Unfortunately an LLC on sunbiz.org only list the officers and registered agent of the LLC. There can still be any number of owners behind an LLC.
New highway 331 bridge in Walton County
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Unfortunately an LLC on sunbiz.org only list the officers and registered agent of the LLC. There can still be any number of owners behind an LLC.
I thought there were ownership/membership doc's on there too. Thanks for the schooling.
Last edited:
Added to SoWal.com home page.
No, you only get to see those if someone faxes it to the wrong number. A local rental company did this once.
"It's an ambush..."
M.C. Davis questioned the 331 Move Forward group at last night's (2-25-09)BCC meeting in Northwest Florida Daily News story on Page 1. Quote, "It's an ambush, in my opinion," Davis said. Story continued on page A7 said, "Odom also reacted somewhat angrily to suggestions ..." "That is total, absolute bull," he said. Walton BCC voted for more time to study.
M.C. Davis questioned the 331 Move Forward group at last night's (2-25-09)BCC meeting in Northwest Florida Daily News story on Page 1. Quote, "It's an ambush, in my opinion," Davis said. Story continued on page A7 said, "Odom also reacted somewhat angrily to suggestions ..." "That is total, absolute bull," he said. Walton BCC voted for more time to study.
Here's some info on 331
This was to be published in DeFuniak Springs Herald today:
A Private Toll Road Won't Help Public
By Linda Young
Director
Clean Water Network of Florida
News that a private company wants to ?help? Walton County by widening U.S. 331 and the Choctawhatchee Bay Bridge should give citizens pause.
This private company wants to turn U.S. 331 into a widened private toll road. That means motorists would be at the mercy of largely unregulated price increases to use a road and bay bridge they now drive on for free.
The proposal comes from a company founded by Denver Stutler, who served as Gov. Jeb Bush?s chief of staff and then as Bush?s Department of Transportation secretary. Stutler?s company approached the Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority Feb. 17 with an ?unsolicited proposal? to ?design, build, operate, and finance transportation facilities which will provide additional capacity for U.S. 331 in Walton County.?
It is curious how this proposal just popped up out of nowhere. Developer Jay Odom, whose 3,000-acre Hammock Bay development in Freeport would benefit from a pricey new road, was quoted in the Northwest Daily News as saying ?In my book, this is a stimulus package. It?s a half-billion-dollar stimulus that?s not reliant on federal dollars.?
Really? A quick look at Florida DOT documents shows that Highway 331 is already teed up for federal stimulus dollars. On the DOT?s official ?Ready-To-Go? list of state projects eligible for federal stimulus money, there?s more than $336 million worth of improvements to Highway 331 and the Choctawhatchee Bay bridge, right there, listed plain as day. Walton County is listed as an officially designated economically distressed area which gives it higher priority for funding.
Citizens should be asking whether this private company intends to draw down public money for private gain. It is doubtful that these corporate folks are doing this expensive road work to be altruistic to the good folks of WaltonCounty. And what will the citizens end up paying in the long run?
Odom is The Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority?s vice chairman. This appointed group, established by Jeb Bush, has spent four years drawing routes for fat new toll roads through our region. So far, this group ? which is independent of the state DOT and has the power to tax, seize private land through eminent domain, and set up toll authorities ? has spent $4 million worth of public money and has not had annual audits as required by law.
In fact, the NFTCA is the only transportation authority in the state that has not had its required audits. Right now, the DOT?s Inspector General is working up balance sheets for the authority, but this does not constitute formal auditing ? outside audits are specifically required.
Most all of the money spent so far has gone to the private HDR Engineering, which is doing planning for the road and collecting a profit in the meantime. Invoices show that about $3.9 million has gone to pay hefty engineering fees to do master planning for the new roads. Still, when pressed by the public, the NFTCA insists that people shouldn?t get attached to the lines on the map that this $4 million worth of public money paid for. These lines drawn through our communities, they tell us, are still just ?concepts.? After four years and $4 million, we?ve still only got concepts?
Now, all of a sudden, a private company waltzes in with this very suspicious-looking proposal to ?help? Walton County. Tom McLaughlin of the Northwest Daily News reported on Feb. 20:
?The authority, never having received an unsolicited proposal, had to set a fee to submit such documents. It settled on a tentative charge of $50,000. That money will be used to advertise the proposal and to notify other potential bidders of its existence. Once advertisements are published, other firms that might be interested in competing for the project have 60 days to provide proposals.?
Sixty days for other companies to come up with a competing proposal for a road project this large and complex? None of this sounds right.
It?s worth noting that about $105,800 of the $4 million that the transportation authority spent so far went to HDR Engineering to pay for ?public outreach? between May and November of 2007. That?s $17,633 per month.
I wish some of that ?public outreach? money would go toward letting the citizens really know what?s going on here.
Clean Water Network of Florida is a network of 300 organizations working together to protect Florida?s streams, rivers, lakes and estuaries.
This was to be published in DeFuniak Springs Herald today:
A Private Toll Road Won't Help Public
By Linda Young
Director
Clean Water Network of Florida
News that a private company wants to ?help? Walton County by widening U.S. 331 and the Choctawhatchee Bay Bridge should give citizens pause.
