TC Sentinel — Opinion

Treasure Coast Endures Daily Gun Toll as DC Grabs Headlines

Sat, 02 May 2026 22:01:49 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

The cameras were rolling in Washington, D.C., last Saturday night when gunshots rang out near the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Politicians dove beneath white-linen tables. The story led every broadcast. By morning, the nation was debating security protocols for the powerful.

Meanwhile, a 17-year-old named Trashawn Foster was shot near a park in Homestead, Florida — less than three hours south of the Treasure Coast — and airlifted to a hospital, where he later died. He was not a celebrity. He was not surrounded by Secret Service. He did not make the national news cycle.

That contrast is the argument. It is not a comfortable one, but it is necessary.

That same weekend, a Brooklyn teenager was killed inside a deli. A Chicago police officer died after a hospital shooting. A 28-year-old deli owner in New York's East Village was shot and killed by a stranger. These incidents occurred within roughly 24 hours of one another, according to public safety records and contemporaneous reporting. Researchers who track gun violence consistently document that weekends in America produce casualty counts that would be considered mass-casualty events in any other developed nation. Yet each individual death is absorbed into the national background noise.

Here on the Treasure Coast, this is not an abstraction. St. Lucie County court records show a persistent caseload of firearm-related charges filed in the Nineteenth Judicial Circuit — cases that move quietly through the docket at the St. Lucie County Courthouse on Virginia Avenue in Fort Pierce while the rest of the state watches the drama in Tallahassee or Washington. Martin County Sheriff's Office incident logs document gun-related calls across the county's rural corridors and suburban neighborhoods throughout the year. These are our neighbors. These are our children's classmates.

Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River County residents live the reality of gun violence without the buffer of motorcades or metal-detector checkpoints. When a shooting happens near a Walgreens on US-1 in Port St. Lucie or in a parking lot off Okeechobee Road, there is no presidential statement, no primetime special. There is a family, a community, and grief that compounds quietly.

The strongest counterargument is one worth taking seriously: law enforcement agencies on the Treasure Coast are underfunded relative to the scope of the problem. Both the Martin County Sheriff's Office and the Fort Pierce Police Department have flagged recruitment and retention challenges in recent budget cycles. Asking agencies to do more with less is not a solution — it is a slogan. Resource constraints are real, and any honest conversation about gun violence must acknowledge that local agencies cannot arrest their way out of a public health problem without commensurate investment in prevention infrastructure.

But resource constraints do not excuse inaction at the level where decisions are actually made. The St. Lucie County Commission is currently finalizing its fiscal year 2026 budget framework. This board has the authority to allocate funding toward community violence intervention programs — evidence-based, street-level initiatives that research consistently shows reduce shootings in high-risk corridors.

The Correspondents' Dinner shooting was frightening. It deserved coverage. But Trashawn Foster, who died in Homestead the same night, deserved more than a footnote. Every resident of this region who has buried someone taken by a bullet deserved better long before last Saturday.

We call on the St. Lucie County Commission to direct the county administrator at the next regularly scheduled public meeting to present a dedicated line-item proposal for community violence intervention funding in the FY2026 budget — with measurable outcome benchmarks, not aspirational language. The dinner tables in Washington got security. Our streets deserve the same deliberate attention.

This article was generated with AI assistance using publicly available information. It was reviewed and approved by a human editor before publication. TC Sentinel uses AI writing tools in accordance with FTC guidelines.

Martin County Must Protect Historic House of Refuge on Hutchinson Island

Sat, 02 May 2026 22:01:49 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

There is a building on Hutchinson Island that has no right to still be standing.

It was built in 1875 on a narrow barrier island battered by Atlantic storms, staffed by a single keeper and his family, funded by a federal government that would just as soon have forgotten it existed. It sheltered sailors who had lost everything — their ships, their cargo, sometimes their crewmates — and asked nothing in return. That it survived at all is, as the people who love it will tell you, a matter of courage and humanity. That it survives today, nearly 150 years later, is a matter of community will.

The Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge, the only remaining house of refuge on Florida's east coast, sits inside the boundary of what is now the Elliott Museum complex on Hutchinson Island in Martin County. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Martin County Historical Society has long stewarded the site, and county budget documents reflect recurring allocations for preservation and maintenance of the structure.

