Pinellas County Economic Development has scrapped plans to sell the Young-Rainey STAR Center in Largo, and now will redevelop the 96-acre manufacturing and technology campus.
The new direction represents an ambitious effort to create high-wage jobs in target industries, while also modernizing a site that already is home to one of the largest employers in the county, Raytheon Co., Mike Meidel, director of PCED told the St. Pete Catalyst Tuesday morning.
Meidel does not yet have an estimate on the cost of the redevelopment plan but said it would be funded with proceeds from Penny for Pinellas, a 1 percent sales tax that won a 10-year reauthorization last year. The reauthorized tax will take effect starting in January 2020.
A growing talent pool and a deeper capital base have made the Tampa Bay area a better place for startup tech companies.
But the area still has a way to go to achieve its full potential, said Linda Olson, president and CEO of Tampa Bay Wave, a non-profit that services and houses growing companies.
“If we really want to be one of those hubs that’s truly competing on a national level for talent and capital we need to be thinking bigger. Much bigger, in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars going to startups annually. I don’t think we’re even close to that point right now,” Olson said at panel discussion on innovation in Florida.
As a certified nonprofit, the museum works with and for the community to help kids learn through the ways they learn best – imagination and play. It provides a hands-on learning environment for curious kids.
Along with their vast and varied collection of contemporary art focused on images of the Old West, Tom and Mary James posess the work of Tampa Bay painter James Michaels, who was, once upon a time, a political cartoonist for the Tampa Tribune. The James Museum is opening James Michaels: An American Pop Life Saturday (Nov. 17) in the second-floor special exhibitions gallery.
Kristallnacht, on its 80th anniversary, still offers a potent lesson: We all face the choice between right and wrong, responsibility and recklessness, conscience and complicity.
