Daily Record Financial News &
Friday, April 15, 2016
Vol. 103, No. 110 • One Section
Co-work operations popular Downtown
By Karen Brune Mathis Managing Editor
Entrepreneurs wanting to move Downtown but who want a flexible lease could soon see another opportunity in an old building seeking a new start. A Downtown building formerly used by the 4th Judicial Circuit Public Defender’s Office is slated for transformation into professional space for lease to businesses, startups, co-work tenants and people who need meeting facilities or an office address. It will join several similar operations in Downtown. Signs are posted on the Market and Forsyth streets building, work is beginning and completion is expected for a July opening in what the new owner considers “cool and affordable space in a great location.” Level Office Principal and founder Bill Bennett in Chicago said his group looks for “beautiful older buildings” in central locations that can be bought for a good price. He said that allows the group to invest more into the renovations. Called Level Office, the building at 25 N. Market St. represents a minimum $4.15 million purchase and renovation investment for Chicago-based Iconic Investors LLC. The group, through 25 N Market Level Office LLC, bought the building in January for $2.05 million. Bennett, manager of the ownership entity, said the group will invest about $2.1 million into the renovations, interiors, furniture, fixtures, equipment and other costs. continued on
3 women join 197 men as apprentices
Story and photo by Carole Hawkins, Staff Writer
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Court says Lee deserves legal fees
ikyla Hall doesn’t see a lot of barriers ahead of her. Twenty years old and a first-year carpenter, she crawls under houses to install floor joists, cuts lumber with a power miter saw and is learning blower-door testing. “She can get into places that I’m too big to get into,” said supervisor Arty Taylor. Hall stills struggles to lift a half-inch sheet of plywood by herself. “She’s kind of a little thing,” project manager Susan Giddens said. “I tell the men they’re going to have to work with that until she builds up her strength.”
By David Chapman Staff Writer
Florida Supreme Court rulings typically come in batches on a weekly basis. For more than a year, Curtis Lee has been checking for those decisions just after 11 a.m. each Thursday. This week, he saw the one he’d long been awaiting. “It’s been 14 months now,” Lee said Thursday. “I was disappointed up until today.” What Lee saw when he opened the file: A 5-2 ruling that sided with his stance that the Police and Fire Pension Fund should pay legal fees he’s incurred during a seven-year fight with the fund over public records. A fight that started with a dispute over $606 in fees. Lee went to the fund to review public records, but was charged for the fund’s effort in addition to an hourly fee for someone to sit with him while he reviewed documents. Lee said the fees were exorbitant and wrong, so he filed suit. Fees continued on Page A-4
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Taking on gender gap
Level Office opening at 25 N. Market St.
Co-work
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Mikyla Hall is a first-year carpenter and a student in the Northeast Florida Builders Association’s apprenticeship program. She’s one of three women who are now in the program.
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Hall is one of three women in the Northeast Florida Builders Association’s apprenticeship program. The other two are electrical apprentices. With building permits up and labor stretched thin, NEFBA has boosted its apprenticeship program to 200 participants, twice that of two years ago. The last time a woman graduated from the program was 2009. Women still face barriers to entering and staying in construction, according to the National Women’s Law Center. The share of women in the industry is less than 3 percent and has remained virtually unchanged for three decades, the organization said in a 2014 report. Even women’s participation in dirty and dangerous jobs, such as
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correctional officers and firefighters, has doubled or more over the same period. The Women’s Law Center faults “gender stereotypes, sexual harassment, a lack of awareness about opportunities in construction and insufficient instruction” as reasons why the number of women in the industry has remained consistently low. Hall said she doesn’t see any of that at her job with St. Johns Housing Partnership, a St. Augustine nonprofit that remodels homes for low-income residents. “I’m younger than some of the other workers, so I can sometimes do things they can’t do,” she said. “I don’t think they care that I’m a woman. But I play it cool.” Her first day on the job, she Apprentice continued on Page A-3
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