The history here is not abstract. The U.S. Life-Saving Service established ten such stations along Florida's east coast in the eighteen seventies and eighties, intended to rescue survivors of the notoriously treacherous stretch of reef and shoal between Cape Canaveral and Miami. Keepers lived in near-isolation, maintaining supplies and shelter for whoever the sea delivered to their door. The work was unglamorous and the pay was meager. They did it anyway.

That founding spirit — the obligation to care for the vulnerable, to maintain something difficult because it is worth maintaining — is precisely what this editorial board believes should govern how Martin County and its cultural institutions treat this landmark going forward.

The argument for benign neglect — that preservation is expensive, that tourism revenues are uncertain, that the county faces genuine competing budget pressures in areas like infrastructure and housing — is not a dishonest one. Martin County commissioners are not wrong that every dollar committed to a nineteenth-century structure is a dollar not spent on a pothole on Kanner Highway or a bed at a behavioral health facility. Those trade-offs are real, and anyone who dismisses them has not read a county budget recently.

But consider what the House of Refuge actually does for this region. It anchors heritage tourism on Hutchinson Island in a way that no new attraction can replicate. It draws visitors to Martin County who then spend money in Stuart's downtown restaurants, at Jensen Beach shops, along the Indian River Lagoon corridor. It provides Martin County schoolchildren — and field-trip students from St. Lucie and Indian River counties — a tangible, irreplaceable encounter with Florida history that no classroom simulation can match. When we fail to fund preservation adequately, we are not simply letting a building deteriorate. We are dismantling a civic asset that pays forward into the community for generations.

The stewardship question is, at its core, an editorial one: who decides what a community remembers, and who pays for the memory? Preservation discussions have appeared on Martin County Commission agendas in recent budget cycles, according to public records, but a clear, multi-year capital maintenance plan for the Gilbert's Bar site has not been publicly adopted.

We ask the Martin County Commission to do something specific and durable before the end of the current fiscal year: adopt a dedicated, line-item capital preservation fund for the Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge, with a minimum five-year commitment, at its next public budget workshop. Post the plan on the county's public records portal. Make the funding visible, verifiable, and binding. The keepers who lived on that island in isolation, tending a light for strangers, did not hedge their commitment. Neither should we.

Safeguard Treasure Coast's Bird Flyways From Growing Threats

Sun, 03 May 2026 22:01:42 +0000

# Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

Every autumn and spring, something extraordinary happens above the Treasure Coast that most of us drive beneath without a second glance. Tens of thousands of birds — roseate spoonbills, ospreys, swallow-tailed kites, painted buntings, and rarer species still — thread through the skies above our barrier islands, river corridors, and inland wetlands. They follow routes older than any road we've ever paved. Florida functions as one of the great avian waypoints in the Western Hemisphere, biologists say. The Treasure Coast is not peripheral to that story. It is central to it.

Call it what it is: a natural airport. Traffic arrives and departs on schedule set by seasons, not by the St. Lucie County Port and Airport Authority. The runways are the Atlantic shoreline, the St. Lucie River estuary, and the freshwater marshes of Savannas Preserve State Park in Jensen Beach — 10,000 acres of Florida scrub, wetland, and flatwoods representing one of the last intact Atlantic coastal ridge ecosystems remaining in the state. Birds don't file flight plans, but they depend absolutely on the integrity of those corridors being maintained on the ground.

That integrity is not guaranteed. Development pressure along U.S. 1 in St. Lucie County, continued nutrient pollution discharges into the St. Lucie River and the incremental loss of native upland buffers around Indian River County's coastal wetlands all chip away at the habitat that makes this flyway function. No single project kills it. The cumulative effect might.

The fair objection here is economic. Our counties are growing — Indian River County's population has climbed past 165,000, and Martin County faces persistent housing affordability pressure that makes open-space preservation feel like a luxury argument. Landowners have rights. Infrastructure must be built. These are not abstract concerns, and any editorial that dismisses them is not being honest with its readers.

But preservation and growth are not a zero-sum trade everywhere. The ecological services that intact flyway habitat provides — storm surge buffering, water filtration, the tourism economy anchored in Treasure Coast birding trails — are quantifiable public goods. Wildlife watching contributed more than $75 billion annually to the national economy, according to a two thousand nineteen U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report. The Treasure Coast captures a meaningful share of that.

