02/27/2025 ISSUE 09

The Sebastian River Medical Center turned out to draw a purchase price almost twice as high as it originally appeared following announcement of Orlando Health’s plans to imminently close the largest of the three Indian River and Brevard county hospitals it acquired After setting the standard for comprehensive cancer care in Vero Beach for the past decade, Scully-Welsh Cancer Center at Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital is forging ahead into the future with the goal of leaving no one behind – regardless of ability to pay. Planning for a second deNews 1-16 Arts 51-56 Books 46 Dining 70-72 Editorial 42 Games 47-49 Health 57-66 Insight 37-50 People 17-36 Pets 73 Real Estate 75-88 Style 67-69 February 27, 2025 Volume 18, Issue 9 Newsstand Price $2.00 TO ADVERTISE CALL 772-559-4187 FOR CIRCULATION CALL 772-226-7925 New tool for treating atrial fibrillation. P58 ‘Moveable Feast’ gala was ooh-la-la. P18 St. Ed’s grad designs $285M Manalapan mansion. P15 Charity golfers chip (and putt) in for seniors. Page 22 © 2025 Vero Beach 32963 Media LLC. All rights reserved. For breaking news visit The City of Vero Beach failed to complete an audit of its financials for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2023, and file a copy as required with the State of Florida on time in 2024, a mistake it still hasn’t rectified that will cost taxpayers at least a quarter of a million dollars, and which could potentially put $32 million of yet-to-be-awarded utility grants in jeopardy. This unprecedented failure was kept from the public and not formally brought to the attention of the Vero Beach City Council by City Manager Monte Falls or Mayor John Cotugno for more than three months. (See accompanying columns on how this unfolded, and who knew what when.) As the man who oversees Vero Beach’s daily municipal operations, City Manager Monte Falls understands that he can delegate authority to department heads and other staff supervisors. He may not, however, delegate responsibility. Ultimately, then, Falls must take the hit for the failure of his finance department to complete an annual audit of Vero Beach’s fiscal-year 2022- 23 financials and submit the required report to the state on time. And he knows it. “Everything falls on my shoulders, and I accept that responsibility,” Falls said last week as he scrambled to mitigate the damage done by the debacle, which will cost city taxpayers at least $250,000 in sales-tax revenue, could jeopFailure to complete, file 2022-23 audit blindsides Council BY LISA ZAHNER Staff Writer CONTINUED ON PAGE 12 Sebastian hospital’s true value comes to light Scully-Welsh on bold, costly comprehensive cancer-care mission Anatomy of a debacle: How and why it all went wrong BY LISA ZAHNER Staff Writer BY LISA ZAHNER Staff Writer How could the City of Vero Beach – a municipality with a veteran city manager, a professional finance staff, one of the nation’s largest accounting firms as its outside auditor, and a City Council to ask questions and provide oversight – have gotten itself into the current financial mess? In the past week, Vero Beach 32963 has tried to reconstruct the sequence of events leading up to state agencies blocking Vero’s access to at least a quarter-million dollars in state funds, CONTINUED ON PAGE 9 CONTINUED ON PAGE 6 ‘I own this’: Falls and city in full crisis mode MY VERO BY RAY MCNULTY BY LISA ZAHNER Staff Writer PHOTOS BY JOSHUA KODIS City Hall blunder sees State move to cut off funds to Vero Beach CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

2 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ as a package deal from bankrupt Steward Healthcare. The disclosure last week that Orlando Health intends to bulldoze the 300- bed Rockledge hospital means it spent $439 million for the three-hospital package but only really wanted two of them – the much smaller Orlando Health Sebastian with 178 licensed beds, and Orlando Health Melbourne with only 119 beds. In closing Rockledge, Orlando Health turns out to have paid more than $400 million not for a 697-bed cluster of hospitals but only 397 beds. “Prior to its acquiring Rockledge Hospital, the healthcare system was aware that years of neglect had left the facility in such poor condition that it did not meet the system’s standards for patient care environments,” an Orlando Health spokesperson said. “Following in-depth inspections that could only occur after acquisition, it was determined that the cost to repair and renovate Rockledge Hospital far exceeds the cost of a new, state-of-theart hospital. Accordingly, a decision has been made to close the facility. This decision is necessary to ensure the safety of patients and team members.” The Rockledge hospital, which opened in 1941 and expanded piecemeal over the decades, serves some of the poorest areas of Brevard County. The Sebastian Hospital, on the other hand, has a $65 million, 90,000-squarefoot tower expansion that Steward opened in 2020 and serves some of the fastest growing areas of Indian River County in Sebastian and Fellsmere. Orlando Health clearly was eager to get a foothold in the county, hoping to capitalize on the unique market opportunity created by Cleveland Clinic’s bad luck to have taken over Indian River Hospital right before a global pandemic. The Sebastian hospital’s eight brandnew operating theaters in the tower stayed open for all kinds of knee and hip replacements and other non-emergency procedures during the sevenmonth period when Cleveland Clinic and other hospitals with big COVID wards could only operate on emergent patients. Sebastian shipped the bulk of its COVID patients to Brevard County, and Vero surgeons went where they could still make money during the pandemic. Barrier island patients grew accustomed to being scheduled for surgeries in Sebastian, though many had never before stepped foot in that hospital. Orlando Health’s big and costly challenges going forward in Sebastian stem from deferred maintenance on older parts of the hospital, and on major systems and pricey equipment likely not serviced or calibrated after vendors stopped getting paid. Meanwhile, Orlando Health Melbourne, only 23 years old, sits at the edge of Brevard’s exploding hi-tech and defense corridor, with L3Harris, Northrup-Grumman and other big firms operating in space that resembles college campuses. That means loads of younger people with excellent group health plans. The hospital borders the city limits of rapidly growing West Melbourne, with high-end new housing communities sprawling way past Interstate 95. Orlando Health Melbourne enjoys a lucrative surgery trade thanks to a major surgical suite expansion and bustling outpatient surgery center. Orlando Health says it plans to ultimately build a new Brevard hospital from scratch, but that will take years.  NEWS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Orlando Health Sebastian PHOTO BY JOSHUA KODIS

