By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Campy pest control ads, late-night real estate infomercials, countless public appearances and a record-setting lack of stature turned Palm Beach County’s own Rice brothers into a singular brand name.

John and Greg, it seemed, were everywhere, and always together.

Emceeing Lake Worth’s Christmas parade, together. Mingling with local dignitaries at the grand opening of the county’s convention center, together. Zipping around on a pair of Segway scooters as grand marshals of a golf cart parade down Clematis Street. As ever, together.

All of which - their celebrity, their ubiquity, their inseparability both personally and in the public eye - made the sudden death of John Rice on Saturday night particularly shocking.

“We’re not seen as John Rice and Greg Rice, we’re seen as John-and-Greg Rice,” Greg said on Sunday. Of the shock of being without his brother, business partner and best friend of more than 50 years, Greg said, simply: “It’s almost like planning your own funeral.”

John Rice slipped on a step and broke his leg Friday afternoon, and died of unknown causes while in surgery to repair it Saturday night. He was 53, just a few weeks shy of his 54th birthday.

John was the older brother, arriving five minutes ahead of Greg at St. Mary’s Medical Center in 1951. Hours after they were born, the brothers’ birth parents “got up and left in the middle of the night,” Greg said.

“For whatever reason, they couldn’t handle the fact they had these two little guys come into their lives,” Greg said. “Was it because we were diagnosed dwarfs, because we were twins?”

After nine months in the care of nuns, the boys were taken in by foster parents Frank and Mildred Windsor. The elementary school janitor and his wife always treated the Rice brothers like regular boys, Greg said, whether they were learning to ride bicycles, driving go-carts or playing Tarzan on a rope swing.

“If there’s any one reason why John and I became the two guys we are today, I give them full credit,” Greg said. “They never treated us like we were three feet tall. They weren’t reckless, but anything we wanted to try, we were given the opportunity to try.”

Mildred Windsor died when John and Greg were in eighth grade, and Frank Windsor died two years after that. The brothers moved in with the Windsors’ oldest daughter and her family until they graduated from the old Palm Beach High School in 1969.

John and Greg got jobs as door-to-door salesmen during their senior year, peddling home cleaning and personal care products.

“We couldn’t get jobs at the grocery store or pumping gas like all of our tall friends,” Greg said. “The only job we could get was straight commission door-to-door sales.”

The brothers, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest twins on the planet, had always been outgoing. They eventually were hired to travel the country and world to train other salesmen, Greg said.

Then, in what Greg said was his brother’s typically daring manner, John decided they should shift gears completely.

“One day John was reading the newspaper and there was an ad in there for a real estate licensing school,” Greg said. “And John looks over at me and says, ‘Hey, Greg, let’s go into the real estate business.’ ”

John was the outgoing brother, the risk-taker, Greg said. But he also never stopped living the lessons of perseverance he preached as a motivational speaker.

After breaking his neck in a car accident in 1990, John endured two 12-hour surgeries, 11 months in a body cast and skull halo and 20 months of therapy without a single complaint, Greg said.

That is the John Rice his brother wants you to remember. The indomitable optimist who not only saw every glass as half-full, but convinced everyone around him to see it too. The warm extrovert, the life of the party, the guy to whom no one ever seemed a stranger.

John Rice was just 34 inches tall, his brother said, but there is no measuring the hole his death leaves in the hearts of those who knew him.

Copyright 2005 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
November 7, 2005 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 677 words

Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and with memories of the 2004 hurricane season still fresh, we told readers what would happen if “the big one” struck South Florida. I used SLOSH model data, property records and population statistics to describe the impact that a Category 5 hurricane would have on our area.

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Main story: If a Katrina hit here
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By ROBERT P. KING, TONY DORIS and WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Katrina has eyes wide open in South Florida: A killer storm really could happen here, wiping out life as we know it for months, possibly years, maybe forever.

The similarities are ominous. Like New Orleans, our low-lying region relies on elaborate networks of levees, pump stations and canals to stay dry. And like the doomsday scenarios written years ago for New Orleans, emergency planners here long have predicted that the drainage systems would have trouble coping with the deluge of a Category 3 hurricane with 111- to 130-mph sustained winds, let alone the high Category 4, 145-mph force of Katrina when it came ashore.

During the past 50 years, South Florida was developed with the notion that the odds of a high-octane hurricane are remote. Nonetheless, it can’t be ruled out; the horrific images of Katrina make that clear, just like Hurricane Andrew not all that long ago. A breach of Lake Okeechobee’s levee alone could flood its surrounding communities with up to 5 feet of water within 24 hours, imperiling 40,000.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the dikes, calls it an “unacceptable” risk, but a fix would cost more than $230 million. And there is no tested evacuation plan to get the area’s at least 2,500 car-less households out of harm’s way. Perhaps, officials say, the buses of farmers, the public schools or Palm Tran could be pressed into service.

Toward the coast, flooding wouldn’t leave survivors clinging to roofs, but the floodwaters would be deep enough to destroy crops and seep into low-lying homes. The water management district’s giant pumps and floodgates could take days to drain the region - with some cities and subdivisions having to wait to drain their share of the deluge.

Along the coast, the ocean’s wind-pushed surge wouldn’t be as high as in New Orleans, thanks to the depth of the Atlantic and a coastal ridge. But it would be enough to inundate Palm Beach and the barrier islands, and powerful enough to rip a new inlet at narrow Sloan’s Curve, among other places.

Homes bordering the Intracoastal Waterway would be swamped, with seawater surging up canals and rushing into waterfront homes from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce. Along the Treasure Coast last year, Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne provided ample evidence of the potential destruction.

When it comes to wind damage, the images of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are deceiving. Because of all the flooding, it is difficult to picture the devastation from 150-mph winds and the much higher gusts and tornadoes.

