Latest news with #FortMyers-based
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
More than 2,000 FGCU students receive degrees in 2025 ceremony
Florida Gulf Coast University's Graduation 2025 is in the history books. More than 2,000 degrees were awarded at the Fort Myers-based university on May 3. Graduation ceremonies were held on campus inside Alico Arena. Here's are some key numbers and data tied to FGCU's 2025 graduates: FGCU students who are eligible for graduation: 2,484 Bachelors: 2015 Masters: 399 Doctoral: 70 FGCU students who registered to participate in commencement: 2,081 College of Arts & Sciences: 672 College of Education: 159 Daveler & Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship: 165 Lutgert College of Business: 416 Marieb College of Health & Human Services: 435 The Water School: 72 U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering: 162 3. Emeriti faculty honored: 4 Dr. Jackie Greene Dr. Darren Rumbold Dr. Lirio Negroni & Dr. Sandra Kauanui 4. Honorary Doctoral Degree: 1 Mr. Michael Swindle This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: How many students attend FGCU in Fort Myers?
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Fort Myers, Jacksonville make list of 10 best dinner theaters in United States
USA Today just announced its 10 best dinner theaters in the country — and two of them have Southwest Florida connections. Fort Myers' popular Broadway Palm came it at No. 10. And another dinner theater owned by the same company — Fort Myers-based Prather Productions — made it all the way to No. 3: The Dutch Apple Dinner Theatre Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Prather Productions CEO Will Prather, who also manages Broadway Palm, says he has 'no idea' how they got nominated, but he appreciates what he calls 'a very nice accolade.' 'Our family's been in this industry now for multiple decades…' he says. 'It's a testament to how resilient our family's been.' The ranking was announced Wednesday by the USA TODAY 10Best Readers' Choice Awards, an ongoing series that highlights the best in travel, dining and lifestyle. For the series, USA Today invites a panel of industry experts to nominate their favorites in a wide variety of categories. Then 10Best editors select the nominees to be presented to the voting public for four weeks. Broadway Palm wasn't the only Florida place to land in USA Today's 10 best dinner theaters. Jacksonville's Alhambra Theatre & Dining took the top spot at No. 1. Not bad, considering there are only three professional dinner theaters left in the state, according to Prather. Naples Dinner Theatre along Immokalee Road closed in 2007 after opening in 1975. He says he appreciates the national attention for an industry that used to be much more widespread. There were 10 dinner theaters in Florida, he says, when he moved to Fort Myers in 1993. 'It was nice to see our industry acknowledged,' he says. 'These dinner theaters have survived all these ups and downs —- and the recessions, and COVID — and they've been able to keep their doors open and they're growing. They're maintaining their customer base.' USA Today's announcement described dinner theaters as 'a brilliant fusion of culture, cuisine, comfort and community.' 'There's no pairing more iconic for an evening out than dinner and a show,' said the article announcing the winners. 'And dinner theaters provide both fine dining and top-shelf entertainment under one roof.' Here's what the 10Best Readers' Choice Awards had to say about Broadway Palm, the Dutch Apple and the Alhambra: The Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre has been putting on dinner theater shows for more than 30 years. Buffet meals are served before each show, and guests can order plated dinners on Friday and Saturday nights in the Main Theater. Menu offerings change with each show, and there's even a special kids' menu for productions in the Children's Theatre. The Main Theatre puts on concerts and Broadway shows like "Annie" and "Legally Blonde: The Musical." Since 1987, the Dutch Apple Dinner Theatre has entertained the people of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The theatre's dining room only seats 320 people at a time and presents shows that range from "A Chorus Line" to "Hairspray" and "The Full Monty." Buffet-style meals include a wide range of options, and there's a full-service bar on hand as well. America's longest continuously-operating dinner theater, Jacksonville's Alhambra Theatre & Dining began putting on shows back in the 1960s. With a winning combination of concerts and Broadway favorites like "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story," the theater's season runs year-round. They offer three-course gourmet meals, which are served as soon as the theater is open to seating. Many shows sell out quickly, so if you're going to Jacksonville on vacation, be sure to plan ahead for this much-beloved local experience. The News-Press and Naples Daily News are owned by Gannett, the same company that owns USA Today. Both papers are part of the USA Today Network. Charles Runnells is an arts and entertainment reporter for The News-Press and the Naples Daily News. To reach him, call 239-335-0368 or email crunnells@ Follow or message him on social media: Facebook(@ Instagram and Threads (@crunnells1) and X (@CharlesRunnells) This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: 10 best dinner theaters: Fort Myers, Florida's Broadway Palm makes cut