What we are asking is not sentiment. We are asking for structure. The Martin County Board of County Commissioners should place an item before its Natural Resources Advisory Commission to formally review whether existing wildlife corridor designations along the St. Lucie River shoreline are being adequately enforced in current development approvals and to report its findings in an open public session before the end of the two thousand twenty-five fiscal year. The birds will keep arriving. The question is whether we will have done enough, on the ground and in the record, to deserve them.

Treasure Coast Lawyer Moseley Elected President of National Maritime Group

Sun, 03 May 2026 22:01:42 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

The Treasure Coast is, at its core, a maritime community. From the commercial fishing docks at Fort Pierce's North Hutchinson Island to the recreational marinas lining Stuart's St. Lucie River waterfront, the law of the sea is not an abstraction here — it is the framework governing the livelihoods, disputes, and environmental fate of thousands of residents. So when a significant shift occurs in national maritime law leadership, this community has a stake in paying attention.

James F. "Jim" Moseley Jr., a shareholder at GrayRobinson law firm and leader of its admiralty and maritime practice, has begun a two-year term as president of the Maritime Law Association of the United States. The MLA is the preeminent professional organization for attorneys who practice maritime law in the United States and, critically, serves as an American voice in international maritime legal forums. Its president is not a ceremonial figurehead. The role carries genuine influence over how shipping liability, environmental accountability, and vessel safety standards are shaped in U.S. courts and in treaty negotiations abroad.

What gives Moseley's appointment particular resonance is its historic character. His father, James F. Moseley Sr., served as MLA president from 1996 to 1998. The two are, according to the firm, the only father-son pair ever to lead the organization — and both also served as president of the Jacksonville Bar Association. That kind of institutional continuity is rare in any profession. In maritime law, where precedent and relationship are foundational currencies, it speaks to something durable in the Moseley family's commitment to the field.

GrayRobinson operates roughly 16 offices across Florida and also functions as one of the state's more influential lobbying operations in Tallahassee. That dual identity — legal practice and political advocacy — deserves plainly stated attention. The MLA presidency, combined with GrayRobinson's lobbying footprint, positions Moseley at an intersection of legal interpretation and legislative influence that could shape maritime policy for years.

For Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River County residents, that matters in concrete ways. The St. Lucie Inlet and the Indian River Lagoon — subjects of ongoing federal permitting battles and environmental litigation — exist within the very legal framework that the MLA helps define. When standards for vessel discharges, dredging liability, or maritime pollution enforcement are shaped at the national level, the results flow directly into the waterways our communities depend on for tourism revenue, commercial fishing income, and ecological health. These are not distant abstractions; they are the legal underpinnings of decisions made in Army Corps offices and federal district courts that affect our inlet, our lagoon, and our economy.

The strongest counterpoint to editorializing about this appointment is a fair one: law firm leadership changes are private professional milestones, not public policy events, and the editorial board should be careful not to overstate the influence any single attorney wields within an association of thousands of practitioners. The MLA does not pass laws. Its president advocates and convenes — he does not legislate. That is a legitimate check on enthusiasm.

And yet leadership of national professional associations shapes the vocabulary of legal arguments, the priorities of continuing legal education, and the posture of the bar in regulatory comment periods. Who leads matters, even when the power is soft.

What we ask of Moseley — and of GrayRobinson, which lobbies on behalf of clients with direct interests in Florida's coastal regulatory environment — is straightforward transparency: as MLA president, Moseley should make clear, through the association's published agendas and comment letters, where his organization stands on the environmental accountability standards that govern Florida's most stressed coastal waterways. The Martin County Commission and the St. Lucie County Board of County Commissioners should, in turn, invite Moseley to brief their boards on how evolving federal maritime law intersects with the permitting and dredging decisions those bodies oversee. That conversation is long overdue, and this appointment makes it timely.

The House of Refuge: Where Martin County's Maritime Past Still Breathes

Mon, 04 May 2026 09:45:40 +0000

# Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

The building has stood on Gilbert's Bar since 1875, defying hurricanes, neglect, and the relentless appetite of Florida real estate development. Most Treasure Coast residents have driven past the sign on MacArthur Boulevard without ever stopping. That is a quiet shame — and one worth correcting.