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 3 cade and beyond, Scully-Welsh is doubling the number of its specialized oncology physicians and surgeons, drastically cutting wait times for an appointment, and better utilizing top cancer experts across the Cleveland Clinic network. By adding capacity and eventually a $30-million third-floor expansion to the Scully-Welsh building, hospital Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard Rothman looks to meet the needs of Indian River County’s growing, aging population. In 2024 the United States hit a grim milestone – 2 million new cancer cases. In Vero Beach, one in three patients seeking cancer treatment has lymphoma, leukemia or another type of blood cancer. One in five local patients needs treatment for breast cancer or a gynecological malignancy. Next common is gastrointestinal cancer, colon cancer and abdominal cancers, accounting for 17 percent of local cases. One in 10 local cancer patients presents with lung cancer, and another one in 10 with genitourinary cancers (kidney, bladder and prostate). Head and neck cancers make up roughly 5 percent of those treated at ScullyWelsh. Better cancer screening, early detection and targeted therapies offer patients greater survival odds and better post-treatment lives. The catch? The explosion of advances in modern cancer care carries a high price tag. “Most medications are cost-prohibitive for many patients, and the cost of many of those drugs is far beyond what we get reimbursed,” Rothman said. Chemotherapy drugs can cost $15,000 per dose for the medication alone, plus the cost of oncologists, pharmacists, infusion suites and nursing staff. Cutting-edge biologic and immunotherapy treatments can run into six figures. In 2024, Cleveland Clinic treated 4,725 chemotherapy patients at Scully-Welsh, up 20 percent from 3,949 patients in 2023. Of those, 589 either had no means to pay or were on Medicaid. The most common cancers treated in this charity-care group were various types of cancers of the blood (179 patients), breast cancer (186 patients), head and neck cancers (48 patients) and malignancies of the gastrointestinal tract such as colon cancer (94 patients). The total cost of just the chemotherapy drugs for these indigent patients was $1.4 million. “We’re not just offering it to patients who have a payer or who can self-pay, and there's no other place in the county where they can go for that care,” Rothman said, noting that he’ll be hiring five new hematologists and medical oncologists soon to expand chemo access. Cleveland Clinic is still negotiating with the Indian River County Hospital District to obtain $13.6 million in taxpayer money over four years for charity care, some of which would underwrite chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. “Not everyone is getting the care they need. How do we both internally and externally partner to ensure that all members of the community are able to have access to this care? It’s a complex conversation made more complicated by the finances of delivering healthcare today,” he said. Radiation oncology – the use of targeted high-energy waves to shrink tumors and relieve pain – is in high demand in Vero Beach with 40 to 50 treatments performed per day. On average in the U.S., one typical NEWS CONTINUED ON PAGE 4 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Scully-Welsh Cancer Center

4 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ 10-minute treatment costs $5,000 to $10,000. In 2024, Cleveland Clinic delivered 11,825 radiation oncology treatments, up 3 percent from 2023. Of the pa- tients treated with radiation in 2024, there were 279 who were unable to pay – an increase of 400 percent in the past five years. “The Scully-Welsh Cancer Center Radiation Oncology Department is one of the most advanced radiotherapy centers in Florida,” Rothman said, noting that much of the high-tech equipment now used in Vero is even newer than machines at Cleveland Clinic Florida’s flagship Weston hospital. Radiation oncologist Dr. Marc Apple, a Cleveland Clinic Florida doctor who moved his practice to Vero, used the TrueBeam to treat a patient with prostate cancer during Vero Beach 32963’s tour of the center “We have the only technology in Indian River County, such as multiple TrueBeam radiation therapy machines that offers precise and fast radiotherapy. This allows for sub-millimeter accuracy to enhance elimination of cancer while minimizing side effects and enhancing the safety of the radiation therapy,” Rothman said. “A radical prostatectomy may have side effects that are well beyond what the patient may be willing to tolerate, where radiation therapy for that same prostate cancer may allow for him to preserve his quality of life and not have to undergo surgery.” Rothman said patients come from across the Treasure Coast, and he expects that number to grow as he’s hired a third radiation oncologist to help handle the caseload. Nearly 900 patients had cancer surgery of the head and neck, lung, prostate, GI tract, skin, spine, brain and breast – with simultaneous breast reconstruction. A second reconstructive plastic surgery specialist, and a third head-and neck specialist have just been hired. No matter the type of cancer, the stage to which it’s progressed, patients typically want answers and a treat- ment plan immediately after getting an initial cancer diagnosis. Rothman has charged ScullyWelsh’s Co-Directors Dr. Brian Burkey and Lori McCormick with getting every new