Frances was just a Category 2 hurricane when it came ashore last year with 104-mph winds. But it and Jeanne, a 121-mph Category 3, were strong enough to infiltrate buildings’ peripheral defenses - for the most part, peeling away shingles, shattering unprotected glass and popping garage doors while toppling trees, traffic lights and power lines. Lack of electricity - all of Palm Beach County was knocked out after Frances, in parts for as long as a month - was the most widespread recovery challenge.

The winds of much more powerful Category 4 and 5 storms would challenge the very structure of one-story homes and high-rises alike. Tens of thousands of homes could be obliterated. Last year’s experience taught us that even homes built to the improved standards of the latest Florida building code would have interiors ruined by water intrusion.

At least newer homes are likely to remain standing. The fact is, more than nine out of 10 South Florida homes were built before the post-Andrew code took effect.

Consider a Category 4’s damage description in the Saffir-Simpson scale, which categorizes hurricanes from 1 to 5 based on their wind speeds:

Storm surge generally 13-18 feet above normal. . . . Complete roof structure failures on small residences. . . . Complete destruction of mobile homes. . . . Low-lying escape routes may be cut by rising water 3-5 hours before arrival of the center of the hurricane. . . . Terrain lower than 10 feet above sea level may be flooded requiring massive evacuation of residential areas as far inland as 6 miles.

The scenario for a Category 5 kicks it up a notch:

Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings. . . . Some complete building failures. . . . Severe and extensive window and door damage. Major damage to lower floors of all structures located less than 15 feet above sea level and within 500 yards of the shoreline.

Katrina, a raging Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, diminished slightly to a Cat 4 before coming ashore, the same rating given to Charley as it hit Florida’s Gulf Coast last year. Only three Category 5 hurricanes have made landfall in the United States since record keeping began: The Labor Day Hurricane that struck the Florida Keys in 1935; Hurricane Camille along the Mississippi coast in 1969; and Andrew along southern Miami-Dade County in 1992.

KATRINA SNAPS ATTENTION BACK TO RISKS

Memories fade when it comes to hurricanes, especially when they strike far from home. Two 1947 hurricanes left South Florida inundated for months, about as far east as present-day Interstate 95.

Now the horrific scenes of Katrina - the black body bags, the putrid Superdome, the anarchy and chaos - have local government leaders reassessing the prospect of a Big One. Last week the Martin County Commission asked its planners for a doomsday scenario. They advised that a Category 5 hurricane would destroy virtually all of the county’s 13,000 mobile homes, rip the roofs off almost every building, cause major road damage and submerge most of Hutchinson Island.

Wednesday, South Bay Mayor Clarence Anthony appeared before South Florida Water Management District leaders to convey his constituents’ fears.

“They’ve started asking, ‘Can this happen to us?’ ” Anthony said. “I saw so many faces that looked like people in Glades, racially and economically.”

In many ways, Florida is better prepared after six hurricanes in the past 13 months. Some comfort can be taken from the fact that no two storms are alike, that a catastrophic hurricane hitting Florida wouldn’t necessarily be an exact repeat of Katrina.

Unlike New Orleans, South Florida’s cities don’t lie in a bowl below sea level. Nobody expects to see homes submerged under 20 feet of water.

State and local emergency managers are amassing food and water stockpiles, having learned not to rely on quick help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Based on experience, they are more quick to order mass evacuations than the mayor of New Orleans, who hesitated even after an urgent personal call from National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warning him there would be no reprieve.

If it happened today, the 1926 hurricane that flooded Miami, tore up Fort Lauderdale and drowned 300 people in Moore Haven west of Lake Okeechobee would have caused more than $101 billion worth of damage, federal researchers have estimated. That would have dwarfed the economic loss from any other hurricane in U.S. history - except maybe Katrina.

People can prepare for the worst but are powerless to prevent it.

“All the emergency managers know that a Category 5 hurricane would be catastrophic,” said Vince Bonvento, the assistant Palm Beach County administrator who oversees disaster planning.

“We’ve got good plans. God forbid we ever have to use them.”

SCENARIOS REFLECT EXTENT OF THREAT

The scenarios in government reports underscore his trepidation:

A Category 5 hurricane would send a wall of tide and waves across the 1- to-3-mile-wide strip of the coast, jeopardizing much of the region’s wealth.

Homes and businesses in the surge zone amount to an estimated $49.6 billion, nearly 30 percent of property values in Palm Beach County alone. More than 107,000 of the county’s 1.2 million residents live there.

In Martin and St. Lucie counties, 59,000 people and more than $21 billion in property are vulnerable to a Category 5 surge.

Widespread rain on the order of 20 inches - as seen six years ago during Hurricane Irene - would overwhelm the region’s post-World War II drainage system for at least a day or two. Relief would be hampered by Category 5 winds, which could damage floodgates and likely would block canals with downed trees and other debris.

It’s happened on a smaller scale in recent years. During Irene in October 1999, two levees leaked in western Palm Beach County, and a farming reservoir failed north of the St. Lucie River. When the October 1995 no-name storm flooded nearly 1,200 homes in north Palm Beach County, the deluge was worsened because a drainage district had allowed its canals and main floodgate to become choked with weeds and trash.

Should a huge, wet, hurricane hit now, a pool of water could linger across much of the region west of Interstate 95, hindering efforts to restore power.

“All low-lying areas would be flooded,” said Olivia McLean, who heads emergency operations for the South Florida Water Management District. “Even some areas that normally don’t flood could flood.”

In a recent simulation of a wet Category 3 hurricane, water managers declared their system overwhelmed by the rain and flooding. That would prevent cities, local drainage districts and homeowner associations from releasing their storm runoff as well.

“We would be telling the county that we can’t move any water,” McLean said.

In previous deluges, the district has had to struggle to prevent flooding in low-lying Lake Clarke Shores, which rests along a bend in the West Palm Beach Canal, as well as in The Acreage and in the St. Lucie Settlement in Martin County.

The consolation, McLean said, is that such an inland deluge would be “the kind of flooding that you can protect yourself from,” not a deadly surge.

