed or religion. It isn't based on gender or age. It is based on men and women having so much pride in our country, they are willing to lay their lives on the line so we can enjoy the freedoms we do. Whether you are working on Monday or taking the day off, please take a few moments, and remember those who have fought for us, who have defended us, and who have made it possible to choose how we live our lives.
Our websites are currently being updated. Within the next week or so, you will see new designs at the Building Edge Magazine site, the Commercial Building Edge Magazine site and the Advantage Web Design site. All three sites are being redesigned so that they flow smoothly like HOME: Living in the Heart of Florida. In addition, we should have a new launch of our parent site, Advantage Publishing, Inc. It has become too hard to remember all the sites for everyone, so we encourage you to bookmark the API website, where you will have easy access to all four divisions.
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www.BuildingEdgeMagazine.com
Our November issue, which features Demetri Homes of Ocala is online, and will be arriving this week in your mail. The National Feature will be on Green Building: engineered wood/stone, heating/cooling alternatives, sustainable building materials, increasing IAQ (indoor air quality), plastic piping.
December, featuring GC Construction of Gainesville is now in production. The National Feature will be on Construction Technology.
We kick start the new year with Allen Stine and All America Homes. Our National Feature will be on Home Technology. February we return to Lake City and feature Sparks Construction. The National Feature will be on Surfaces & Finishes: Countertops, floorcoverings, walls & ceilings
Our Fall 2007 Commercial issue should be arriving in the next few days. The cover story is a feature on Ocala's Ausley Construction , one of the premiere commercial builders in North Central Florida.
We are currently working on the Winter issue, featuring Trunnell Construction on the cover. You may remember a few months back we did a residential issue featuring Greg Trunnell, along with Mitch Glaeser and Myles Kinsell, promoting The Palms. This issue is open for sales now, and will close November 29th.
HOME™: Living in the Heart of Florida: The feedback on our newest magazine, Home™: Living in the Heart of Florida has been phenomenal. Distribution is now at about 300 locations, and requests for subscriptions have come in from 14 states. It is nice to see that The Heart of Florida is as popular as ever, and I am humbled that we have been chosen by so many, so quickly to be the vehicle to deliver the news on the area. We have solicited feedback from many about this publication, and have started implementing the ideas to improve even further for the second issue, due to arrive the beginning of January. To be featured, advertise or just interested in receiving the magazine, please email us at info@advantagepublishinginc.com or call us at 352-372-5854, x203.
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WEB/GIS Services for Building Activities
Alachua County recently unveiled a set of web-based applications that has transformed the operations of the building permits and the building inspections processes. In real time, they integrate the field activities of inspectors, office activities of staff, and the Automatic Telephone Request system, into a single geospatial web framework. For the first time geographic intelligence has been added to building activities in Alachua County and real time access to the entire construction process has been made possible for anyone with an internet connection.
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Commercial Real Estate on U.S. 441 is Hot
Commercial real estate in the area of U.S. 441 in northern Gainesville has received a lot more interest since The Home Depot opened. Todd Rainsberger of Coldwell Banker/M.M. Parrish Realty is broker for three commercial properties in the area and said he has had more inquiries since the home improvement store opened. "It wasn't enough just that it was coming. It had to open," he said. Plans for a new Wal-Mart Supercenter in the area has increased that interest.
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Lake, Pioneer of UF landscape, Dies at 81
Noel Lake, who was instrumental in designing the landscape of the University of Florida, died of natural causes early Sunday morning, according to his family. Lake, 81, retired from UF in 1988 after serving as superintendent of grounds and a landscape architect at the university for 33 years. Don Goodman, director of Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, called Lake a pioneer in landscape architecture who literally changed the face of the university and the city of Gainesville.
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County Considers Locations, Designs for New Elementary Schools
Alachua County could get two new elementary schools as soon as August 2009, and the School Board is starting to investigate where those schools will be and what they will look like. "Opening in the 2009 school year is probably optimistic, but it's doable," School Board member Wes Eubank said. Not surprising is that the schools will probably both be on the west side of Alachua County with a new facility in High Springs taking the top priority.