cancer patient seen as soon or sooner than they would be able to get an appointment at an out-of-town cancer center – but that will take more work to achieve. “If a patient calls and we say we can see them in a week, and they call Moffitt and Moffitt says they can get them in tomorrow, they’re going to drive three hours to Tampa. That’s an excruciating week,” Rothman said. “In addition to best-in-class outcomes and experiences for patients with cancer and those caregivers treating them, the Scully-Welsh Cancer Center leadership’s primary focus is ensuring pa- tients needing urgent evaluations for a diagnosis of cancer can be seen im- mediately and do not have to wait to see a clinician.” When at its full complement of physicians, Cleveland Clinic Indian River will employ 30 local doctors and surgeons specializing in cancer, including two palliative care experts. Even with those reinforcements, rare and complex cancers may require a second opinion, so Rothman pur- chased a $600,000 digital pathology machine in January so high-resolution tumor images can be sent to specialists who exclusively treat certain cancers at Cleveland Clinic’s locations worldwide. “Our sites across the globe work together. So as the enterprise depart- ment chair, my role is to make sure the quality of care provided in Ohio, in Florida, and in Abu Dhabi is going to be the same,” said Dr. Jame Abraham, who heads up Cleveland Clinic’s main campus Hematology and Medical Oncology Department, speaking at the Feb. 18 Becker’s Oncology Summit. He’s treated and researched only breast cancer for decades, so Vero doc- tors can bring Abraham in to consult. “So let's just say, there is a complicated case we have in Abu Dhabi. They're discussing it at our tumor board in Ohio. It’s similar to a complicated case in London that will be discussed in a meeting in Ohio,” he said. “We learn from each other, share our expertise across our geographical sites. And so that's the clinical care. And then of course, the science is the same way.” “It’s really a team of teams working together to take care of our patients,” Abraham said. McCormick coordinates all those teams at the Scully-Welsh Cancer Center. Brought on in 2014 to head up am- bulatory care while the cancer center was still under construction, McCor- mick ensures the front-desk greeter, surgeons, post-op nurses in the main hospital, pharmacists, infusion techs, volunteers and appointment setters work collaboratively. “We have a lot of patients who have the means to go back home to get their treatment, but they choose to stay here, even through the summer, because it’s such a comprehensive cancer program,” McCormick said. “The staff here is wonderful. They love our nurses. They are all chemotherapy and biotherapy certified, which brings NEWS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 Scully-Welsh Cancer Center CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

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6 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ NEWS 3001 Ocean Drive # 105, Vero Beach, FL 32963 772-231-2060 The Finest Pre-Owned Rolex Watches Le Classique Jewelers and Watchmakers Every Rolex watch comes backed with our 1 year warranty. All Rolex service and repairs are done on premises. Jewelry repair available. Get the Best Price For Your Pre-Owned Rolex We are proud to deliver exceptional customer service and high value offers for your pre-owned Rolex. As your trusted and reputable local jeweler, we make selling your watch a smooth experience with our guaranteed offers. CONTINUED ON PAGE 8 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 Scully-Welsh Cancer Center a greater level of expertise to the care they give.” But it’s not just about surgeries and chemo, radiation and rehabilitation. Scully-Welsh Cancer Center offers yoga classes, acupuncture, nutritional counseling, smoking cessation classes and even talk-therapy and support groups for patients and family members living with the realities of cancer. “We offer massage therapy, reiki therapy,” McCormick said. “We have a wig program to help patients who have lost their hair. A lot of it is body image disturbance. Nobody wants to experience that, but this program really helps the patient feel whole again.” Local donors who designate gifts for cancer patients enable Cleveland Clinic Foundation to provide these integrative health services gratis. “Individuals who have suffered through something like a cancer benefit from being around others who also have been through that. There’s been a lot of data to support yoga therapy for patients with cancer, but it's more than just yoga,” Rothman said. “It’s the ability to interact with people who have been through the same thing that you have – who have lost their hair, who have had major surgery, who have sat in that room,” Rothman said. Once cancer treatment concludes, Scully-Welsh Cancer Center enrolls patients in its Survivorship Program to maintain access to oncologists and assist the patient’s primary care physicians. Since research shows compliance with follow-up care, physical therapy and screenings improves when care is closer to home, “Scully-Welsh Cancer Center offers the ability for patients who start treatment in a different center to continue their cancer care at Scully-Welsh,” Rothman said. “The recovery journey for patients is complex and has different steps depending on the type of cancer and the treatment,” he said. “Patients at Scully-Welsh Cancer Center can transition from diagnosis to treatment to living life in remission or cancerfree.”  Dr. Ellis Ziel explains how some of the medical equipment at the Scully Welsh Cancer Center is used to help patients. PHOTO BY JOSHUA KODIS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Vero’s audit debacle After the Florida Joint Legislative Auditing Committee voted on Feb. 10 to put 34 noncompliant municipalities around the state – most of them, except for Vero, tiny rural towns and cities – on 30-day notice that they’d lose access to most state funding starting in early April, Vero Beach 32963 attempted to contact City Manager Monte Falls. When he finally returned the call eight days later with the city attorney on the line, Falls said he had been “flabbergasted” by the news and had promptly begun an inquiry. He said that on Feb. 17, he had informed the City Council of the noncompliance problem and the impending cutoff of state funding. He also said he had asked for City Finance Director Steve Dionne’s resignation. Dionne could not be reached for comment. If Vero had been able to get its FY 2022-23 audited financials completed and filed by this Friday, Feb. 28, the en- .dediova neeb evah dluoc tnemecrof But according to Falls, who said he planned to provide a full explanation of the debacle to the City Council this