District pumps have diesel engines, enabling them to move water even during power outages, and safe rooms where crews would ride out even the fiercest storm.

The floodwater could mix with raw sewage, a problem that bedeviled last year’s recovery from Hurricane Frances. Untreated waste bubbled from pipelines and spewed from manholes after power outages left pumps without power. To avert a repeat, some utilities now stock up on generators and have made arrangements to get fuel from out of state.

A breach in leak-prone Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee - an event the corps calls “likely” if the lake’s level gets high enough - would endanger 40,000 of the region’s poorest and most vulnerable residents, leaving communities submerged under 1 to 5 feet of water for several weeks. As in Louisiana, emergency managers aren’t sure how quickly the residents could evacuate.

The $230 million needed to shore up the dike would take decades to arrive at the rate the money has been dribbling from Congress.

In the event of a break, a corps report warns, “flooding would be severe. . . . The potential for human suffering and loss of life is significant.” The report also said residents would receive only “limited” warning that a breach was coming.

Some residents aren’t willing to wait. In Pahokee, Delia Gonzalez is considering selling the house where she lives with her sister Elvia in a tree-shaded, one-story home at the foot of the dike.

The televised scenes of New Orleans gave them a shiver. “It’s scary that one of these days we might have the same problem,” Elvia Gonzalez said.

Others don’t worry. Jim Sheehan, managing partner at Everglades Adventures RV & Sailing Resort - perched in Pahokee on the dike’s inside rim - plans not just to rebuild the marina that Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne wiped out last year. He’s moving ahead with plans for a new resort complex, complete with restaurant, pool and pavilion.

“I have never for one moment thought to myself, ‘I don’t think this thing will work,’ ” he said, speaking from an office cabin high up on the dike’s grassy slope. “It will. It does. It’s an absolute.”

EROSION IMPERILS DIKE AROUND LAKE O

Leaders of the corps and the Water Management District point out that the dike has withstood decades of hurricanes since the engineers began building it in the 1930s. The dike’s purpose is to prevent a repeat of the 1928 hurricane that sent the lake spilling south over a low muck wall, drowning more than 3,000 people around Belle Glade.

But the agencies also acknowledge that the dike is in danger - not from any sudden hurricane sloshing but from the steady erosion caused by years of high water. When the lake rises high enough, the dike leaks.

Corps leaders said a break would be more likely after a storm than during one.

At high enough water levels, the erosion would carve out a cavity that would collapse part of the dike, allowing water to escape uncontrollably. The engineers say the risk would become serious if the lake were to rise about 5 feet above its current level.

Depending on where a break happened, much of Belle Glade, South Bay, Pahokee and other lakeside cities would flood within a day, with the deluge eventually spreading to surrounding farmland, according to a county evacuation plan by experts at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions.

“Once flooding has begun, options will be limited,” the plan advises.

Of the 10,000 Palm Beach County households near the lake, 24 percent don’t own cars. That’s more than triple the rate for the rest of the county.

The county’s evacuation plan offers few details on how it would help those residents escape, but county Public Safety Director Paul Milelli said the effort likely would include Palm Tran, school buses and vehicles that farming companies use to transport employees.

“We’re pretty confident we can get them out of harm’s way,” he said.

But the county has never practiced such an evacuation with real vehicles, Milelli said. He said he doesn’t know how many buses would be available, how many residents could be evacuated or how quickly it would happen.

The county also hasn’t installed a $1.25 million network of sirens to warn Glades residents about an impending dike breach, as the FAU plan had recommended.

Milelli said the county’s plans don’t anticipate a sudden onslaught. “What we have been led to believe and do believe is that there wouldn’t be a massive opening of the dike.”

But that’s not the way to plan for the worst case, said Jim Murley, director of the FAU center and a former secretary of the state Department of Community Affairs. “You have to plan for every scenario, not pick a scenario and hope that’s the one that happens,” he said.

Coastal evacuation also would be challenging because of the sheer size of the population. One advantage is that the most vulnerable barrier islands house many of the region’s wealthiest residents, who would be best able to get themselves out of harm’s way. Still, past hurricanes have shown that evacuating the region would be a monster headache, especially in a state with no real high ground.

As many as 602,000 people could clog the roads in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties while fleeing a major storm, according to one 2003 study. If given only 36 hours’ warning, 92,000 people could be trapped.

Emergency managers have tried to lessen such logjams by urging people not to flee long distances if it’s not absolutely necessary. A shelter or a friend’s house - outside an evacuation zone - would be a safer haven than a car stuck on Interstate 95.

Local governments could help by requiring all new subdivisions to provide a hurricane-proof shelter for their residents, the water district’s McLean said. That way, many people could evacuate to their own neighborhoods.

“You wouldn’t buy a house in Kansas that didn’t have a storm cellar,” she said. “People would think you were an idiot.”

Copyright 2005 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
September 18, 2005 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 3502 words

This story about an Ohio investor who bought dozens of homes in a single neighborhood used to be accompanied by an interactive map, which I also made. I took pictures of every house owned by the investor and linked them to a parcel map of the entire neighborhood. The map also featured more than a decade of sales data. Sadly, the map is not online anymore.

STORY AND DOWNLOAD LINKS
Main story: Is investor’s ‘Monopoly’ fair game for neighbors?
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (1.2 MB, 2 pages)

By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

The letter that landed in Cabana Colony mailboxes last month was direct.

“I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOME!”

Sent by Ohio real estate investor Rick Winnestaffer, the letter promised “full price for your home,” without the need for real estate commissions, last-minute cosmetic repairs or any of the other hassles usually associated with selling a house.

It’s a sales pitch that has proved effective for Winnestaffer, 42, who in just over 10 years has amassed a real estate portfolio of nearly 300 single-family homes in and around Columbus, Ohio - home of Ohio State University.

“Our business model is to buy it, rent it out to cover its costs, then over time it goes up in value,” Winnestaffer said. “Then I can either resell it, or re-mortgage it to have the benefit of pulling some equity out of it in cash.”