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Belleview, County Officials Discuss Sports Complex, Library
It could be nearly a century before leaders from the county and Belleview talk again about the lease at the Belleview Sports Complex. An extension was one of the items before the group Monday during a meeting in which the county gave the go-ahead to extend the city's lease of the Juddy A. Perry Park property, known as the Belleview Sports Complex, from 30 years to 99 years.
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Ocala Wants to Prove It Can Be the Best in the World
How does Ocala compare with similar cities around the world, and what can it learn from them? The Ocala Pride in Bloom committee knows a way to find out: Enter the 2008 International Communities in Bloom competition. Tonight, committee members will ask City Council for permission. Ocala recently won first place among American cities of its size and a Five Bloom Award for placing best overall within its category. The win makes Ocala eligible to compete in the international challenge.
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County Has Eye on Coastal Plant
While populous counties in the Orlando area have been eyeing the Ocklawaha River for their future drinking water needs, Marion County commissioners said the county's future water needs might have to be met in part by desalination plants on the coast. On Tuesday, the commissioners unanimously voted to send a letter to the St. Johns River Water Management District saying Marion plans to participate in the preliminary design of a desalination plant planned in Flagler County along the Atlantic Coast.
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Public Gets First Glimpse at Plan to Clean Up Area Waters
An effort to clean the area's most polluted water bodies will include investigating "fecal hot spots" in Gainesville creeks and restoring wetlands on Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. Officials held a public meeting Wednesday night to unveil a plan requiring pollutant levels to be significantly reduced in eight water bodies. The plan includes more than 100 projects intended to improve water quality.
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Florida Growth: Slow and Steady
A University of Florida study indicating that Florida's population growth has slowed but remains relatively strong is mirrored in Alachua County, which continues to draw new residents due in part to the stability provided by UF, hospitals and government employment. Stan Smith, director of UF's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, said he expects Florida to add about 300,000 residents a year during the next two to three years unless there is a recession.
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MCBIA Calendar of Events
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BANCF Calendar of Events
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Property Tax Vote is Threshold's Big Test
Few people appreciate the irony behind Florida's Jan. 29 property tax amendment like Sen. Jim King of Jacksonville, who three years ago pushed to raise the approval threshold for constitutional amendments to a level that may now be too high for the very amendment King and fellow lawmakers want to pass.
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Hometown Democracy Plan Spooks Landowners
Higher juice prices and fair weather have made this a good time to be a citrus grower like Joe Davis. So why, amid a historic housing slump, is Davis planning to develop his plump groves to make way for homes, which are withering on the vine? "I don't want voters determining how I can use my land," said Davis of Highlands County. "So I've speeded up my plans."
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Sales Tax, Super Majority Issues Pass
Two critical issues got the go ahead last Tuesday from Sarasota County voters. The so-called penny sales tax was extended until 2024 and the super majority amendment, requiring at least a 4-1 majority vote of the County Commission on development and land use decisions, also got the thumbs up. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, county residents passed the penny tax, 48,325 votes to 24,609. That's 66.26 percent in favor to 33.74 percent opposed.
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Property Tax Ballot Issue Divides Florida Housing Industry Groups
Real estate and builder trade groups in South Florida and across the state are divided on the new property tax plan approved by legislators last week. The Realtor Association of Greater Fort Lauderdale and the Florida Home Builders Association will encourage voters to support the constitutional amendment on the Jan. 29 ballot.
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Gov. Crist Announces Major Initiatives to Strengthen Alternative Energy
Gov. Charlie Crist announced two major initiatives Monday to strengthen alternative energy in Florida: A $182 million deal for a garbage-to-electricity plant in Tallahassee and a pledge to encourage Congress to end an import tax on Brazilian ethanol. The Tallahassee project offers a model already being considered for other cities from Orlando to Turkey's Istanbul and could be adopted in South Florida.
