Florida's Latest News

UF increases tuition fees for out-of-state students

University of Florida trustees voted Wednesday to approve a 10% fee increase for out-of-state students.

The flagship school did so after the Board of Governors paved the way last month for up to 10% increases this year and 15% increases next year at all 12 public universities.

The last time UF raised out-of-state fees for undergraduate students was in 2009, and in 2008 for graduate students.

Under the new rate, undergraduate students paying a fee of about $707 per credit hour will now pay nearly $778 per credit hour. For a 15-credit hour semester, that’s a difference of more than $2,000 per year. Financial aid will increase by about $3 per credit hour.

Graduate students, who previously paid about $690 per credit hour, will now pay nearly $760 per credit hour. Financial aid will increase by nearly $3.50 per credit hour.

Those increases alone are estimated to generate close to $19 million in additional revenue for UF, according to a Board of Governors analysis.

How to get around: County has high hopes for transportation master plan

To anyone living in Palm Beach County, it has become clear that rapid growth means more traffic and fewer ways to get around.

Welcome to the countywide transportation master plan.

“What we’re really doing here is helping you through the process of deciding what your county is going to be like when it grows up,” said planner Victor Dover at the kickoff event Friday for the county’s one-year, $1 million master planning effort.

The Coral Gables planner is part of a team headed by international engineering and planning conglomerate WSP, which has assigned its Atlanta-based Southeast region executive, Claudia Bilotto, to head the project. 

The effort dates to February 2024, when the County Commission met with the League of Cities to discuss adding to the sales tax an extra 1-cent for every dollar spent. Voters approved such a tax for construction needs in cities, schools and the county in 2016 but it expires this year. 

At the meeting, county commissioners decided voters would be hard-pressed to approve such a tax in 2024, especially with the School District seeking (and getting) a half-cent tax. Commissioners decided the county and the cities would have a better chance if they could build support for the tax through a study prioritizing how the money would be spent.   

DOL: Florida’s unemployment claims drop 16.1% from last week

New unemployment claims in Florida saw a 16.1% decrease for the week ending July 19.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) shows there were 6,254 first-time jobless filings last week. That’s a substantial decline from the 7,335 claims made for the week ending July 12.

It’s the latest report in what’s been an erratic Summer for initial unemployment claims.

Before Summer, the majority of reports saw decreases for Florida, with only occasional increases. But June started off with an abnormal increase, swelling the number of new claims above the 8,000 mark. That’s the highest number of new claims seen this year. The numbers have surged up and down since.

Florida’s latest decline is in line with the national trend. There were 215,792 initial jobless filings in America last week. That’s a 17.4% drop from the previous week, a decline of 45,319 filings.

That’s more significant than DOL analysts had expected. Economists projected a 15.8% dip in new claims, or a drop of 41,275.

The new national report also showed a decrease in the year-over-year comparison. There were 225,839 initial unemployment filings for the same comparative week in 2024.

While initial jobless filings have shown instability for the past two months, that stands in contrast to Florida’s general unemployment rate. That figure stood at 3.7% for June.

A new future begins in Biscayne Bay with planting 'coral babies'

Emotions ran high one recent Sunday morning on Biscayne Bay, where University of Miami marine researchers bid farewell to the "coral babies" they’d nurtured for months.

Kate Etter, a coral recruit technician at UM's Coral Reef Futures Lab, was at the dock of Diver’s Paradise at Crandon Marina to see the new breed of coral off to their first planting in the reefs.

“Without coral, we’re not going to have different types of fish or different types of herbivores that, together, work in a group to create a thriving environment,” she said.

These elkhorn coral babies, affectionately called “Flonduran” corals by researchers at the UM Rosenstiel School were planted in Biscayne Bay on July 1. It is the first time internationally crossbred corals have ever been planted in wild reefs.

UM professor Andrew Baker said that restoration efforts for Florida’s dwindling coral reefs don’t fit the perception most people read in history books. He teaches marine biology and ecology at the UM Rosenstiel School. He's also director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab.

“It's gonna be very difficult to go back to the reefs of the past,” he said. “I think restoration these days has as its goal a way of securing the biodiversity, the species diversity that we have."