8 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ week, the earliest the work now could be completed would be mid-April. Vero’s audited financials for FY 2022- 23 should have come before the City Council to be reviewed and voted on a year ago, as councils have done like clockwork every March or April for decades. In fact, every year since 1983 until this past year, the City of Vero Beach has won accolades for its financial reporting. National accounting firm Cherry Bekaert’s accountants were selected by the city back in 2012 to review Vero’s books and accounting processes annually, and produce the required reports, opinions and financial schedules the city staff needs to file each year with the State of Florida. Cherry Bekaert has a whole Government and Public Sector division which does this type of work. The city pays the firm $38,500 per year for auditing services. The audit typically takes a few months to complete, with city finance staff providing access to bank statements, electronic records, personnel who handle cash, and anything the auditor needs to spot-check accounting accuracy. The auditor does not file the financial paperwork for the city, like a CPA might file a tax return. Auditors only conduct the audit and produce the financial statements the city needs to file to comply with Florida Statutes. It’s yet to be seen if Vero Beach will need to delay or cut expenses or projects from the city budget once the full extent of the losses from the failure to file are realized. Monthly draws of Vero’s share of certain state sales taxes will be forfeited and returned to the state’s general fund on the 15th of the month until accountants finalize the audited financial statements, the Vero City Council accepts the results, and the city files the audited financials with the state. According to the city’s published budget, Vero was set to receive $1.5 million in optional half-cent sales tax money this fiscal year. Assuming those funds are doled out in equal monthly draws, and Vero misses the April and May payments, that’s a quarter-million in lost revenue that will need to be cut from the city’s expenses, or drained from reserves. Other types of funding will be withheld until the state receives and reviews the audit, notifies the Florida Department of Revenue and all relevant agencies managing grant funding process reimbursement requests. If all that is not accomplished by the NEWS June 30th close of the State of Florida’s fiscal year, all that funding will likely be lost. Those other sources of funding total nearly $3 million for this fiscal year, based upon estimates in the city’s current budget. Utilities Director Rob Bolton’s department could take the biggest hit from the enforcement measure, but like the city council members, Bolton was kept in the dark about the city’s failure to file the audited financials. Bolton found out from Vero Beach 32963 on Feb. 12. The Utility Department is in the midst of numerous costly projects, including the construction of the city’s new sewer plant at the Vero Beach Regional Airport. At last check the price tag on that project is about $340 million, plus debt service. All told the new plant will cost close to three quarters of a billion dollars. State grant money is expected to cover tens of millions of dollars of the cost. For grants already approved, Bolton can delay submitting deliverables and reimbursement requests until the city gets compliant (as long as it’s all nailed down before June 30), but the real risk lies in three grants Bolton has applied for but that have not yet been awarded. The three pending grants total $32 million needed to build critical utility infrastructure to protect the lagoon, and to move forward with the Three Corners project. A $15.2 million Water Quality Grant would help fund the Water Reclamation Facility, and a $1.8 million Indian River Lagoon Water Quality Grant would help pay for converting septic systems onto the expanded sanitary sewer system with Septic Tank Effluent Pump (STEP) systems. A $15 million Alternative Water Supply Grant would help pay for an additional deep well to send more drinking water supply to the city’s reverse osmosis system. “The portals closed for these grants back in July-August 2024. The rankings for these should be done. The award notice is late. Last year it was before Christmas. I was told awards would be revealed in January but nothing has been awarded yet,” Bolton said. Grant applications generally compete with proposals from all over the state for a limited pool of Florida Department of Environmental Protection funds. Top-ranked projects get the money. It’s unclear how the city’s noncompliance might impact the fate of grants that have not yet been awarded for funds not yet encumbered. “The ranking for these projects are based on benefit to the environment. They do have a financial match (50:50) requirement as part of the ranking. I am CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Vero’s audit debacle

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 9 and putting $32 million of grants in limbo. At midnight on Sept. 30, 2022, the City of Vero Beach concluded one fiscal reporting year and started the next. Soon after, then-Finance Director Cindy Lawson began readying the city’s books for the upcoming 2021-22 audit with accountants from Cherry Bekaert, a national firm hired not aware of a ranking component that would look at the status of our audit,” Bolton said. “These grants are construction grants so we have to front the money and then ask for a reimbursement.” If those grants are lost, these important programs could be delayed until the next grant award cycle, or the costs that would have been covered by the state will be paid by Vero taxpayers, and by Vero Utilities ratepayers inside the city, in the Town of Indian River Shores and on the unincorporated South Barrier Island.  NEWS CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 How it all went wrong

