Florida Trident

A cadre of engineers and planners who design America’s roads, bridges, hospitals and other critical infrastructure fear that an emerging tool that would replace the nation’s out-of-date rainfall and flood data is on the Trump Administration chopping block.The new tool, Atlas 15, uses modernized rainfall data to allow engineers to design and build infrastructure to withstand flooding for decades to come as extreme rainfall predictably worsens.Without it, the engineers and planners say, they would be forced to rely on old data that understate flood risks and put infrastructure in harm’s way.

When Lee County Undersheriff John Holloway’s daughter Morgan and her fiance Joe Trubilla posted a wedding registry on October 21, 2022, they appealed to friends and relatives for spa dates, a cruise, and other presents before their March 2023 wedding.But it was her father’s law enforcement agency that provided perhaps the biggest gift of all: a $5,000-per-month Lee County Sheriff’s Office consulting contract for Trubilla to run a youth boxing program.

The Trump Administration is cutting personnel and funding for federal agencies such as the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency as hurricane season 2025 begins. But wait! Artificial intelligence is rolling out lightning-fast data-crunching powers that can fill in for some of the missing meteorologists and emergency managers. But wait! Those AI platforms rely on precise data to perform their miracles. And those data largely come from scientists at the National Weather Service and its parent, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose data collection capabilities are being curtailed. So where does that leave the American people, particularly Floridians, when it comes to forecasting and recovering from severe weather? That is decidedly unclear.

As he faces a federal corruption investigation and also floats a potential run for Congress, the last thing Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno needs to do is upset his supposed allies in the Republican Party.But that may happen as a result of the surfacing of insulting and profanity-riddled audio recordings of Marceno talking about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and first lady Casey DeSantis — as well as presidential daughter Ivanka Trump — obtained by the Florida Trident.

A non-profit organization tied to the Florida Chamber of Commerce now at the center of the governor’s Hope Florida controversy involving the diversion of millions of dollars in state Medicaid settlement funds for political purposes, has a history of funneling money to political operatives attempting to sway election outcomes in Florida.

For Lee County Undersheriff John Holloway, the sheriff’s office is a family business.As if Holloway’s $280,000 public salary as second-in-command under embattled Sheriff Carmine Marceno weren’t enough, now his wife, lawyer Kathleen Holloway, has been added to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office payroll at $155,000 a year, bringing the couple’s total take from the agency to more than $430,000 annually, internal LCSO documents show.State ethics law forbids public officials like John Holloway from not only hiring relatives but also from advocating for relatives to be hired at their own agencies. The sheriff’s office maintains it wasn’t the undersheriff but Marceno himself who “recruited” Kathleen Holloway after an as yet unnamed outside law firm determined the hiring didn’t pose a legal issue for the undersheriff.

When the Sarasota County Commission narrowly approved a $7.5 million federal disaster recovery grant to a startup nonprofit last fall, it was sold as a cornerstone of workforce recovery for trade apprenticeship programs after Hurricane Ian.Just days after the vote, Jon Mast—CEO of the Building Industry Institute (BII) which received the grant—was photographed at a party, cigar in mouth, beer in hand, donning a custom T-shirt that read: “$7.5 Million.”The optics of the photo did not sit well with many Sarasota residents.And in a late move April 22, the county commissioners reallocated the grant.

What started as a routine city manager search unraveled into a public spectacle recently at Sarasota’s City Commission. The breakdown on Friday, April 11, played out over two separate meetings — a morning workshop and an afternoon special session — where commissioners openly admitted to confusion, mistrust, and having no clear path forward.Commissioners contradicted each other, the search firm hired to oversee the process struggled to provide basic materials and information, and the public was left in the dark — literally and figuratively — about how the process would move forward.

Seth Miller visited his client at North Florida’s Jackson Correctional Institution in February of 2019 with some good news. The client, Thomas Gilbert, was serving a life sentence for a 1973 murder in North Miami Beach he always said he didn’t commit.That afternoon, Miller, the executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, informed Gilbert they had discovered powerful new evidence of his innocence that included police files from 1977 containing an entire reinvestigation of his case with multiple witness statements saying Gilbert was not present, the results of a polygraph Gilbert took “exculpating” him, and a confession from a man who said he was the one who actually committed the murder.

The March 27 announcement on the conservative website Florida’s Voice that Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno is considering a run for Congress was met with incredulity from some voters. According to his political consultant, Anthony Pedicini, Marceno is eying the Congressional seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running as President Donald Trump’s pick for governor.