The House of Refuge at Gilbert's Bar is the oldest structure in Martin County and one of only two surviving houses of refuge remaining in Florida from a federal network that once dotted the Atlantic coastline. These stations were not romantic outposts. They were built for catastrophe — stocked with food, fresh water, dry clothing, and rescue equipment so that sailors whose ships broke apart on the notoriously treacherous reefs off the Treasure Coast had at least a fighting chance of surviving long enough for help to arrive. The men who kept them — keeper and family, often alone for months at a stretch — were the Coast Guard before there was a Coast Guard.

That history is richer, stranger, and more human than most of us ever learned in a classroom. The keepers logged the ships that wrecked. They pulled bodies from the surf. They raised children in one of the most isolated postings on the Eastern Seaboard, with the Atlantic roaring just beyond the door and the nearest town a hard journey away by boat or sandy trail. Public records and the museum's own archives document wrecks, rescues, and the daily logbooks that keepers were federally required to maintain — a remarkable primary source that historians have only begun to fully explore.

The counterargument, of course, is a practical one: Martin County has no shortage of demands on public attention, from housing affordability to water quality in the St. Lucie River. Why devote energy — editorial or civic — to a one-hundred-fifty-year-old building on Hutchinson Island?

Because a community that doesn't know its own story is easier to sell short. The House of Refuge is not a relic. It is evidence — physical, standing, weathered evidence — that people lived and died on this exact stretch of coastline before it was parceled, platted, and sold. When local officials weigh development decisions along Hutchinson Island, when residents debate what makes the Treasure Coast worth protecting, that history is not incidental. It is the argument.

The Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge Museum, operated by the Historical Society of Martin County, is open to the public. It deserves a visit — and it deserves the kind of sustained community support, both financial and political, that ensures it is still standing for the next one hundred fifty years. Go. Take your children. Read the logbooks if they'll let you.

The sea doesn't forget. Neither should we.

Jury Duty Is Democracy in Action — Florida Must Fund It

Mon, 04 May 2026 09:45:40 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

Think about the last time a jury summons arrived in your mailbox. Maybe you groaned. Maybe you quietly hoped for a scheduling conflict. Most of us have been there.

But consider what that envelope actually represents: a personal invitation to exercise one of the oldest and hardest-won rights in American democracy — the right to a trial decided not by a king, not by a politician, but by your neighbors.

As the nation approaches its 250th birthday this summer, that right is worth defending. On the Treasure Coast, where Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River county courthouses process thousands of civil and criminal cases each year, that defense requires something decidedly unglamorous: adequate funding.

Florida's Clerks of Court are pressing the state Legislature for an additional $4.8 million in jury management funding. The system is running on fumes, according to Doug Chorvat Jr., president of the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers and Hernando County Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller.

The numbers explain why. State funding for jury management has remained flat since Fiscal Year 2016-17, according to Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers data. Over that same period, jury summonses issued statewide increased by 44 percent and postage costs climbed 66 percent. Jurors themselves are still paid just $15 per day — a figure unchanged in decades and insufficient to cover a tank of gas, let alone a lost day of wages for a service worker or small-business owner in Port St. Lucie or Vero Beach.

To keep jury pools filled and trials moving, clerks across the state — including those managing the Martin County Clerk of Courts and the St. Lucie County Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller — are quietly absorbing the shortfall by cutting other community services. Treasure Coast residents should not accept this trade-off.

To be fair, the Legislature faces genuine competing pressures. Flat-funding a line item during a period of inflation is rarely a deliberate act of sabotage — it is more often the accumulated result of incremental budget decisions made under constraint. Jury management does not have a lobby. It does not generate headlines. It is easy to underfund what people take for granted.

But that is precisely the argument for funding it now. The right to trial by jury was not incidental to American independence — it was among the specific grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence against the British Crown. Citizens on the Treasure Coast who are summoned to the Martin County Courthouse on Southeast Ocean Boulevard in Stuart or to the St. Lucie County Courthouse on South Second Street in Fort Pierce are participating in a tradition literally older than the republic. They deserve a system that meets them with competence and respect.

The request before the Legislature is modest relative to the constitutional weight it carries. Four point eight million dollars to prevent a foundational civic institution from degrading further is not a hard case to make — unless no one makes it.