10 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ a dozen years ago to perform the annual independent review of city finances. After the bulk of that audit was concluded, Lawson announced her retirement. City Comptroller Kelley Brost was tapped as Interim Finance Director while City Manager Monte Falls advertised the job and vetted candidates. On April 18, 2023 the Vero Beach City Council approved a resolution switching the official bank signatory from Lawson to Brost. The day before her April 21, 2023 departure, Lawson delivered the city’s fiscal 2021-22 financial reports, along with the audited financial statements from Cherry Bekaert, to the Vero Beach City Council so those could be filed with the Florida Auditor General’s Office well ahead of the June 30, 2023 deadline. Falls had some difficulty finding eager, qualified applicants to replace her, so Brost remained as interim finance director until Steven Dionne was hired on June 19, 2023. Dionne had served as finance director for the Palm Beach County Health Department, an agency with a $108 million budget, so the state’s audit filing requirements and deadlines should have been no secret. Brost, upon stepping down from the interim position, was promoted to assistant finance director and that summer Brost and Dionne produced the city’s budget, which by law must be finalized by Sept. 30. Before that fiscal year ended, however, Brost resigned and on Sept. 25, 2023, a new assistant finance director, Hana Juman, was hired. Once the 2022-23 fiscal year closed, Dionne delegated the task of preparing the city’s books for the annual audit to new employee Juman, according to Falls. While the annual audit had long been presented to the City Council for approval in either March or April each year, those months came and went in 2024 with no audit – and no one on the council asking when they were going to see it. In June 2024, when it became evident that Vero was not going to meet the June 30 deadline for presenting the completed audit to the Florida Auditor General, Dionne requested a 90-day extension, stating on the request form: “The entire Senior Management Team for the Finance Department of the City of Vero Beach has turned over in the past year. Current management is working their way through the daily activities as well as producing the financial statements for audit and preparing FY 24-25 budget. We expect completion of the final close out of FY 22-23 no later than September 2024.” The June 30, 2024, deadline was missed. And while the deadline was extended, the new Sept. 30 deadline was missed as well. On Oct. 8, 2024, as Hurricane Milton was headed toward Florida’s East Coast, Falls declared a local state of emergency, and the following day, Vero was hit by devastating tornadoes. The Joint Legislative Auditing Committee (JLAC), which is tasked with enforcing financial reporting requirements on counties, cities, state agencies, school districts and special taxing districts, on Oct. 29, 2024 sent a notice of non-compliance to Mayor John Cotugno (copied to Falls and Dionne), requesting written acknowledgement of the notice, and setting a drop-dead deadline of Jan. 15, 2025, for filing 2022-23 financials. No one ever responded to the JLAC notice. Asked about this, Falls said Dionne “was out that day,” so he forwarded the notice to new Assistant Finance Director Juman. No one informed the City Council, either, that the Vero was out of compliance, or that city funding was in jeopardy. NEWS Tracey Zudans, who was serving on the City Council at that time, said the council knew nothing about all this. She said she was never told the staff had missed the filing deadline, and that the city risked losing state funding. “If Mayor Cotugno and the city manager knew about this and didn’t bring it to the attention of city council until it was too late, that seems like bad judgment to me. I worry sometimes about the common sense and competence in local government,” Zudans said when informed about the problem this past Sunday. Then on Nov. 18, 2024, Juman – who supposedly had been tasked with getting things ready for the FY 2022-23 audit – resigned. Her position remained empty for two months. In December 2024, City Manager Falls sought help from Rehman Consulting regarding the city’s accounting needs. On Jan. 13, 2025, new Assistant Finance Director Lisa Burnham was hired. Two days later, Vero missed the JLAC’s drop-dead deadline to file the 2022-23 financials, or to submit a detailed explanation of non-compliance. The City of Vero Beach was listed in an agenda packet of the JLAC as one of 34 Florida municipalities facing enforceCONTINUED ON PAGE 12 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 How it all went wrong

12 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ ardize more than $30 million in state grant money and might impact planned bond issues to fund municipal projects. “I own this,” he added emphatically. In fact, Falls said Sunday he planned to further discuss the situation with City Council members this week during the one-on-one sessions he conducts with them each Monday, then provide a public explanation at Tuesday’s council meeting. He said he would be willing to offer his resignation at that meeting if his conversations with individual council members revealed a lack of confidence in his leadership. As of late Sunday, however, Falls said he wasn’t planning to resign – and didn’t believe he needed to. Certainly, Falls was at fault for not showing a greater sense of urgency after Florida’s Joint Legislative Auditing Committee (JLAC) sent an Oct. 29th email to inform the city that it hadn’t yet filed its audited financial statement and needed to do so by Jan. 15 to avoid punitive action. He should’ve demanded immediate action and no-nonsense accountability from City Finance Director Steve Dionne, who, according to Falls, created this mess by not