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Gov. DeSantis delivers trucking education funds to Nassau County

Gov. Ron DeSantis has put in an order for additional trucker training in North Florida.

DeSantis granted $3.2 million to the Florida State College at Jacksonville to establish the Nassau County Transportation Education Institute, a commercial driving facility at the school’s Nassau campus. The facility will be able to support 120 graduates a year.

New truckers who go through the training can “make a lot of really good money right off the bat,” DeSantis told reporters.

“This will provide people with an ability to have very marketable skills,” he said. “I can tell you, if you go through this program successfully, you are going to get hired in the state of Florida — and be able to be hired elsewhere, if that’s what you choose, because there is such a strong demand and people are willing to pay good money to serve this.”

Trump-O’Reilly event at Amway Center sold just 5,406 tickets, despite predictions of sellout

The Donald Trump-Bill O’Reilly “History Tour” just sold 5,406 tickets for Sunday’s event at Amway Center in Orlando, city records show, despite earlier predictions of a sellout by organizers.

The listed capacity for the event of 8,700 didn’t include vast swaths of the upper bowl covered with a tarp before the event started, said Orlando spokeswoman Samantha Holsten, despite tickets for those seats being listed as available all the way until Sunday morning.

In total, records for the city-owned arena show that 6,201 people went through the turnstiles for the two-hour event, in which the former president repeated his usual litany of attacks on Democrats and Republicans alike and spread more falsehoods about the 2020 election.

In Miami-Dade, signs Christmas may overlap with a new COVID wave as omicron spreads

The fall brought a COVID lull in Miami-Dade County as administrators lifted emergency rules and virus statistics hit all-time lows. Those days are over, as Miami-Dade braces for the omicron variant’s full impact and holiday gatherings ramp up ahead of Christmas.

“We cannot allow our hospitals to be overwhelmed with cases,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a press conference Thursday announcing her revival of an emergency order requiring hospitals to report daily COVID patient counts, intensive-care availability and other pandemic metrics the county stopped collecting last month.

Miami-Dade is seeing a spike in COVID-19 tests coming back positive — an average of 7% now, versus 1% a month ago, according to county data. The first sequencing of viral results from those tests confirms a scattering of omicron cases in Miami-Dade, but experts assume the actual count will be much higher as analysis catches up with real-time results.

Orlando home prices keep going up; higher interest rates might not stop it

The housing market is still white-hot in Orlando, with inventory declining and home prices setting yet another record this year, and not even rising interest rates will slow it down much, one expert said.

In November, the median home price in metro Orlando hit $330,000, up $5,000 from October and the latest in a series of record-high prices set in a year of nearly uninterrupted increases, according to the Orlando Regional Realtor Association. The group includes sales from Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties in its reports.

Some of the fuel for the hot market came from mortgage interest rates being kept at or near historic lows this year. The average mortgage rate in November was 2.95% for a 30-year fixed loan.