But some longtime Cabana Colony residents are worried about what Winnestaffer’s entrepreneurial ambitions will do to their northern Palm Beach County neighborhood, where he has bought or is in the process of buying 38 houses and is aiming for a total of 55. They say the working-class community of nearly 800 homes has made great strides toward rehabilitating a reputation that once prompted real estate agents to steer buyers elsewhere.

“A lot of us are really worried about the number of rental units in the community,” said Dennis Conway, who has lived in the neighborhood for 26 years and is vice president of the Cabana Colony Residents League. “When you have a lot of trashy-looking houses, it brings the neighborhood down. And when you have a lot of renters, you have a lot of trashy-looking houses.”

One point that Winnestaffer and his skeptics in the neighborhood agree on is that Cabana Colony is well-positioned for a dramatic price boom. Bordered to the north by the million-dollar homes of Frenchman’s Reserve and to the south by The Gardens mall and the still-under-construction Downtown at the Gardens project, the neighborhood is full of, as Conway put it, “very moderate homes sitting on very lucrative locations.”

Cabana Colony’s median home sale price in 2004 was $165,000, a 76.5 percent increase since 2000. And although Winnestaffer paid $140,000 for a 1,346-square-foot house on Everglades Road in February 2004, a 1,418-square-foot home down the street cost him $221,000 in January of this year.

“Eventually, they’re going to be $500,000,” Winnestaffer said. “Is that going to be in two years or 10 years? I would love it to be in two, but I’m positioned for the long haul.”

Winnestaffer’s business career started when he was 9 and would mow neighborhood lawns for a few dollars a pop. That hobby became WinnScapes, a landscape design and maintenance company in Ohio with 45 employees and $3.5 million in annual revenue.

Winnestaffer began buying investment homes in the early 1990s, and found the real estate game to his liking. A game, in fact, is exactly how Winnestaffer views it.

“I call it adult Monopoly,” he said. “How much more fun could it be than to drive through a neighborhood, see a house and buy it?”

In addition to the homes in Cabana Colony, Winnestaffer owns two side-by-side, high-end houses near Juno Beach with backyard access to the Intracoastal Waterway. He also owns one house in Port St. Lucie, part of a package deal with one of his Cabana Colony sellers.

Winnestaffer, who says he comes to Florida about every three weeks, uses one of the waterfront houses as a second home. Though Winnestaffer is not planning a permanent move to Florida because he has children in school in Ohio, he said his interest in Cabana Colony is not fleeting.

“When it comes to maintaining the houses, having a real care for the neighborhood and how safe and successful it is, I’m very committed,” Winnestaffer said. “Having millions of dollars worth of real estate in Cabana Colony, I don’t think I can be any more committed.”

Conway does not doubt Winnestaffer’s interest in protecting his investment and seeing property values rise, but he wonders about Winnestaffer’s ability to follow through on his promises as long as he is an absentee landlord.

“He may care, but he doesn’t live here,” Conway said. “The landlord has certain control over things, but beyond that it’s a matter of code enforcement. There’s a point where people can have a junky-looking house and they’re not breaking the law and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

County Commissioner Karen Marcus, whose district includes the unincorporated neighborhood, said there are no legal means by which the county can regulate real estate investors such as Winnestaffer.

“If his intent is to just buy them and maintain them, I don’t know that anyone can object to that,” she said.

Perhaps not legally or on principle, but Mary Sutherland certainly objects to the actual practice of Winnestaffer’s real estate business.

The house on Acapulco Avenue where she has lived for 29 years faces one of Winnestaffer’s rentals, and she said the view is not pretty. On a recent afternoon, dozens of pieces of lawn furniture and faded plastic children’s play sets crowded its yard.

“It looks terrible,” Sutherland said. “No place is perfect, but it just looks terrible.”

Copyright 2005 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
June 26, 2005 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1393 words

It has been ridiculed from its inception, and the improbable industry it was born to nurture never caught on, yet Florida’s sales-tax exemption for ostrich feed endures.

Created in 1992 - when it was not uncommon to sincerely believe that the meat of large, flightless birds would find a place on America’s dinner plate - the tax break was the same as that enjoyed by cattle or chicken farmers.

Then-Gov. Lawton Chiles called ostrich ranching “an emerging new industry.”

The intervening years have not been kind to the ostrich industry. But the tax exemption has survived not just ceaseless mocking by editorial writers and politicians, but repeated legislative attempts to repeal it.

Ostrich exemption opponents are hopeful that this is finally their year. State Sen. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, as he did the past two years, has filed a bill that would eliminate Florida’s statutorily enshrined right to tax-free ostrich nourishment.

“I’m a pretty conservative legislator, and I don’t support new taxes,” Posey said. “But the exemption is moot from an economic-development standpoint.”

The measure cruised to approval in the Senate by a 38-0 vote in 2003 and a 39-1 count in 2004.

So how is it that Florida residents, if so inclined, can still head down to the feed store today and pick up a bag of tax-free ostrich food?

The measure stalled in the House, a casualty of the contentious relationship between leaders of the House and Senate, Posey said.

The ostrich bill is unlikely to generate much controversy because there isn’t really an ostrich lobby to fight back.

“The last I checked, which was about a year ago, there were no ostrich farms in Florida,” said Terence McElroy, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Henry Wilson, a retired University of Florida professor of poultry science, called the debate over the exemption “a tempest in a teapot” considering that the business “really just failed here.”

A 2002 census listed just more than 600 ostriches on 44 farms in Florida, but calls to agricultural extension agents, state wildlife officials and feed stores in Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties failed to yield a single local ostrich rancher.

And Posey has yet to hear from a Florida ostrich owner.

“I heard from somebody in another state,” Posey said. “I think Alabama. They sent me a letter, told me how sorry I was.”

With new House Speaker Allan Bense and Senate President Tom Lee promising better relations between their chambers, Posey’s bill appears to have a good chance in the House.