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Decline of Florida's citrus industry hastened by Trump's tariff tiff
Citrus was such a major industry in Florida, it became entwined with the state's history and culture. Not anymore. (Photo title "Busy Day in an Orange Grove" via Florida State Archives) This weekend I was driving through Central Florida on U.S. 301, so I just HAD to stop at the Orange Shop in Citra. It was as if my car was pulled into their parking lot by one of those giant magnets that Wile E. Coyote always used for his harebrained schemes. The Orange Shop has been selling citrus in Citra since 1936, aided by a series of pun-filled billboards that say things like 'Make Us Your Main Squeeze.' It used to have a lot more competition for us drive-by customers but most of those other citrus stands have disappeared, along with the groves that supplied them. While the clerk was ringing up my bag of fruit, I told her I sympathized with her over the latest bit of bad news. President Convicted Felon had announced he was proceeding with his latest harebrained scheme of imposing stiff tariffs on our allies, Canada and Mexico. Canada was talking about hitting back with its own tariffs on, among other things, Florida orange juice. The clerk didn't miss a beat. 'Means more for us!' she chirped, still upbeat about making a sale. Then she told me that my bag of tangerines was a BOGO so I could get another bag. In other words, they were literally giving them away. These are tough times for Florida's citrus industry. They've been battered by hurricanes, disease and developers eager to convert their grove land to sprawl. Where we used to savor the sweet scent of orange blossoms, we now can smell only the raw stink of bulldozers at work. 'Of the 950,000 acres zoned for citrus in 2012, Florida lost more than half by 2023,' the Tampa Bay Times reported last month. 'Last year, a major labor group representing growers shut down due to financial constraints.' Now they're facing a new foe: that Florida club owner in the White House. You'd think he'd be more sympathetic to the citrus industry, given how his facial coloration resembles their main product. Yet Trump has launched a ridiculous trade war with our politest ally, which is sure to hurt the demand for Florida citrus in the Great White North. He's also started one with Mexico that will hurt citrus processors (more on that in a minute). Meanwhile, his immigration roundup is sure to hinder the industry's labor supply. Is it any wonder one of the remaining giants of Florida citrus, Fort Myers-based Alico Inc., announced last month that it's getting out of the business? 'We determined that it's not economically viable for us,' the CEO, John Kiernan, told Gulfshore Business. Instead, look for the company, like so many others before it, to turn to a different, less savory crop: houses. 'It's a rather dismal time for the industry,' said Fritz Roka, director of the Center for Agribusiness at Florida Gulf Coast University. 'It's sad, because they have been such a big part of our culture.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Citrus has been so important to Florida that there are counties named 'Citrus' and 'Orange.' There are oranges on Florida license plates. Oranges are our official state fruit, orange juice our official state beverage, and the orange blossom our official state flower. Oranges can pop up in the strangest places. The University of Florida's stadium is known as 'The Swamp,' but it's named for citrus magnate Ben Hill Griffin Jr. Perhaps UF should call it 'The Grove.' Yet the orange is not a native of Florida. Like two-thirds of the state's residents (including a certain Palm Beach club owner), oranges came from someplace else — specifically, Spain. Spanish explorers carried the fruit aboard their ships so their crews could eat them to ward off scurvy. They would plant the seeds in pots on the ship and transplant the saplings wherever they landed, according to Erin Thursby, author of 'Florida Oranges: A Colorful History.' Florida's earliest groves date to 1565, when Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine. The groves the Spanish planted around the city were intended strictly for local consumption. But by the late 1700s, a slippery St. Augustine businessman named Jesse Fish — described by one historian as a 'land dealer, slaver, smuggler, usurer, and cunning crook' — found a way to send Florida oranges elsewhere. He became the first to export oranges out of state and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude (and maybe a pardon). Harriet Beecher Stowe, who helped start the Civil War with her novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' moved to a cabin in a Florida town called Mandarin after the war. You could trace the origin of both our citrus and tourism industry to her. She wrote letters to Northern newspapers in which she extolled the state as a paradise, encouraging her readers to visit. She also claimed anyone who moved here could live off the earnings from growing citrus, even without royalties from a bestselling novel. During World War II, the government launched a fruit-based Manhattan Project here to figure out how to ship orange juice to the troops overseas to combat scurvy. The result of that concentrated science project: frozen concentrated orange juice, which became a hit in the '50s with families — thanks, in part, to the newfangled freezers sold as part of kitchen refrigerators. 