This private company wants to turn U.S. 331 into a widened private toll road. That means motorists would be at the mercy of largely unregulated price increases to use a road and bay bridge they now drive on for free.
The proposal comes from a company founded by Denver Stutler, who served as Gov. Jeb Bush?s chief of staff and then as Bush?s Department of Transportation secretary. Stutler?s company approached the Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority Feb. 17 with an ?unsolicited proposal? to ?design, build, operate, and finance transportation facilities which will provide additional capacity for U.S. 331 in Walton County.?
It is curious how this proposal just popped up out of nowhere. Developer Jay Odom, whose 3,000-acre Hammock Bay development in Freeport would benefit from a pricey new road, was quoted in the Northwest Daily News as saying ?In my book, this is a stimulus package. It?s a half-billion-dollar stimulus that?s not reliant on federal dollars.?
Really? A quick look at Florida DOT documents shows that Highway 331 is already teed up for federal stimulus dollars. On the DOT?s official ?Ready-To-Go? list of state projects eligible for federal stimulus money, there?s more than $336 million worth of improvements to Highway 331 and the Choctawhatchee Bay bridge, right there, listed plain as day. Walton County is listed as an officially designated economically distressed area which gives it higher priority for funding.
Citizens should be asking whether this private company intends to draw down public money for private gain. It is doubtful that these corporate folks are doing this expensive road work to be altruistic to the good folks of WaltonCounty. And what will the citizens end up paying in the long run?
Odom is The Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority?s vice chairman. This appointed group, established by Jeb Bush, has spent four years drawing routes for fat new toll roads through our region. So far, this group ? which is independent of the state DOT and has the power to tax, seize private land through eminent domain, and set up toll authorities ? has spent $4 million worth of public money and has not had annual audits as required by law.
In fact, the NFTCA is the only transportation authority in the state that has not had its required audits. Right now, the DOT?s Inspector General is working up balance sheets for the authority, but this does not constitute formal auditing ? outside audits are specifically required.
Most all of the money spent so far has gone to the private HDR Engineering, which is doing planning for the road and collecting a profit in the meantime. Invoices show that about $3.9 million has gone to pay hefty engineering fees to do master planning for the new roads. Still, when pressed by the public, the NFTCA insists that people shouldn?t get attached to the lines on the map that this $4 million worth of public money paid for. These lines drawn through our communities, they tell us, are still just ?concepts.? After four years and $4 million, we?ve still only got concepts?
Now, all of a sudden, a private company waltzes in with this very suspicious-looking proposal to ?help? Walton County. Tom McLaughlin of the Northwest Daily News reported on Feb. 20:
?The authority, never having received an unsolicited proposal, had to set a fee to submit such documents. It settled on a tentative charge of $50,000. That money will be used to advertise the proposal and to notify other potential bidders of its existence. Once advertisements are published, other firms that might be interested in competing for the project have 60 days to provide proposals.?
Sixty days for other companies to come up with a competing proposal for a road project this large and complex? None of this sounds right.
It?s worth noting that about $105,800 of the $4 million that the transportation authority spent so far went to HDR Engineering to pay for ?public outreach? between May and November of 2007. That?s $17,633 per month.
I wish some of that ?public outreach? money would go toward letting the citizens really know what?s going on here.
Clean Water Network of Florida is a network of 300 organizations working together to protect Florida?s streams, rivers, lakes and estuaries.
And then there is this Sansom's friend pushes for toll road through nature preserve - St. Petersburg Times
Sansom friend pushes toll road
By Craig Pittman, Times staff writer
Published Wednesday, February 25, 2009
A developer closely linked to former House Speaker Ray Sansom is pushing for a new toll road to slice through a nature preserve that taxpayers spent $16.5 million to save from development.
"They couldn't have picked a worse place to put this road," said Matt Aresco, the biologist who manages the preserve.
The eight-member board in charge of building the toll road was created by the Legislature in 2005 through a bill sponsored by Sansom, R-Destin. Sansom's brief tenure as House speaker this year has led to a grand jury investigation.
The toll road board's vice chairman is Jay Odom, the developer whose ties to Sansom are among the subjects now being investigated by the grand jury.
The work of the Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority was close to Sansom's heart. When Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed giving the authority $3 million in 2007, Sansom told the Northwest Florida Daily News that he regarded that as "about the most important $3 million in the state budget."
Odom, who built a subdivision that would benefit from the proposed toll road, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Board chairman Randall McElhenny said he can understand why Aresco and others might be worried about seeing an authority map that shows a road being built through the middle of the nature preserve.
But those concerns are premature, he said, because at this point the routes are only conceptual.
"They're lines on a map," he said. "Those lines don't really mean anything except as a concept."
The preserve is older than Odom's road board. In 2002, real estate investor M.C. Davis bought 48,000 acres of farm and timberland east of Eglin Air Force Base called Nokuse (pronounced "Nuh-GO-zee," an Indian word for bear) Plantation. He hired Aresco to guide its restoration ? filling in ditches that had drained wetlands, replanting longleaf pines, conducting controlled burns.