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Florida Pulls Out of Deal on Water
Florida officials Friday backed away from a temporary truce hammered out by the Bush administration to end a three-state water war, fearing the deal would kill Apalachicola Bay's oyster industry. In a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Florida's environmental chief said the plan to reduce water flowing from drought-plagued Georgia into Alabama and Florida could "displace the entire economy of the Bay region."
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Plan Aids Homeowners, Slashes Business Perks
Former state Senate President John McKay has proposed a tax plan that would reduce homeowners' property taxes up to 45 percent at the expense of business interests that have been exempted from sales tax for decades. McKay, a member of the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, took steps Friday to address a ''patently unfair'' tax system by filing a proposed constitutional amendment with the commission that would direct the Legislature to review all items and services that are not being taxed in order to repeal $15 billion worth of sales-tax exemptions on services and items like lawn care service, professional sports skyboxes and cattle growth enhancers.
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Home Construction to Perk Up Region
Is that light at the end of the tunnel? The region's economy, stumbling through its weakest calendar year since 1991, is expected in November to post its best monthly growth rate since May 2006, even though job creation and household formation remain relatively slow. The latest CFB Economic Index, a basket of leading indicators using local data, predicts an annualized growth rate of 3.66 percent this month for the six-county Orlando area.
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DBPR Makes License Renewal Easier
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) recently unveiled a new license renewal program. The new license renewal program should be faster and easier to use. For most licenses, renewal simply involves submitting your continuing education information and your fee, and in most cases, your continuing education provider will submit the information for you. It will save time, trees and stamps with this online renewal program.
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Banks Said to Agree on Credit Backup Fund
The country's three biggest banks have reached agreement on the structure of a backup fund of at least $75 billion to help stabilize credit markets, a person involved in the discussions said yesterday, ending nearly two months of complicated negotiations against a worsening economic backdrop. Officials from Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase reached agreement late Friday, settling on a more simplified structure than had been proposed, said this person, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to talk for the group.
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Survey Says that Builders Want Voluntary Green Building Certification Program
The vast majority of residential builders and developers-90 percent-are interested in participating in a voluntary green building certification program, according to the results of a National Association of Home Builders survey. NAHB will launch its National Green Building Program on Feb. 14 at the 2008 International Builders' Show. It will link dozens of successful state and local voluntary green building programs with a national online scoring tool for builders and verifiers. It will also provide a registry of green homes and green builders.
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Home Price Data Shows Housing Solid Long-Term Investment
A closer examination of statistics shows that the largest metro markets appreciated in value by more than 50 percent over the past five years, despite data that showed a 4.4 percent year-over-year decline. While housing is a cyclical business, experience shows that over time, home values will stabilize and then move upward with the next recovery. Housing typically increases in value slightly above the overall inflation rates.
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Big Tax Reforms Determines Who Would Pay and Would Gets to Save
If a tax-system overhaul proposed last week were to pass into law, there would be a substantial redistribution of the tax burden. Those with incomes over $500,000 would bear the brunt of that shift, with tax bills that could grow by between six percent and 10 percent in 2008, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center of a proposal introduced last week by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel.
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U.S. Mayors Find It's Not Easy to Be Green
America's mayors, responding to a growing sense of urgency over climate change, are rapidly stepping up programs to weatherize buildings, capture methane gas from landfills, switch municipal fleets to hybrids, promote mass transit and buy cleaner electricity. To help fund the mayors' ambitious plans, Congress has included block grants in energy legislation now under consideration to jump-start "green jobs" initiatives, training low-income workers to retrofit buildings and install climate-friendly energy systems.
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Greenspan Wants to Cut Home Inventories
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that cutting excess home inventories in the United States is key to stabilize the financial system at home and the rest of the world. The former chairman urged central banks to avoid suppressing asset bubbles, which is "exceptionally difficult" to do. Greenspan also said the global economy can handle higher commodity prices through strong monetary policies by central banks and that he expected major increases in commodity demand from rapidly developing nations.