But the position of Gov. Jeb Bush remains unclear.

“He has yet to weigh in on this tremendously heavy subject,” Posey joked.

Perhaps of more interest to Floridians: What does ostrich meat taste like?

“It tastes like prime rib,” Posey reports.

Wilson says ostrich is a red meat, “a good bit like lean beef.”

“I think it’s a little strong,” he said. “I like it and it’s good, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get it.”

Which of the state’s hundreds of remaining exemptions would be a suitable successor for the title of silliest if Posey’s bill succeeds?

Several seem to have the winning combination of obscurity, monetary insignificance and almost inexplicable narrowness.

A racing dog can be sold without sales tax, for example, but only if its owner also is its breeder.

Then there’s the skybox exemption, another item on Posey’s hit list. It allows high-priced luxury boxes in venues such as college football stadiums to be leased tax-free.

The exemption, of course, does not apply to the cheap seats.

“The talk of any real review of exemptions is nothing more than talk if you can’t get these two sorry ones repealed,” Posey said of the ostrich-feed and skybox tax breaks.

Copyright 2005 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 11, 2005 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 5B
LENGTH: 623 words

Palm Beach County’s elections canvassing panel had reviewed thousands of votes by Thursday evening when Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore shielded her face with a provisional ballot and whispered to an assistant and the other board members.

Was a conspiratorial plot twist about to be unleashed upon the county’s unsuspecting voters? Precisely what nature of electoral machination took place behind that ballot?

Dinner plans, actually. Consensus: Italian subs.

Four years after the international spotlight focused on Palm Beach County’s three-person voting board, public interest in this once little-noticed process apparently has receded to its pre-chad state of none.

But late into Thursday night, three days after this year’s election and with all but a handful of local races comfortably decided, the ballots were still coming.

National and international news crews hoping for a 2000 redux packed it up days ago, and even local media still dutifully watchdogging the proceedings could barely be bothered to look up from their notebook doodles.

But just as the going got boring, the weirdness got going. The strain of reviewing thousands of absentee and provisional ballots had left LePore, County Commission Chairwoman Karen Marcus and, in particular, County Judge Barry Cohen a little punch-drunk.

Presented with a provisional ballot from a voter with the last name of Griswald, Cohen remarked that the name reminded him of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1965 case Griswold vs. Connecticut. The precise details of the case eluded him, however, so Cohen invited “any bored jurists” watching the elections panel on the county’s public-access Channel 20 to call his wife’s cellphone to fill him in because he didn’t remember his own number.

He then read his wife’s phone number on live television.

(The Griswold case, for the record, established certain privacy rights that paved the way for the decision in Roe vs. Wade.)

Prompted by the verbal peculiarities of voters’ names or precinct numbers, Cohen also initiated brief on-air discussions of, among other topics, obscure New York Yankees pitchers of the 1950s and the television show Beverly Hills 90210.

Upon returning from a dinner break, Cohen looked into the camera and announced: “My name is Chuck Burton, and I’m reporting for duty,” a reference to both his judicial predecessor on the 2000 canvassing board and the opening line of John Kerry’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.

After Cohen read out the name Marino from a provisional ballot and commented “as in Dan Marino,” Marcus added: “The best quarterback ever.”

Cohen countered: “The ballot is accepted, but the characterization of Dan Marino as the best quarterback ever is rejected.”

Copyright 2004 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
November 6, 2004 Saturday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 458 words

CLEWISTON - Of all the paths taken by the hundreds of people who sought refuge from Hurricane Frances in a middle-school gym, surely none was as monumental, as inspirational, as essentially implausible as that of Jose Castro.

The native of Brazil is five months into an expected 2 1/2-year boat trip from New York City to Rio de Janeiro, a journey in which Castro’s legs and a pair of bicycle pedals rigged to a propeller are the only engine aboard.

Castro set out on his 14,000-mile route on March 22, powering his custom-made 14-foot pontoon boat, Liberty, down the East Coast an average 25 to 30 miles a day.

As he set out from Stuart earlier this week on his way across the Okeechobee Waterway toward Fort Myers, he started hearing reports of Hurricane Frances on the radio.

Castro, 47, hoped to make it across the lake to Moore Haven by Thursday but got only as far as Clewiston. He tied up his boat at a local marina and found his way to a Red Cross shelter at Clewiston Middle School.

Such a predicament might be cause to panic for many people, but to Castro, who is perhaps best described as an enviro-adventurer, it’s destined to be just another story to be told to the next set of disbelieving strangers.

His current trip along the coasts of 15 countries on two continents has its origin in a previous adventure of even greater proportions.

In 1982, Castro left Spain on a bicycle during the quadrennial soccer World Cup and arrived at the end of his trip in Mexico in 1986, in time for the next tournament.

During his cycling trip, which included 107 days on a child-sized tricycle while crossing Japan, Castro said he was struck by the harm being done to the environment.

“I had seen a lot of aggression around the world toward nature,” Castro said.

His current trip, Castro said, is an effort to raise awareness of the carelessness with which people treat waterways.

Castro has relied on the kindness of strangers he meets along the way. One man, in particular, has done more than anyone to keep Castro going.

Buddy Davenport was having a dinner party at his waterfront home in New Smyrna Beach one night last month when Castro pedaled past, looking for a place to tie up.

Davenport talked to Castro for a bit and ended up inviting him in for dinner.

“He’s just one of the most unique people in the world,” Davenport said. “You could just see what his mission was. You could feel it.”

Davenport put him up for 10 days. He also gave Castro a cellphone and digital camera and promised to pay for the rest of the trip.

“I just got blessed by meeting him,” Davenport said. “I thought my dreams were big until I met this guy.”

Copyright 2004 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
September 5, 2004 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 11A
LENGTH: 447 words

By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Is there any doubt that Americans are nearly pathological in our obsession with the price of gasoline?