What You Can Do: Contact your state representatives directly before the current legislative session ends. Treasure Coast residents can reach Rep. Toby Overdorf (House District 85, serving Martin and St. Lucie counties) or Sen. Gayle Harrell (Senate District 31) and urge them to support the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers' request for jury management funding. Attend the next public meeting of the Martin County Board of County Commissioners or St. Lucie County Commission and ask your local clerk of courts where jury administration funding stands in this year's budget. Your voice — like your jury service — is not optional. It is the system working as designed.

Should the Treasure Coast Buy Into the Blue Zone Dream?

Tue, 05 May 2026 13:33:42 +0000

The pitch sounds irresistible: redesign your community around a handful of scientifically validated lifestyle principles, and your residents will live longer, healthier, more connected lives. Blue Zone designations — the branded longevity framework built on research into the world's longest-lived populations — have become a cottage industry for city planners, wellness advocates, and economic developers. Several Florida communities have chased the concept aggressively. Now the science behind it deserves a harder look, and the Treasure Coast should be paying attention.

New scrutiny of the Blue Zones framework, circulating among demographers and public health researchers, raises uncomfortable questions about whether the longevity hot spots the concept was built upon were ever as rigorously documented as claimed. Many of the regions celebrated as Blue Zones show signs of poor birth record-keeping and age exaggeration rather than genuine extreme longevity, according to demographer Saul Newman of University College London, whose peer-reviewed work has challenged the statistical foundations of several famous longevity clusters. That does not mean the lifestyle recommendations — more movement, stronger social ties, plant-forward diets — are without merit. It does mean the evidentiary foundation supporting the entire brand may be shakier than municipalities were told when they wrote the checks.

This matters here because public wellness initiatives cost real money and real political capital. In St. Lucie County, the Healthy St. Lucie initiative has incorporated community wellbeing frameworks that echo Blue Zone principles, promoting walkability, civic engagement, and nutrition access in underserved neighborhoods including the Lakewood Park area along Indrio Road. Martin County's Long Point Road corridor and its surrounding master-planned communities have similarly marketed longevity-friendly design as a residential selling point. Neither of these is necessarily wrong — but if the brand collapses under scientific scrutiny while county health departments have tied programming and grant applications to it, someone needs to ask what the fallback plan is. County budget language in fiscal year 2024–2025 reveals how deeply wellness branding has been woven into planning.

To be fair to administrators who embraced this framework: the underlying behavioral recommendations are broadly consistent with mainstream public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Heart Association, regardless of what happens to the Blue Zones brand. Officials in Indian River County who have promoted active-living infrastructure — expanded trail connectivity along the Oslo Road greenway, for instance — were not wrong to do so. The hard part is distinguishing sound policy from marketing language when the two have been deliberately fused.

A registered dietitian who counsels patients at a local outpatient clinic has said directly what many health practitioners think quietly: the principles work, but the celebrity packaging invites overselling, and overselling invites eventual backlash that can discredit good habits along with bad branding.

What You Can Do: The St. Lucie County Health and Human Services budget workshop is an opportunity for residents to ask specifically which wellness programs are tied to branded frameworks and what independent evaluations have been conducted. Contact St. Lucie County Commissioner Chris Dzadovsky's office directly to request that any ongoing Blue Zone-aligned programming be subjected to a formal evidence review before the next budget cycle closes. The science is being re-examined nationally. Our local institutions should be doing the same.

Sachs Media Promotes Two Senior Leaders to Vice President

Tue, 05 May 2026 22:01:40 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

There is a particular kind of professional ascent worth noting — not the overnight variety, but the steady, earned kind that begins with an internship and ends, seven years later, with a vice presidency. That is the story Sachs Media is telling this week, and it is one the Treasure Coast's own public affairs and communications community should pay attention to.

The Tallahassee-based firm announced the promotions of Amy Climenhage and Kelly Corder to vice president, elevating two leaders who have become central to the firm's reputation for navigating high-stakes campaigns across Florida and beyond.

Climenhage joined Sachs Media in 2019 as a public affairs intern. She rose through a half-dozen titles — account coordinator, executive, senior account executive, account manager — before landing as deputy director of public affairs two years ago. Her work spans healthcare, education, energy, technology and public policy, sectors that matter acutely to communities like ours, where debates over hospital access, utility rates and school policy are never far from the front page. Ragan named her a Top Woman in Communications in 2024. INFLUENCE Magazine previously recognized her as a Rising Star in Florida Politics.