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Autodesk and the U.S. Green Building Council Collaborate to Increase Adoption of Sustainable Design
At the 2007 Greenbuild Expo, Autodesk, Inc. and the U.S. Green Building Council presented an update on their ongoing collaboration to expand the use of technology to facilitate adoption of sustainable design and green building. Autodesk also showcased a technology concept for a new sustainability analysis dashboard that could be used in combination with the Revit platform for building information modeling to provide architects, engineers and designers with real-time graphical feedback about the impact of their decisions on the LEED rating of a project.
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Ratings Proliferate for Green Builders
In the next several months, three nationwide certifications for environmentally friendly homes will be available to builders. But buyers may be confused by the array of standards. The U.S. Green Building Council, the National Association of Homebuilders and the federal government's Energy Star program are all releasing standards.
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Builders Blame Press for Poor Home Sales
Luxury home builder Toll Brothers says that the housing market in most parts of the country is horrible, and he fears it will not get better until the newspapers stop saying how bad it is. A survey of Toll customers who canceled contracts showed that only 11 percent reported trouble getting mortgages. "Translation, they've read one too many Times articles, and decided now is not the time to buy a home," he said.
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Housing Building Taps the Global Economy
The message sent to Sacramento home builders who gathered for 2007 housing forecase was that the global economy is found in the home. Builders need to get over the idea of a domestic home building industry that relies on conditions inside the United States to thrive. The world's money is rushing in, which transforms the industry that has so transformed the capital region in recent years. As struggling area builders face prospects of land sell-offs, rich foreign investors will be there to buy.
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Tioga Center Breaks Ground
The Tioga Town Center officially broke ground Tuesday on a 90,000-square-foot expansion with retail space and apartments that will more than double the development's existing space. The next two buildings will be behind the current retail and office space that opened about a year ago. They will include 30,000 square feet of retail on the ground floors and 40 apartments on the second and third floors.
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Lake City Action Plan Revisited
A pedestrian-friendly Marion Street, canoe and boat rentals on Lake DeSoto and a downtown supermarket were just some of the ideas tossed around during the first meeting of the Lake City Downtown Development Subcommittee.The subcommittee was formed in order to review and revise the Lake City Downtown Action Plan that was first drawn up in 1976.
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Company Opens New Factory in Ocala
American Spaceframe Fabricators International thinks big. Really big. The company's building a tensioned-fabric structure big enough to house 55,000 people under one fabric roof for a church in Puerto Rico. And they're doing it at a new factory in Ocala. ASFI celebrated the grand opening of its Ocala facility Friday, in the former Haverty's Furniture distribution center on Southwest 54th Court. The company relocated here from Crystal River after outgrowing its Citrus County facilities, said president and CEO Craig Anderson.
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Green Building Scores $50M
America's "green" trend is spreading beyond tofu-eating neo-hippies out to save the world in their hybrid cars. It's now become firmly planted in the construction industry. New building owners increasingly ask architects to design buildings that use water, electricity and materials more efficiently and do less damage to the environment. In the United States alone, the market for green construction is expected to hit $20 billion from $10 billion in 2005, according to McGraw-Hill Construction.
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Small Businesses Grow Strong in the midst of Economic Slowdown
Even as oil prices surge, the housing market contracts, Wall Street reels and multibillion-dollar deals falter, small businesses are flourishing and, in fact, are helping to buoy the economy, experts say. A monthly report showed an increase in private sector employment in October of 106,000. That included a surge of 63,000 at businesses with fewer than 50 employees, a gain of 50,000 at businesses with 50-499 employees, and a loss of 7,000 at companies with more than 500 employees.
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U.S. Economy Adds 166,000 New Jobs in October
The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics Nov. 2 reported that nonfarm payroll employees grew by 166,000 in October, increasing from the seasonally adjusted September rates of 138.25 million to 138.42 million. They also reported that construction industry employment dropped by 5,000 jobs in October.
Click Here>> AGC of Greater Florida Calendar of Events
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Residential November 2007
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HOME: Living in the Heart of Florida
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