doing his job. Had Falls been tougher on Dionne, who was hired in June 2023 to replace the retired Cindy Lawson, the city could’ve avoided this uncomfortable and costly blunder. But there’s plenty of blame to go around: The city’s outside auditing firm, the City Council and even Vero Beach voters all contributed to this fiasco. We’ll start with Dionne, though, because filing annual financial statements – while among his most important duties, along with preparing budgets – should have been a routine task, especially for someone with 25 years of experience in accounting and budgeting. Apparently, it wasn’t. According to Falls, Dionne did not complete the audit or file the mandatory financial report in accordance with the state’s January deadline. Worse, Dionne never responded to the JLAC’s Oct. 29th email, nor did he request a filing extension that Falls said likely would have been granted if it had been submitted in a timely fashion. Dionne’s most inexplicable dereliction of duty, however, was that he never told Falls he hadn’t done either. “I was flabbergasted,” Falls said after Vero Beach 32963 contacted him two weeks ago to inform him that the city hadn’t yet submitted its financial report with the state. Vero Beach’s city manager since 2019, NEWS CONTINUED ON PAGE 14 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10 How it all went wrong ment action for failing to file its 2022- 23 financial reports and audit. At its Feb. 10 meeting, JLAC members voted to give the non-compliant municipalities until Feb. 28 to get into compliance or be referred to the Florida Department of Revenue for further action. Vero Beach 32963 covered the Feb. 10 JLAC proceedings in case matters pertaining to the Indian River Hospital District arose during the meeting, and was surprised to learn that Vero was in trouble with state regulators. On Feb. 11, the newspaper phoned Falls to get to the bottom of the problem. The following day, Falls and Cotugno received an official notice of the JLAC’s action. Rather than disclosing the problem to the other four members of the Vero Beach City Council, however, Falls contacted Florida House Rep. Robbie Brackett, a former Vero mayor, and asked for help getting an extension of time from JLAC. Meanwhile, Vero Beach 32963 contacted Vero Utilities Director Rob Bolton to ask how the JLAC enforcement might impact state grant funding CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 My Vero for city utility projects. No one had told Bolton of the city’s noncompliance in filing the financial reports. Falls finally returned a phone call to Vero Beach 32963 on Feb. 19, with City Attorney John Turner on the call, to explain that the city was trying to secure an extension of time, with Brackett’s help. Falls said he had informed the City Council of the noncompliance problem and potential loss of statefunding on Monday, Feb. 17. On Feb. 20, tVero Beach 32963 sent a series of questions to the JLAC staff about the City of Vero Beach’s status, and was told no exceptions to the new deadline would be made. This information was shared with Falls and Turner. Finance Director Dionne submitted his resignation to Falls on Feb. 20. On Feb. 25, Falls was scheduled to give a full report of the events to date, and reasons for the pending loss of state funding, to the Vero Beach City Council at its regular public meeting. On Friday, the JLAC’s Feb. 28 final deadline to comply will pass, as Falls estimated the audit won’t be completed until April. On March 3, the JLAC staff will forward notice to the Florida Department of Revenue to begin withholding most state funding to the City of Vero Beach, following a 30- day grace period, to begin March 4. In early April, the City of Vero Beach will begin to lose access to most state funding. On April 15, the city will forfeit one month’s draw from Vero’s share of the optional half-penny sales tax (approximately $125,000). By state statute, according to JLAC, those funds will be returned to the State of Florida’s general fund and cannot be recouped. Auditors Cherry Bekaert estimated that 2022-23 audited financials will be completed and submitted to the Vero Beach City Council on April 30 – if all goes perfectly. On May 15, the city will forfeit a second monthly payment of the City of Vero Beach’s share of 1/2-cent sales tax collected while the city was out of compliance (approximately $125,000). On June 15 the city may forfeit a third monthly draw of sales tax funding should it still not be in compliance. On June 30, the State of Florida will close its books for the 2024-25 fiscal year. Everything needed to restore and disburse any funds temporarily withheld from the City of Vero Beach must accomplished before the fiscal year closes on June 30. After June 30, any state revenue sharing Vero might have been entitled to recoup would be forfeited. 

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14 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ NEWS Falls said he promptly began an inquiry and quickly confirmed what he had been told. He felt blindsided and betrayed. He couldn’t believe that Dionne hadn’t warned him. With good reason: It’s difficult to imagine any of Vero’s other department heads conducting themselves in such an unprofessional manner. Falls meets with each of them on a weekly basis and, as recently as Sunday, he said he didn’t know why his finance director failed to take the actions necessary to avoid state-imposed sanctions. What Falls did know was that he could no longer rely on Dionne, who put him in this predicament, to help get him out of it. That’s why he asked him to resign. Dionne, who commuted to Vero Beach from his home in Port St. Lucie, could not be reached for comment. Mayor John Cotugno, meanwhile, joined Falls in wondering why Cherry Bekaert, the city’s auditing firm, didn’t notify the city when it became obvious the 2022-23 financial statement hadn’t yet been completed. “Where were the auditors?” Cotugno said. “They’ve been doing our audits for 10 years and they didn’t notice anyCONTINUED FROM PAGE 12 My Vero thing? They should’ve brought this to Monte’s attention, just to make sure he knew about it.” To be sure, Cotugno and the City Council didn’t make Falls’ job any easier, either, allowing unnecessary distractions to become priorities that placed greater demands on an undersized staff already burdened with three major projects. In addition to meeting the unprecedented challenges presented by the proposed development of the Three Corners site, planned relocation of the city’s wastewater-treatment plant and expansion of the municipal marina, Falls and his staff were too often forced to waste time and resources on frivolous issues. For example: There was no good reason for the council to again address in 2023 the previously failed attempts to reduce traffic lanes along the Twin Pairs through the city’s downtown. The time the staff devoted to the issue was considerable. Similarly, the council continues to ignore the will of the city’s voters, who in a November referendum sent a loudand-clear message that they’re fine with the evolution of the downtown district and see no need for any significant revitalization. Just last month, though – the council caved to pressure from a small-butpassionate group of downtown advocates and held a special-call meeting at night to explore the city’s options in the wake of the failed referendum. That meeting required Falls and other staffers to prepare for and attend the two-hour session, squandering valuable time and energy that could’ve been put to far better use. Falls and his staff also have been required to deal with: a tenant-insurance crisis at the Vero Beach Regional Airport; a failed attempt to remove Police Chief David Currey; a county resident’s requests for hundreds of public records; and the council’s change of plans for replacing the Humiston Beach boardwalk. Oh, and let’s not forget the city’s allhands-on-deck response to – and cleanup following – the Hurricane Miltonspawned tornadoes that tore through the Central Beach area in early October. More recently, Councilman John Carroll requested Falls’ staff provide extensive updates on the progress of various city projects, requiring department heads to make presentations. Such asks are not unreasonable. Then, however, there’s Councilman Taylor Dingle directing Falls and his staff to needlessly waste more time and resources looking into the possibility of removing fluoride from the city’s drinking water – even though that decision will almost certainly be made at the state level. That kind of silliness needs to stop, especially as the continuing surge in the county’s population places increased demands on the city’s infrastructure and services. Given the city’s relatively small size and limited resources, the council might already be taking on too much at the same time, asking Falls’ undermanned staff to juggle three major projects. There’s no margin for error. So when one department head doesn’t do his job – and doesn’t tell anyone – the city finds itself confronting a systemic failure that could have catastrophic consequences. None of these reasons, though, excuse Falls’ failure to hold Dionne’s feet to the fire, especially after the city received the Oct. 29 non-compliance notice from the state. Falls should have recognized the potential consequences, especially with the city engaged in several major projects, and ordered Dionne to promptly respond to the notice – then made sure that he did. He should have required Dionne to send him a copy of the city’s response by the end of the next business day and regularly followed up by demanding to see hard evidence of his progress on the audit. Instead, Falls forwarded the JLAC email to the finance department and trusted that Dionne would do his job. “I did check in with him,” Falls said. “I went to him in November and again in December, and I asked him if he had everything he needed to get the audit done. I asked him: ‘Do you need anything? Do you need extra resources? Do you need help?’ “He said no, and I took him at his word,” he added. “I meet with my department heads every week, and every time I asked the finance director about the audit, he said they were working on it. “I can’t solve a problem I don’t know exists.” That’s true, but Falls knew a problem existed on Oct. 29 – and he should have done more than simply offer additional resources. He should have known his trust was misplaced. Now, Falls is confronting an emergency and doing damage control, working to minimize the repercussions by making sure another deadline isn’t missed after learning last week that the JLAC had told this newspaper it would not grant the city an extension. But he continues to hold out hope that the committee’s members might yet be swayed by the intervention of State Representative Robbie Brackett, a former Vero Beach mayor, and a detailed explanation of the obstacles the city encountered in producing its financials. To ensure the city submits its financial audit before the end of the state’s fiscal year on June 30 and avoids further penalties, Falls is bringing in an additional outside accountant, Sea Oaks resident Michael Haesche, on a contract basis to help now-interim Finance Director Lisa Burnham. Falls said he contacted Lawson, who served as the city’s finance director for 12 years before retiring in April 2023, in hopes that she might be willing to ride to the city’s rescue. She turned him down. Since Lawson’s departure, the city’s finance department has been rocked by turnover: During Dionne’s 20 months as her successor, two assistant directors resigned and two were hired, the most recent of which was Burnham. “She’s competent and pleasant,” Falls said of Burnham, who worked in municipal government in Michigan for 25 years before joining the city last month. She’ll also need to be dependable to ease the angst Falls has felt the past couple of weeks, which he described as the most stressful stretch of his 34 years in the city’s employ. But Falls isn’t going anywhere. He cares about the city and takes pride in his performance. He has proven himself to be competent, and he’s generally well-liked and respected by city staffers. Could Falls have handled this situation better? Yes, but to jettison him over Dionne’s mind-boggling inaction would’ve been shortsighted. Falls did what honorable leaders do: He delegated authority, and when it went bad, he took responsibility. 

