Initial claims for unemployment benefits in Florida declined for the second consecutive week. There were 86,298 first-time claims filed in the week ended June 13, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. It was the first week since mid-March, when the financial impacts of COVID-19 began to be felt, that initial unemployment claims in Florida were below 100,000. Nationally, there were about 1.5 million first-time unemployment claims in the week ending June 13, and the seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 14.1 percent for the week ending June 6, the Department of Labor said.
You can now check in on the Catalyst's latest content series via a new panel on the StPeteCatalyst.com home page. The current collection includes our TBBCA partner video series, Vintage St Pete, Inside the Boardroom and The Work Around. A full series section is in development and will be launching in the coming months.
The Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg will re-open to members Saturday, Sept. 12, Executive Director Kristen A. Shepherd has announced. Shepherd, who has been vocal about her desire to see local COVID-19 numbers falling before the museum re-opens, said the next three months will be spent deep cleaning, sanitizing, and "renovating and reinstalling our collection galleries as planned, ahead of schedule." Re-opening for the general public has not been announced.
The Penny Hoarder, a national personal finance website headquartered in St. Petersburg, has a new strategic partnership with Moonlighting, an Allen, Virginia-based platform that helps independent workers find jobs and manage their businesses. Under the partnership, Moonlighting will provide The Penny Hoarder’s financial literacy and personal finance articles to Moonlighting’s audience, while Moonlighting will deliver work-from-home job opportunities to The Penny Hoarder’s work-from-home job board. Financial terms were not disclosed in a news release announcing the deal.
Due to the risk of spreading COVID-19 at large gatherings, St. Petersburg has canceled its July 4 waterfront fireworks display. Fireworks displays have also been canceled in Tampa, Clearwater, Gulfport, Tarpon Springs, Siesta Key and Sarasota.
The University of South Florida Health Morsani College of Medicine has received the largest single gift to scholarships in the history of the medical college. The $4 million gift from Dr. Jack F. Ross will benefit the medical scholarship that bears his name, a news release from the college said. Ross, a retired Tampa psychiatrist, died at the age of 98 last summer. He had previously provided $150,000 to establish the endowed Jack F. Ross Medical Scholarship, which assists high-achieving medical students. To date, 13 students have benefited from the scholarship, USF said.
Disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to hamper operating performance at Tech Data, a new report from Moody's Investors Service said. The credit agency said in a June 15 report that it expects total revenue to decline and margins to shrink at the Clearwater-based IT distributor over the next 12 months. Tech Data is positioned to return to revenue growth when overall IT demand rebounds based on its leading position in the industry and its global reach, the report said. Tech Data (Nasdaq: TECD), currently the largest publicly traded company headquartered in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, is being acquired by funds managed by Apollo Global Management and will become privately owned after the deal closes. In the new report, Moody's assigned a Ba2 corporate family rating and a Ba3 probability of default rating to Tech Data, in conjunction with the debt the company is taking on to help fund the $6.1 billion purchase by Apollo. Both ratings are just under investment grade ratings.
Florida Funders has closed an investment in Simplenight, a technology company with a B2B platform for booking events, attractions and other experiences online. The size of the investment was not disclosed in a news release announcing the deal. Simplenight will use the funding to develop additional partner integrations, reinforce its software and customer support, and hire key talent. The company is currently based in New York, but is moving operations to south Florida, with a new headquarters opening in Miami next month. Simplenight is led by Mark Halberstein, founder and CEO, and has raised more than $11 million to date.
Moffitt Cancer Center broke ground Tuesday on a new inpatient surgical hospital on its McKinley campus. The 34-year-old hospital on the Magnolia campus, on the grounds of University of South Florida in Tampa, has outgrown its space and soon won’t be able to meet the demand to treat more cancer patients, a news release said. The new hospital, about a mile south of the Magnolia campus, will have 128 inpatient beds and capacity to expand to 400 beds. Moffitt is financing construction through two bond issues, totaling $383 million. In the news release, Moffitt said the expansion project would create upwards of $120 million for workers on the construction site, with about 5,500 construction workers involved at some point and about 550 per day at the construction's peak. Moffitt also said it is focused on hiring minority, women, veteran and service-disabled veteran-owned business enterprises and is striving for a supplier diversity goal of 15 percent with this project. Hospital construction is expected to wrap up in May 2023 with doors to open in July 2023.
The University of South Florida will invest $20 million to assist students experiencing financial challenges as a result of COVID-19 and keep them on track for an on-time graduation. The university has already begun awarding the We Got U-SF Scholarship and Waiver to nearly 22,000 eligible graduate and undergraduate students with the goal of encouraging full-time enrollment for the fall semester. USF leaders created the program out of concern that financial instability could lead to interruption of academic progress and increased debt for students unable to cover the cost of tuition. The initiative also serves to bridge the gap between the cost of tuition and additional expenses not covered by financial aid or traditional scholarships. Students who are not already receiving scholarships from the Office of Admissions, Federal CARES Act Emergency Financial Aid funds for fall 2020, or tuition waivers or third-party payments of tuition are eligible for the program.
U.S. News & World Report ranked Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg among the nation’s best children’s hospitals in eight specialties. That's more than any other pediatric hospital in Florida and more than Johns Hopkins All Children’s has ever ranked for in a single year, a news release said. The specialities and John Hopkins All Children's rankings are: neurology and neurosurgery, No. 27; diabetes and endocrinology, No. 33; nephrology, No. 39; cancer, No. 41; neonatology, No. 44; urology, No. 46; pulmonology and lung surgery, No. 47; and orthopedics, No. 50. The full "Best Children's Hospitals by Specialty" rankings by U.S. News & World Report are here.
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has approved the planned acquisition of IberiaBank Corp. by First Horizon National Corp. First Horizon (NYSE: FHN), a Memphis-based bank, said in November that it had an agreement to buy all the stock of IberiaBank Corp. (Nasdaq: IBKC) for $3.9 billion. IberiaBank is a Lafayette, Louisiana-based bank that entered the Tampa-St. Petersburg market in 2015 when it acquired the former Florida Bank and Florida Bank Group. IberiaBank has six offices and $364 million in deposits in the Tampa-St. Pete area. The First Horizon-IberiaBank deal is expected to close on July 1 and will create one of the largest financial services companies headquartered in the South, a news release said.
