March 28, 2024

Friday's Daily Pulse

What you need to know about Florida today

| 3/31/2023

› Florida is getting a new tourist attraction. Take a look at what’s coming near a mall
The $130 million Mote Science Education Aquarium is under construction on the Gulf Coast of Florida. After breaking ground in fall 2020, Mote is starting to go vertical with the long-awaited complex. The 110,000-square-foot, multi-story building rising on 12 acres near the Mall at UTC has a futuristic design that features one million gallons of water for exhibits. Mote SEA is projected to attract more than 700,000 visitors a year.

› Chalk Festival is moving from Venice back to Sarasota
The International Sarasota Chalk Festival will leave Venice and return to Sarasota, where organizer Denise Kowal hopes to stage a full-scale event in 2024. Kowal moved the Chalk Festival offices to Venice in 2014, in part to take advantage of the spacious Venice Airport Festival Grounds and 14,000 square feet of warehouse space on nearby Base Avenue. But once her landlord opted to lease the building to the owners of Venice Mercato, Kowal knew a move was imminent because some of the larger pieces, including two elephant sculptures, are hard to move from an off-site warehouse to the festival grounds on the island of Venice.

› UF Health will get $10M from Jacksonville for new trauma center. How will the city pay?
A new trauma center and emergency room at UF Health Jacksonville's main campus will get $10 million from the city on top of $80 million from the state, an amount that hospital leaders say will be needed over the next three to four years for modernizing the region's life-saving center for emergency care. Jacksonville City Council voted Tuesday for the city's portion of the cost. A future City Council will have to decide how to pay for the commitment.

› Miami-Dade’s apartment rental market still among most competitive in U.S. Here’s why
People shouldn’t expect apartment rental prices to drop anytime soon in Miami-Dade County, because a new survey shows the county remains one of the most competitive areas in the United States to land an apartment. The desire to live in the Miami metropolitan area made it the second-hottest residential-rental market in the country to start 2023, after North Jersey, N.J., and a notch ahead of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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