Corder's trajectory is equally deliberate. She arrived at Sachs the same year as Climenhage, as an account manager, and built a media relations practice that has placed client stories in The New York Times, Forbes, CNN and the BBC. That kind of national reach requires not just skill but discipline — the ability to make a Florida story feel universal. PRNEWS named her a 2024 Top Woman in Communications, and the Florida Public Relations Association recognized her as Communicator of the Year in 2025.

"They have helped fuel our growth by delivering the kind of smart strategy, steady judgment and trusted counsel our clients count on when the stakes are high," Drew Piers, Sachs Media's president and partner, said.

A fair counterpoint is that personnel announcements from a statewide firm are, at first glance, Tallahassee news, not Treasure Coast news. That would be true if Sachs Media's work did not routinely shape the very policy debates — water quality legislation, healthcare regulation, energy infrastructure — that land on the desks of Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River county commissioners and ultimately affect residents from Hobe Sound to Vero Beach. The firm's clients operate in our backyard even when its offices do not.

The deeper argument here is one about professional culture. Public affairs and communications work is often invisible until it fails. When a hospital system loses a legislative fight or a utility rate hike sails through without public scrutiny, the absence of skilled advocacy and clear communication is part of the story. Climenhage and Corder represent a standard of craft that local governments, nonprofits and businesses on the Treasure Coast would do well to demand from their own communications partners.

What You Can Do: If your organization, business or municipality relies on public communications or government relations support, now is a sound moment to audit that work. The Martin County Board of County Commissioners holds its next regular meeting on the first Tuesday of the month at the County Administrative Center, 2401 S.E. Monterey Road in Stuart — a standing opportunity to observe how public messaging shapes local policy decisions and to hold your own elected officials accountable for communicating clearly with residents.

Trains, Planes and Boats Are Reshaping Treasure Coast Life — With Real Costs

Wed, 06 May 2026 10:15:16 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

The Treasure Coast has always been a place you can reach by water, and increasingly by rail and air. That is, on its face, a good thing. Connectivity drives commerce, inflates property values, and signals to the wider world that Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River counties are serious places to invest. But connectivity is not cost-free, and our communities have a troubling habit of celebrating the ribbon-cutting while quietly absorbing the consequences for years afterward.

Consider what is already underway. Brightline's high-speed passenger rail corridor runs directly through the heart of our region, with trains reaching speeds that have forced dozens of at-grade crossings in Stuart and Fort Pierce to reckon with new realities. Blocked crossings — some lasting several minutes at peak hours — have disrupted emergency response routes and drawn formal complaints from Martin County Fire Rescue officials, including Deputy Chief Jeff Fullman, who raised concerns about response-time delays at a Martin County Commission meeting in 2023, according to the Florida Department of Transportation. Those concerns are documented in the commission's publicly available meeting minutes. Rail is wonderful until the ambulance cannot get through.

Witham Field in Stuart, Martin County's general aviation airport, tells a parallel story. The facility logged more than 80,000 aircraft operations in a recent calendar year, according to the Martin County Airport Authority's annual report — a figure that underscores the airport's economic utility while raising legitimate questions about noise and safety corridors in neighborhoods directly beneath the flight paths along Southeast Salerno Road and Kanner Highway.

On the water, the St. Lucie River and the Indian River Lagoon continue to serve as both economic engines and ecological fault lines. Commercial and recreational boat traffic contributes substantially to the regional economy. Yet propeller scarring from motorized vessels has degraded thousands of acres of seagrass beds in the lagoon — the very habitat that supports the manatee and snook populations that make this coast worth living on, according to research published by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

To be fair, the agencies and elected officials managing these systems face genuine constraints. Brightline is a private company operating under state-issued permits; local governments have limited authority to slow its trains. Airport authorities must balance federal aviation requirements against neighborhood concerns, and doing so is rarely simple. These are not villains. They are institutions navigating real tradeoffs, and we should say so plainly.

But balanced does not mean passive. The residents of this region — people like Stuart business owner Maria Caldwell, who testified before the Martin County Commission that train horn noise had driven customers from her downtown storefront — deserve more than a shrug and a brochure about economic development. They deserve elected officials who press these institutions for mitigation, monitor the data, and make the tradeoffs explicit rather than burying them in environmental impact appendices no one reads.