Entire Web sites are dedicated to pinpointing stations where we can fill up for a few pennies less than the rest. And who doesn’t have a friend willing to drive miles out of their way for cheap gas, someone who still recounts that blessed day in 1999 when he paid 98 cents for a gallon of midgrade - midgrade! - in Valdosta?

Here, then, is some good news: All those recent, breathless reports about “record-breaking” gas prices are bogus.

In fact, when inflation is taken into account, today’s gas prices aren’t even close to those of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when calamities such as the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war sent prices into orbit.

In today’s dollars, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gas in March 1981 was $2.98. If you just winced at the thought of spending more than $50 to fill up your Honda, be thankful that the current national average is a relative bargain at about $1.75 per gallon.

What’s more, the typical American is significantly wealthier today than in the 1970s or ’80s, meaning we spend an ever-smaller portion of our income on gas.

In 1980, an average-income person who drove 50 miles a day in a car that got 25 miles per gallon would have spent 9 percent of his or her annual earnings on gas.

In 2002, under the same conditions, the figure would have been only 3 percent.

Yet we still obsess.

A recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 56 percent think gas prices are a major problem, and another 13 percent call it a crisis. The cost of gas has even become a presidential-campaign issue.

“I think there’s a national impression that it’s an entitlement to us that we don’t have to pay high gas prices,” said Randy Bly of AAA Auto Club South. “But the picture really isn’t as bad off as it seems. And the way people drive, they don’t seem to be concerned about wasting fuel.”

Aggressive driving, speeding and drag-racing-style launches at stoplights are big gas guzzlers, Bly said, but rising prices don’t appear to have led to a corresponding decline in the number of lunatic drivers.

For all our complaining about paying more for gas, in other words, we don’t seem willing to do much that might save a few gallons.

Why would we? Even now, gas is still so cheap that even large price hikes make a relatively small dent on our wallets.

Consider a theoretical round-trip between Miami and Los Angeles in a 2004 Toyota Camry, which averages 26 mpg. A 10-cent per-gallon increase in the price of gas would add only $21 to the cost of the 5,500-mile trip.

“If you look at the overall budget of a family vacation, fuel cost is the cheapest part of the trip,” Bly said. “The only individual that might think twice about taking a long vehicle trip is someone with a motor home.”

Or someone on a tight income, Riviera Beach resident Wiley Drew said Wednesday as he filled up his Ford Escape at a BP Connect station in West Palm Beach. Drew and his wife are retired and travel often.

“When you’re on a fixed income, you have to kind of think about it when you’re budgeting for a trip,” Drew said.

Still, Drew said the price of gas is just one consideration in whether to take a trip.

Consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow said the complexities of gas prices make our fascination understandable.

“Gas is a mystery to most people,” said Yarrow, a business professor and head of the psychology department at Golden Gate University in California. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense. People feel out of control, and possibly taken advantage of.”

Such powerlessness is compounded by the absence of other options. If the price of orange juice rises, you can switch to tomato juice, Yarrow said, but when gas prices increase, “You can’t say, ‘I’ll just drive my electric car today.’ ”

Maybe what we all need is to take a deep breath and look at the gas-price hysteria in context. A cup of coffee might help, though at $1.09 for a 16-oz. cup at that BP station ($8.72 per gallon!), it might put a dent in your wallet.

Copyright 2004 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
April 4, 2004 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: BUSINESS, Pg. 1F
LENGTH: 843 words

SEBASTIAN - Through freezes and hurricanes, tiny Pelican Island has literally clung to life, its sandy shores held together by little more than mangrove roots, its very existence under constant, subtle assault by the erosive currents of the Indian River Lagoon.

The national wildlife refuge that bears its name has grown to include thousands of acres on surrounding islands. The ponderous birds that made the island famous no longer number in the tens of thousands.

It is, by most measures of grandeur, as far removed from the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls as a backyard garden. And yet the attention of environmentalists across the country will be focused here Friday, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service marks the centennial of Pelican Island, the first of what has become a sprawling network of national wildlife refuges.

From its fountainhead on Florida’s Treasure Coast, the refuge system has grown to encompass 538 sites and nearly 150,000 square miles, an area equivalent to the whole of Montana’s vast rolling, rocky expanse.

With areas as varied as the 30,000-square-mile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and the half-acre Mille Lacs refuge in Minnesota under its stewardship, the wildlife service manages the world’s largest collection of conservation lands.

That it all started with a minuscule rookery for pelicans, egrets and storks was the result of a fortunate confluence of events. “Stars in alignment,” as the wildlife service’s Dorn Whitmore puts it.

Demand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for showy feathers was taking a heavy toll on Pelican Island’s inhabitants. Colorful plumes, and even entire birds, were so the rage as fashion accessories, particularly as adornments on women’s hats, that it was said bird-watchers could spot 50 different species while strolling along New York City’s Fifth Avenue, none of them among the living.

The poachers who harvested feathers for the “plumassiers” had so decimated bird populations that Pelican Island was the only remaining brown pelican nesting area on Florida’s east coast.

“Now we think of them as a ubiquitous bird,” Whitmore said. “But the brown pelican just came off the endangered species list” in 1985.

Into this backdrop stepped a handful of important - in some circles legendary - individuals.

The Florida Legislature in 1901 passed legislation protecting certain birds. A 37-year-old German immigrant named Paul Kroegel was one of four wardens hired by the Florida Audubon Society to enforce the law.

Kroegel had come to Sebastian in 1881, where he and his father settled atop Barker’s Bluff, a 60-foot high Ais Indian shell mound that overlooked Pelican Island and the poaching that went on there.

Two of the Audubon Society’s four wardens in Florida would be killed by poachers, but Kroegel was a determined defender of the the island, guarding it from his sailboat.

Standing just 5-feet-6, Kroegel wore tall hats and stood literally between “his” pelicans and the feather hunters.

In 1903, Kroegel and other early conservationists, most notably Frank Chapman of the Audubon Society, took their case for Pelican Island to President Theodore Roosevelt.

“Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?” Roosevelt is reported to have asked. “Very well, then I so declare it.”

On March 14, 1903, Roosevelt issued a brief executive order, stating that the island “is hereby reserved and set apart for the use of the Department of Agriculture as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”

Kroegel liberally interpreted the boundaries of the new refuge as the area within range of his double-barrel 10-gauge shotgun. Among those on the receiving end of one of Kroegel’s across-the-bow warning shots was industrialist Andrew Mellon, then the secretary of the treasury.

“Paul Kroegel came along at the right time,” said Whitmore of the wildlife service. “There was a fledging conservation movement and a conservation-minded president in the White House. It had to happen somewhere, and it happened here.”

Paul Tritaik, manager of the Pelican Island and adjacent Archie Carr refuges for the past 10 years, said individual activists over the past century have consistently defended the island in the tradition of Kroegel.

“There have been proposals over the years to dredge and fill the refuge, to build boat basins and docks in the refuge,” Tritaik said. “Each time the local community stood up and voiced their concerns to fend off these threats.”

The number of people in Indian River and Brevard counties who live within 5 miles of Pelican Island increased more than 44 percent between 1990 and 2000 alone, from 16,147 to 23,337. Indian River County as a whole grew by 25.2 percent during the same period, and Brevard by 28.5 percent.

“We face the same situation today as they did 100 years ago,” Whitmore said, “in which short-term economic gain is made in exchange for long-term environmental damage.”

Every new house, driveway and road increases polluting runoff, degrading the water that is the foundation of the Indian River Lagoon’s food chain.

But more than the health of the wildlife is at stake, Tritaik said. Pelican Island itself, at 2.2 acres, is less than half the size it was as recently as the 1950s. Natural forces are partly responsible for the island’s erosion, but the rate at which it is shrinking appears to have been accelerated in the past 30 years by human influences, such as the wakes of boats on the nearby Intracoastal Waterway.

Between 1975 and 2001, the number of pleasure boats registered with the state increased about 250 percent in Indian River County and by 150 percent in Brevard County.

Faced with the real prospect that the island might one day wash away, wildlife officials in 2001 dropped from a helicopter about 250 tons of fossilized oyster shells into the shallow water off its eastern shore. The hope was that the shell would act as a wave break, dissipating the energy that was eating persistently away at the island.

“For the short term we have halted the erosion,” Tritaik said. “But I’m concerned that over time we’re still going to be battling the same forces, and unless we do more we’re not going to be able to ensure that Pelican Island will be protected.”

Future restoration efforts might include filling out the island to its historic shoreline. Whatever the solution to Pelican Island’s current problems, officials are dedicated to preserving the progenitor of the modern refuge system.

“Pelican Island is not going to be the most important refuge biologically,” Whitmore said. “It’s real value is in its historical significance.”

Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
March 10, 2003 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1276 words

Scarcely minutes after the first reports that the space shuttle Columbia had been destroyed, Internet speculators were already scooping up accident-themed Web addresses.

Whether destined for use as online memorials or for sale through auction sites such as eBay, scores of such Internet domain names as columbiadisaster.com and shuttlecrash.net were bought by individuals and companies across the country, starting Saturday.

The race to claim choice domain names in the wake of a major disaster or other big news event has become a standard, if little-noticed, phenomenon. The Web address september eleventh.net, for example, was snapped up the very day of the terrorist attacks.

Through Web sites such as register.com or godaddy.com, anyone with a computer and a phone line can buy their own spot in cyberspace for less than $10 per year.

With prices like that, even small-time cyber speculators can afford to plant their flag on dozens of pieces of electronic real estate, hoping that someone somewhere will be willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an address.

In the meantime, most such Web addresses go undeveloped. In the lingo of the Web, these domains are said to be “parked.”

Robert Mercer of Tierra Verde on Florida’s west coast is a hopeful and enthusiastic newcomer to this Web domain land grab.

After stepping out of the shower to the news of Columbia’s disintegration, Mercer wasted no time jumping online to beat what he knew would be a rush on the most desirable Web addresses.

“I’m somewhat of what you’d call an American capitalist,” Mercer said. “When everybody’s jaws were kind of dropped, my wheels were starting to spin.”

Mercer came away with five shuttle-themed domains, including columbiacrew.net and columbia crewmemorial.com. Addresses that end in .com are particularly coveted, said Mercer, a professional diver by trade currently laid up with an injury and on workers compensation.

He also bought columbia explosion.com, which he has posted for sale on eBay. His asking price is $2,500, but no bids had been posted as of Monday night. Though acknowledging his entrepreneurial instincts, Mercer said he will not sell his domain names to just anyone.

“I’m not looking to secure the name to exploit it,” he said. “My terms of sale say that whoever purchases it, they have to pay tribute and honor the astronauts who lost their lives.”

Mercer’s eBay auction page also says he will give NASA half the proceeds of the domain name’s sale.

Deus Marchacos envisions an online gathering place for the three domain names he bought on Saturday. Columbiaaccident.com, spaceshuttleaccident.com and columbiashuttleaccident.com may one day take visitors to “a Web site where people can add their own comments, post their thoughts and find information” on the accident.

“We’re not looking to sell the names,” said Marchacos, the owner of a small Rochester, N.H.-based Web development firm.

William Holderfield of Lexington, Ala., on the other hand, is most definitely looking to sell his Saturday catch: shuttleaccident.com.

Holderfield, a Webmaster by day, has been picking up potentially lucrative domain names for years. The mid-1990s glory days of big-time scores and cybersquatting on corporate names are gone, he said, but good money can still be made.

“You pretty much have to go for generic type names,” said Holderfield, who once owned the address harvardlawyers.com, but “ended up just letting that one go” after getting a letter that threatened legal action.

What will become of all the space shuttle-related domain names registered since Saturday remains to be seen. If the past is any indicator, however, not all of them will be put to the noblest of uses: wtcdisaster.com, an address registered on Sept. 11, 2001, redirects visitors to the Web site of a New York City travel agency that features Caribbean travel packages.

Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
February 4, 2003 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 10A
LENGTH: 656 words

In the 16 years since it was produced in a Philadelphia garbage incinerator, a 2,200-ton load of ash that now sits in a barge south of Stuart has criss-crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, accumulating an itinerary that reads like a traveler’s delight.

Turned away from Bermuda, the Dominican Republic and other tropical ports of call, and after being abandoned on a beach in Haiti for more than a decade, the ash found a temporary home on the Treasure Coast in April 2000.

There it has rested ever since, piled deep in an oceangoing hopper barge moored on the St. Lucie Canal.

But now, finally, the saga of the infamous and supposedly toxic ash that no one wanted in their back yard appears to be limping toward an elegant, symmetrical resolution.

Final destination: Pennsylvania.

If all goes according to plan, the globe-trotting ash will be moved to the Mountain View Reclamation Landfill in Franklin County - a scant 120 miles west of where it was first produced - by mid-July. The move was approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection on Thursday.

“Out of all the options we’ve looked at for the past two years, it seemed like Pennsylvania was on the same train of thought as the rest of us” when it came to deciding where the ash should be disposed of, said Melissa Meeker, director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s southeast district office.

“It’s Pennsylvania’s ash, it was generated there, and we feel they should take responsibility for it.”

Environmental regulators in Pennsylvania shared that view.

“The state believes that since this was originally Pennsylvania waste, that we should take it back and dispose of it here,” said Sandra Roderick, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania DEP.

Environmental regulators in Florida and Pennsylvania worked together over several months to draw up intricate arrangements for moving the ash, now considered harmless by environmental officials.

The material will be loaded into a series of 20-foot-long, 8-foot-wide sealed containers and trucked to a railroad facility in Miami. The ash will require an estimated 100 truckloads to move, Meeker said.

The containers will then be transported by train to a site in northern Maryland, where they will again be loaded onto trucks and driven the final dozen or so miles to the landfill near the south-central Pennsylvania town of Upton.

Such meticulous measures are designed to reassure the public that the ash is being handled safely, she said. The misguided perception of the ash as hazardous, Meeker said, is what has prevented it from being disposed of permanently for all these years.

Workers have begun removing plants, weeds and trees that have taken root in the ash while it sat idle, and could begin unloading the ash as early as Monday, Meeker said.

The Florida DEP will pay the estimated $615,250 cost of moving the material, then will seek reimbursement.

From whom they will seek repayment, however, will have to be determined in court. Deciphering who is legally responsible for the ash is a murky proposition.

Waste Management Inc. became involved in the ash saga in late 1998 when it bought a company with ties to the firm that was awarded the original contract from Philadelphia to dispose of the ash.

State environmental regulators have said in the past, however, that the company’s circuitous connection to the ash absolved it of any legal responsibility for its disposal.

Produced in Philadelphia in 1986 during a critical shortage of landfill space, the ash has been sampled and deemed safe over the years by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the city of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and Florida departments of environmental protection and an independent testing company.

But some environmental advocates, including Greenpeace, believed the ash was toxic, and every failed attempt to dispose of it, every Third World port from which it was turned away at gunpoint, only made the next attempt all the more likely to fail as well.

After it was turned away during the late 1980s from the Bahamas, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau in Africa and the Netherlands Antilles, part of the original 14,000 tons of ash was abandoned on a beach in Haiti, where it remained for more than a decade.

The freighter carrying the remaining 10,000 tons of ash eventually made its way to Asia - minus the ash, which presumably was dumped into the Indian Ocean.

The ash that remained on the beach in Haiti was brought back to the United States in March 2000 and found its way to the Treasure Coast in late April of that year. Since then, the material has sat in a barge tied up at Maritime Tug & Barge.

More than anything, it has been the ash’s long, globe-trotting history that has scuttled attempts over the years to dispose of it in, among other places, Georgia, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Environmental regulators also thought they had found a solution to the ash problem early last year, devising a plan to ship it to a waste-to-energy plant in Pompano Beach, where it would be reburned and buried in a landfill.

Broward County commissioners nixed the plan in a matter of days, however, angrily threatening Waste Management with economic reprisals if it was carried out.

After several such episodes in just the two years since the ash came to South Florida, Meeker is relieved to be getting rid of the material.

“I’ve had staff who have gone out there nearly every day to make sure it’s OK, stable and not a threat to the waterway,” Meeker said. “It’s been a burden.”

LONG, STRANGE TRIP

1985-1986 - During a Philadelphia trash crisis, more than 14,000 tons of ash from a waste incinerator is put aboard a cargo ship, the Khian Sea.

SEPT. 1986-AUG. 1987 - Khian Sea is turned away from six Caribbean islands.

DEC. 1987-JAN. 1988 - Khian Sea unloads a portion of the ash on a beach in Gonaives, Haiti. The rest disappears on its way to Asia, presumably dumped into the Indian Ocean.

APRIL 10, 2000 - New York state waste officials get approval to bring the ash from Haiti back to the United States.

APRIL 26, 2000 - Florida Department of Environmental Protection office in Port St. Lucie receives complaint that ash has been loaded onto barges in the Port of Fort Pierce.

APRIL 29, 2000 - Ash moved from three open-air barges to a single hopper barge at Maritime Tug & Barge, just southwest of the St. Lucie Lock in Martin County.

JAN. 31, 2001 - Broward County commissioners scuttle a plan to move the ash to a waste-to-energy facility in Pompano Beach.

SEPT. 26 - Cherokee Nation announces that accepting the ash at a tribe-owned landfill in Oklahoma, a proposal that had been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, would violate its environmental policies.

THURSDAY - Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection approves plan to transfer ash to a landfill in a rural area about 25 miles west of Gettysburg.

Copyright 2002 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
June 14, 2002 Friday
MARTIN-ST. LUCIE EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1177 words