'The most functional sentence in the English language is: Mix with three cans of water and stir,' said historian Gary Mormino, author of 'Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.' How popular was the new product? 'Citrus production in Florida increased from 43 million boxes in 1945 to 72 million in 1952,' the Florida State Archives note. 'About half of all fruit became [frozen concentrate] in the 1950s.' During the glory years of the citrus industry — the 1990s — growers harvested 240 million boxes of fruit a year. By contrast, the 2022 harvest, 41 million boxes, was the lowest since World War II. The USDA's latest crop forecast — you know, the one so crucial to the plot of the movie 'Trading Places' — predicts this season's orange crop will be a mere 12 million boxes. That's a faster decline and fall than the Roman Empire's. Near Orlando, in the town of Clermont, a couple of tourism promoters built a 226-foot spire known as the Citrus Tower. When it opened in 1956, the view it offered of the orange-filled countryside was breathtaking. 'From the top of that tower you could once see 12 to 16 billion citrus trees,' Mormino told me. 'Today it's all gone, unless you spot one growing in someone's backyard.' Where did the trees go? Freezes killed a lot of them. Hurricanes knocked them down or drowned them in floods. Then there were the diseases — citrus canker, then citrus greening. Greening has been particularly destructive over the past 20 years, leaving the fruit nearly inedible and trees weaker, more likely to be toppled by high winds. I had a backyard tangerine tree that was a victim of greening, so I know this firsthand. Now, on top of all that destruction, we've got the red-hatted chief MAGA of 'Merica threatening to slap 25% tariffs on Canada, with little thought to the consequences. That has prompted Canada to threaten to slap its own tariffs on American imports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau specifically mentioned Florida orange juice. Turns out Canada consumes a LOT of Florida OJ. 'Florida exports tens of millions of dollars' worth of orange juice to Canada,' WLRN-FM reported this week. 'About 60% of American orange juice sent to Canada comes from Florida.' The Canada tariffs are now on hold for 30 days, but that's not much breathing room. Meanwhile, the Mexican tariffs are more bad news for Florida's citrus industry, Roka said. Now that Florida's orange groves have faltered, our remaining juice processors — Tropicana, Minute Maid and Florida's Natural — are buying much of the fruit they need from Mexico, he explained. Because tariffs are routinely passed along to the customers, guess who has to pay those higher fees? Fortunately, that's on hold for 30 days, too, or until Co-President Elon Musk decides it's a bad investment. But what's not on hold are the widespread raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looking for illegal immigrants to deport. Florida's citrus growers have made good use of the H-2A program, which allows people from other countries to come to the U.S. to legally work jobs in the agriculture industry, Roka told me. That means that all their immigrant labor is legal immigrant labor. But the ICE agents have been scooping people up left and right and shipping them out so quickly, they've had little time to check everyone's paperwork. I'm sure they'll eventually get it all sorted out at the detention camp at Guantanamo. So far, it's been worse than when the Florida Legislature passed an anti-immigration bill in 2023. So many immigrants fled the fields then that three Republican lawmakers, in a secret meeting that leaked out, protested that their bill was just meant to scare people, not actually shut down farm operations. I tried repeatedly to reach some folks in the citrus industry who would talk to me about all this. Although a spokesperson for the trade association known as Florida Citrus Mutual insisted there were signs of hope for the future, she couldn't give details and nobody else wanted to explain. Some citrus growers are trying to hang on by switching to different crops, such as olives, pomegranates, peaches, avocados, or even hops. Before you rush out and start printing up a bunch of 'I Hop for Beer from Florida Hops' bumper stickers, I should tell you that those alternatives have so far not proven to be as successful as OJ. In other words, don't hold your breath for the Florida Welcome Center to switch from offering free cups of orange juice to cups of olive oil (and a little piece of bread to dip in it). The thing of it is, every time a citrus grower even thinks about giving up the fight, a developer's right there with a big check, ready to take over that high and dry, well-drained property. The next step: Pave it over and send the stormwater cascading onto its rural neighbors. I called up the folks from the smart growth organization 1000 Friends of Florida to ask what they think we should do about our disappearing citrus industry. 'It's sad to watch the shift in Florida's identity,' said Kim Dinkins, the organization's policy and planning director. 