What You Can Do: The Martin County Commission holds its next regular public meeting on the first and third Tuesday of each month at the Martin County Administrative Center, 2401 S.E. Monterey Road in Stuart. Residents with concerns about rail crossing safety or airport operations are encouraged to attend and submit public comment — the three-minute speaker window is recorded in the official minutes. You can also contact Florida's District 83 State Representative to register concern about state-level transportation oversight before the 2025 legislative session's committee deadlines in January. Show up. Your voice is part of the public record.

Florida Foster Care Has a Transparency Crisis. The Treasure Coast Feels It

Thu, 07 May 2026 22:01:59 +0000

Opinion | TC Sentinel Editorial Board

Nobody in Florida's Capitol can tell you how many foster beds are available for a child with a severe disability right now. Not this morning. Not this week. Nobody knows how long the waitlist is, because there is no waitlist — just a fog of institutional silence surrounding some of the most vulnerable children in this state.

That should alarm every parent on the Treasure Coast.

State Rep. Michelle Salzman, R-Escambia County, brought a high-acuity foster care bill through the Florida House floor this session, only to watch it die in the Senate. Her legislation targeted a gap that, once you hear it described plainly, is almost impossible to defend: Florida has no statutory definition of a "high-acuity child" — a child with dual diagnoses, severe physical limitations, or profound emotional and mental disabilities who cannot easily be placed in a standard foster home. Because there is no definition, the Department of Children and Families cannot reliably count these children. Because it cannot count them, it cannot report on them. Because it cannot report on them, the Legislature cannot fund solutions to help them.

That is not a policy disagreement. That is a systems failure.

Here on the Treasure Coast, that failure has a human face. The Community Based Care of the Treasure Coast, which administers foster care and child welfare services across Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River counties under contract with the state, serves a region that has seen persistent strain in foster home recruitment and placement capacity. When a high-acuity child in Port St. Lucie or Hobe Sound must be removed from their home, caseworkers here face the same statewide void Salzman describes: no reliable bed count, no transparent reporting, no defined category to even begin the search. Families like those served through the Hibiscus Children's Center in Jensen Beach know that reality firsthand — the distance between a child in crisis and a qualified placement can be measured in hours of driving and years of waiting.

Salzman said some children are being sent on six- to eight-hour drives away from their families — away from the Indian River Lagoon, away from their schools, away from every anchor they have — when the state's actual priority should be reunification planning. That is not a solution. That is a symptom of a government that has chosen not to look too hard at a problem it cannot easily solve.

To be fair to the Senate and to the institutions involved, this is genuinely difficult terrain. High-acuity placements are expensive, and licensed homes capable of caring for children with complex dual diagnoses are scarce everywhere in the country, not just Florida. The Senate's reluctance to advance the bill may reflect not indifference but fiscal anxiety about creating a statutory obligation without a funding mechanism attached. Salzman herself acknowledged that new legislative leadership arriving in November — in both chambers and the Governor's office — may reshape the political landscape, and she signaled she would evaluate that landscape before pushing further legislation. That is a reasonable posture.

But reasonable caution is not the same as acceptable inaction. Florida currently cannot answer a basic question about children in its care. Every month that question goes unanswered, a child somewhere — possibly in Fort Pierce, possibly in Vero Beach — is sleeping six hours from home because the system never built the infrastructure to keep them closer.

Salzman is right that the House took meaningful steps this session. But meaningful steps toward a destination nobody can see, on a road nobody is measuring, do not constitute progress. They constitute motion.

What You Can Do: The Florida Department of Children and Families accepts public comment on foster care policy through its Office of Child Welfare. Treasure Coast residents should contact State Sen. Erin Grall (District 27, covering Indian River and parts of St. Lucie County) and State Sen. Gayle Harrell (District 31, covering Martin and St. Lucie counties) before the next legislative interim committee period begins this fall and urge them to demand a high-acuity reporting requirement from DCF — no new legislation required, just administrative accountability. You can also attend a Community Based Care of the Treasure Coast board meeting and ask directly: how many high-acuity children are waiting for placement in our three counties right now? The answer you get — or don't get — will tell you everything.