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Coffee Talk (Tampa edition)
New help for Schindlers
Notable lawyers have tried to help Robert and Mary Schindler save the life of their daughter Terri Schiavo, who has been kept alive through tube feedings since she collapsed in her home in 1990. Add two new Pinellas lawyers: David Gibbs III and Barber Weller, both of the Gibbs Law Firm, Seminole.
Attorneys Patricia Fields Anderson and Larry Crow stepped aside after years of unsuccessful legal arguments. Schiavo, 41, is now alive because the Florida Legislature passed a special law ordering she be fed. Gov. Jeb Bush has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the law, overturned last year by the Florida Supreme Court.
In a battle that has received international media attention and the support of pro-life Christian groups, the Schindlers have fought Schiavois husbandis efforts to allow her to die. They contend his motives are questionable, especially since he has had two children with a fiancEe.
Weller, a mother and grandmother, accompanied Gibbs and Schiavois parents and family on a Christmas Eve visit to Schiavois Pinellas Park nursing home. It was the first time Weller or Gibbs met her.
iShe was definitely not in a coma, not even close,i Weller says in a written statement posted at www.terrisfight.org. iThis visit certainly shed more light for me on why the Schindlers are fighting so hard to protect her, to get her medical care and rehabilitative assistance, and to spend all they have to protect her life.i
Just checking
When youire losing money, why scrimp on marketing?
The Bank of St. Petersburg, which is pushing so hard into Hillsborough County that it has moved its headquarters to downtown Tampa, is now a sponsor of University of South Florida athletics.
The bank, a unit of Bank of St. Petersburg Holdings Inc., gets to do things like co-brand its checks with the USF Bulls logo. In return, the bank will have its own logo showcased around the home venues of the universityis sports teams.
iWe will work hard to ensure this partnership meets the bankis marketing and community service goals,i promised USF Athletic Director Doug Woolard in a news release.
The partnership is something of a leap of faith for the Bank of St. Petersburg. Home attendance has been down at both USF football and menis basketball games this academic year.
USF does join the Big East conference next season, which should bring a more reliable slate of big-name opponents to the gridiron and hardwood in Tampa.
Financial terms of the deal werenit disclosed in the news release, but the bank must be paying something for the exposure.
Any outlay will magnify the lack of recent profitability at the bank, which has turned in one of the worst financial performances among local institutions over the past year. For the first nine months of 2004, the Bank of St. Petersburg lost almost $1.5 million, compared to a modest $183,000 gain for the prior-year period.
The bank is spending $1.16 for every dollar of revenue that comes in, largely due to the expansion beyond its original two offices in St. Petersburg.
Besides the recently opened Tampa headquarters, the Bank of St. Petersburg is putting the finishing touches on a new office in West Tampa and has plans for a downtown St. Pete location later this year.
Thatis a major undertaking for any $147 million asset community bank. For now, though, the attitude at the Bank of St. Petersburg seems to be: Let the games begin.
Top honors
St. Petersburgis Grady Pridgen Inc. won top honors at the annual awards ceremony sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of the National Association of Industrial Properties. Grady Pridgen, the firmis president, accepted the 2004 iDeveloper of the Yeari award.
Pridgen controls a portfolio that contains about 2 million square feet of industrial space. Over the years, his investments have helped produce about 13,500 jobs and relocated about 700 businesses to the area.
Federal appointment
The U.S. Senate has confirmed the appointment of Robert N. Davis, a Stetson University College of Law professor, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. President Bush nominated him in March 2003 to serve a 15-year term, and the full Senate acted in late November. As a judge, Davis will serve with six other presidential appointees who hear appeals from the federal Board of Veteransi Appeals. Since the job is full-time, Davis will resign his professorship.
A mystery
A local novelist is out with her first whodunit and, judging from a tantalizing publicity blurb, the story is a legal thriller set in Tampa.
But the first mystery for Coffee Talk: Who is Ruth Beall?
The apparent Pinellas County resident is identified as the author of iMystery Lake.i Attempts to reach Beall before deadline were unsuccessful.
According to a synopsis of iMystery Lake,i an undercover cop from Tampa falls for a Philadelphia woman but he ends up dead in the City of Brotherly Love. His attorney, who works at a Tampa firm called Fowler and Simms, meets a similar fate.
Could the mysterious Ruth Beall work in the Bay area legal profession? Or did she just pick the name of Fowler White Boggs Banker PA out of the telephone directory and modify it to protect the innocent?
Beall didnit ring a bell, so to speak, at Fowler Whiteis Tampa office. Maybe itis a pen name.
Building boom
UBS Investment Research, a division of the international financial firm, expects the supply of hotel rooms to increase by 3.7% this year in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metropolitan statistical area. Thatis 2% more than the national average and 3.3% more than what the local market produced last year, according to research UBS produced in cooperation with Smith Travel Research.
The research group forecast higher revenue per available room this year throughout the nation as part of a multiyear recovery from the soft market the hotel industry experienced the past few years. The group also forecast higher room rates, which should provide hotel property owners with improved profit margins.
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