'But it's an opportunity for us to do better.' Local governments that have citrus groves classified as rural and agricultural areas should stick to those zoning designations, she said. Unless and until the infrastructure — water lines, sewer lines, roads etc. — are put in place to handle any development, there should be no change. If and when development is allowed to replace another orange grove, she said, it should not be the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all kind we've seen all over the place (and probably called 'The Citrus Stand' or 'The Fruit Trees'). Instead, she called for development that's clustered instead of sprawling, with large conservation areas that are preserved by a permanent easement and low water-use lawns and landscaping required. I'm sure a lot of developers will object to such common-sense constraints, but here's hoping that local elected officials heed that sound advice, because it's important for our quality of life here. Speaking as someone who routinely enjoys a cup of OJ with my breakfast, I, too, will be sorry to see oranges, orange blossoms, and orange juice fade away into the sepia tones of ancient Florida history. But hey, it's not like we can afford to pay for juice AND our super-expensive eggs. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
CBS News
05-02-2025
- Business
- CBS News
Florida's struggling citrus industry asks for help from state lawmakers
TALLAHASSEE - Citrus growers called on lawmakers Tuesday to continue providing research and advertising money to help an industry that has seen production drop more than 90% in less than three decades. Otherwise, they cautioned that more of the roughly 1,500 remaining citrus growers in the state could exit the industry. Appearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee on Tuesday, Florida Citrus Mutual CEO and Executive Vice President Matt Joyner stressed the need to continue providing money for research in the long-running battle against deadly citrus greening disease. Meanwhile, Department of Citrus Executive Director Shannon Shepp focused on money for marketing. "We are admittedly an industry in need of your help on many levels," Shepp said. "I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't hearken the words of Henry Ford, that, 'Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping a clock to save time.'" "There will be a renaissance in this industry," Shepp added. "We need to maintain a market for these growers." With research occurring at places such as the University of Florida, Joyner said the goal is to stabilize the industry by putting into groves trees that are resistant to citrus greening, which is spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, a small insect that feeds on trees. "Losing the citrus industry is not an option," Joyner said. In addition to a $6.8 billion to $6.9 billion annual economic impact, Joyner argued that the 250,000 acres of citrus trees scattered throughout the state have other benefits, such as aquifer recharge and wildlife habitat. Florida citrus industry has seen production drop Florida produced 244 million boxes of oranges and 50 million boxes of grapefruit in 1998, when the industry was at its peak, according to Florida Citrus Mutual. As a comparison, the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected last month that Florida this growing season will produce 12 million boxes of oranges and 1.2 million boxes of grapefruit. Along with citrus greening, the industry has faced constant pressures from residential and commercial development and has been hit by hurricanes and winter freezes. Last month, Fort Myers-based Alico Inc., a major grower, announced it was getting out of the citrus business once the current crop is harvested. Alico President and Chief Executive Officer John Kiernan, in a prepared statement, told investors that after more than a century growing citrus "we must now reluctantly adapt to changing environmental and economic realities." Alico's decision is estimated to remove about 12 percent of the acres used in Florida for citrus. Florida budget impacts citrus growers The state budget for the current fiscal year, which runs through June 30, includes more than $47 million for the citrus industry. It includes $29 million for technologies to research, treat and prevent citrus greening. Another $9 million was earmarked for citrus marketing. Gov. Ron DeSantis late Sunday released a budget proposal for the 2025-2026 fiscal year that included $20 million for citrus research and what is known as the Citrus Health Response Program, with $7 million of the total going to the Department of Citrus. Lawmakers will consider DeSantis' proposal as they start piecing together a budget during the legislative session that will begin March 4. Senate Agriculture Chairman Sen. Keith Truenow, a Tavares Republican who founded Lake Jem Farms in Central Florida, suggested lawmakers could look into how citrus groves are assessed for property values. "Some of those things I think need to be tightened up so that they don't feel like they have to pay three or four times or five times the rate just to hold on to their property, when everyone knows that they're not going to hold it very long at that rate because they've already been losing money the last 20 years," Truenow said. Sen. Colleen Burton, a Lakeland Republican whose district includes key parts of the citrus industry, said the state needs to support growers "through the difficult times as much as we can." "My concern is that a reduction in growers, a reduction in participation by the growers we have, and all the work that both of your organizations do, is not healthy," Burton told Shepp and Joyner.