Three years later, Davis sold to the state the development rights on 18,000 acres of Nokuse Plantation, granting the state something known as a "conservation easement" that can never be developed. Cost to the taxpayers: $16.5 million.
Now that the taxpayers have paid to preserve it, Odom's board wants to bisect it with a major four-lane highway, Aresco said.
As set up by Sansom, the toll road board has the power to select routes for a whole series of roads and bridges across the Panhandle, condemn any property needed for construction and then borrow money to pay for the work, to be paid off using tolls.
The board is supposed to pick routes that improve travel times through the Panhandle's coastal areas, enhance hurricane evacuation and "promote economic development along the corridor," according to the authority's attorney.
Critics say "economic development" is the real reason for most of the roads being planned. The road that would cut through Nokuse would also funnel traffic to a subdivision called Hammock Bay that Odom has built outside the town of Freeport.
"I don't know how he can vote on this when he has a development in close proximity that would benefit from it," Aresco said.
The toll road system being planned by Odom's board would also benefit the state's biggest developer, the St. Joe Co. It would provide direct access to a new $330 million airport being built 20 miles north of Panama City on land St. Joe has donated.
St. Joe officials hope the new taxpayer-financed airport will spur the development of the company's thousands of acres surrounding the airport, the first to be built since Sept. 11 sent the airline industry into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.
"We see this whole road system as a real boondoggle," Aresco said. "We've been calling it the road to nowhere that goes to the airport to nowhere."
Most of the existing highways that the new toll roads are supposed to supplement, such as State Road 20, are far from clogged, the biologist said. So the highway through the preserve "doesn't make any sense economically."
Craig Pittman can be reached at craig@sptimes.com.
Sansom friend pushes toll road
By Craig Pittman, Times staff writer
Published Wednesday, February 25, 2009
A developer closely linked to former House Speaker Ray Sansom is pushing for a new toll road to slice through a nature preserve that taxpayers spent $16.5 million to save from development.
"They couldn't have picked a worse place to put this road," said Matt Aresco, the biologist who manages the preserve.
The eight-member board in charge of building the toll road was created by the Legislature in 2005 through a bill sponsored by Sansom, R-Destin. Sansom's brief tenure as House speaker this year has led to a grand jury investigation.
The toll road board's vice chairman is Jay Odom, the developer whose ties to Sansom are among the subjects now being investigated by the grand jury.
The work of the Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority was close to Sansom's heart. When Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed giving the authority $3 million in 2007, Sansom told the Northwest Florida Daily News that he regarded that as "about the most important $3 million in the state budget."
Odom, who built a subdivision that would benefit from the proposed toll road, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Board chairman Randall McElhenny said he can understand why Aresco and others might be worried about seeing an authority map that shows a road being built through the middle of the nature preserve.
But those concerns are premature, he said, because at this point the routes are only conceptual.
"They're lines on a map," he said. "Those lines don't really mean anything except as a concept."
The preserve is older than Odom's road board. In 2002, real estate investor M.C. Davis bought 48,000 acres of farm and timberland east of Eglin Air Force Base called Nokuse (pronounced "Nuh-GO-zee," an Indian word for bear) Plantation. He hired Aresco to guide its restoration ? filling in ditches that had drained wetlands, replanting longleaf pines, conducting controlled burns.
Three years later, Davis sold to the state the development rights on 18,000 acres of Nokuse Plantation, granting the state something known as a "conservation easement" that can never be developed. Cost to the taxpayers: $16.5 million.
Now that the taxpayers have paid to preserve it, Odom's board wants to bisect it with a major four-lane highway, Aresco said.
As set up by Sansom, the toll road board has the power to select routes for a whole series of roads and bridges across the Panhandle, condemn any property needed for construction and then borrow money to pay for the work, to be paid off using tolls.
The board is supposed to pick routes that improve travel times through the Panhandle's coastal areas, enhance hurricane evacuation and "promote economic development along the corridor," according to the authority's attorney.
Critics say "economic development" is the real reason for most of the roads being planned. The road that would cut through Nokuse would also funnel traffic to a subdivision called Hammock Bay that Odom has built outside the town of Freeport.
"I don't know how he can vote on this when he has a development in close proximity that would benefit from it," Aresco said.
The toll road system being planned by Odom's board would also benefit the state's biggest developer, the St. Joe Co. It would provide direct access to a new $330 million airport being built 20 miles north of Panama City on land St. Joe has donated.
St. Joe officials hope the new taxpayer-financed airport will spur the development of the company's thousands of acres surrounding the airport, the first to be built since Sept. 11 sent the airline industry into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.
"We see this whole road system as a real boondoggle," Aresco said. "We've been calling it the road to nowhere that goes to the airport to nowhere."
Most of the existing highways that the new toll roads are supposed to supplement, such as State Road 20, are far from clogged, the biologist said. So the highway through the preserve "doesn't make any sense economically."
Craig Pittman can be reached at craig@sptimes.com.