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 15 NEWS St. Edward’s grad Paul Fischman has been designing fabulous houses for a while, but the Miami architect’s career hit a new high when plans for a stunning 55,000-square-foot estate in Manalapan came on the market with an asking price of $285 million. Located 12 miles south of The Breakers in Palm Beach and only a quarter mile from an ocean inlet, the project has the highest price tag of any home currently listed in the United States. “This is the largest and most expensive residence we have designed,” said Fischman, one of three partners at Choeff Levy Fischman, a leader in the Tropical Modern style that has captivated Florida’s rapidly growing band of billionaire homebuyers. Some of those buyers are already circling, according to Douglas Elliman listing agent Nick Malinosky. “I have been amazed by the level of interest at that price point,” he told Vero Beach 32963 last week. Developed by former Manalapan mayor Stewart Satter, who has done multiple projects in the town, the planned estate sits on 4 acres extending from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Worth Lagoon, with 350 feet of frontage on both waterfronts. It includes a 41,500 main house and guest house on the lagoon side that encompass 8 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, 5 half-baths, a steam room, sauna and spa, a 4-lane bowling alley, an indoor shooting range and a 6,800-square-foot, glass-walled car museum, all encased in the superb Tropical Modern architecture that is Fischman’s calling card. There is also a beach house on the ocean side of the property, with a connecting tunnel under South Ocean Boulevard, which bisects the parcel. The project is being marketed as land and plans, a method increasingly popular with $100-million-plus spec homes in South Florida. “Before COVID, we were doing 50 percent specs that we built and sold and 50 percent custom homes,” said Robert Burrage, owner of RWB Construction Management, the builder attached to the project. “Now it is almost all custom homes, really, because the specs are selling before they come out of the ground, which allows us to modify the design to suit the buyer, saving them six or eight months of headaches and getting them in the house faster.” That is what happened in 2022 at a Satter/Burrage project at 1260 S. Ocean Blvd., a mile north of the $285-million estate. There, Satter bought a 1.5-acre ocean to lagoon lot for $15.5 million, commissioned plans and secured permits for a 27,500-square-foot home and listed the package for $125 million. Shortly afterward, he sold the land and plans to Campbell Soup heiress billionaire Mary Alice Dorrance Malone for $40 million, who proceeded to have Burrage build a modified version of the planned house. Burrage said he and Satter have worked together for 15 years, developing luxury homes in Palm Beach and Martin counties, where they have multiple $100-million projects underway at present. Burrage has also worked with Fischman on prior ultra-luxury homes. “Candidly, Stewart selected me not just to build the house but to put together the team,” Burrage said. “Once we decided to move ahead, Paul was the first person I thought of. My first phone call was to Choeff Levy Fischman. “We think they bring the most value to the project. They have an edgy, contemporary style that is fresh, dramatic and in demand. It’s what billionaires moving to Florida want and we know they will do it right.” “I had met Satter over the years and we had been trying to work together,” Fischman said. “When he saw a chance to shake up the market in Manalapan, he and Robert wanted us to be part of it. “At this point, Choeff Levy Fischman is synonymous with record-breaking sales, and they wanted to tap our style and reputation. “I took my body of work and my 23 years of listening to what our clients want and designed the project as if all those clients and customers over the years were a single composite person. “Satter and Robert had a few fundamentals they wanted, such as the number of bedrooms and the car museum, but other than that, they gave me free reign and I threw the dream program on the design, making it the ideal of what these kinds of buyers want.” Fischman said it took him, two CLF senior project managers and a project designer about three months to create the design. Despite that long, painstaking, highly technical creative process, Fischman isn’t married to every detail or even every major component of the design. After more than two decades in his profession, steel, glass, stone, wood – and space – are easily malleable in his mind. “Any time you build a house like this, there are constant changes due to the materials, technology and the buyers, so it is no problem to reshape the vision to suit whoever purchases this project,” he said. “I was on a OAC [owner, architect, builder] call last week for one of our projects where we made 20 design changes in an hour. It’s part of the process when you are building at this level for these kinds of clients.” And the clients keep coming. Fischman, Burrage and Malinosky all say the influx of super-wealthy buyers into Florida that began during the pandemic is gaining momentum. “The volume of wealth that has poured in the past five years is hard to comprehend,” said Burrage. “We are basically building for billionaires now, which is a huge change from five years ago. It was always wealthy people, but nothing like we are seeing now.” “Hundred-million-dollar properties are becoming normal,” said Malinosky, who handled the sale of Satter’s 1260 S. Ocean project in 2022. Fischman said there are two main types of big buyers. “Palm Beach attracts more conservative, generational wealth, including a lot of the high-end equestrian crowd. You may get a Rockefeller or a Kennedy, people who are not flashy, while Miami pulls more high-profile types who are St. Ed’s grad designs home with highest price tag in the U.S. BY STEVEN M. THOMAS Staff Writer CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

16 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ in the news, people with cultural cache as well as financial means. “Miami has become the new Monaco, Silicon Valley and New York City rolled into one in the past few years,” said Fischman, a snowballing process that has developed symbiotically as the uber-rich and famous arrive in private jets, build trophy homes and attract more people from the upper echelons of finance and culture in their wake. Jeff Bezos, the second-richest man in world, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffen, soccer star Lionel Messi, David Beckham and real estate superstar Fredrick Ecklund are among those who have arrived in South Florida since COVID-19 upended the world. Wealth builds on itself in multiple ways, pushing real estate prices higher. When Bezos splurges $235 million on lots on Indian Creek Island in Miami as he has in the past several years, adjacent lots become much more valuable. According to Page Six, soccer legend Beckham paid $25 million to start Inter Miami CF, where Messi now plays. It became a major league soccer franchise in 2020 and is now worth over $1 billion, making the hard-charging city richer and more exciting for sports fans and people draw to urban action and celebrity vibes. Following on, Beckham and his wife Victoria bought a $72-million house on the water in Miami Beach last year, paying more than $5,000 a square foot for the Choeff Levy Fischman-designed home, where they park their 130-foot Bellissima yacht. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison – the fourth richest person in the world, according to Bankrate – juiced the market in Manalapan when he showed up NEWS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 $285 million residence in 2022, paying $173 million for the estate next to Satter’s $285-million project. Last year, he added Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa to his Manalapan holdings, spending $277 million for the town’s only hotel, where rooms start at $1,000 a night and suites go for over $3,000 a night in season, pouring money into upgrading the resort, which doubles as a club for town residents. Meanwhile, across the lagoon, real estate billionaire Stephen Ross, founder of Related Companies and owner of the Miami Dolphins, is in the midst of spending $10 billion to upgrade the city of West Palm Beach into a national tech and luxury center, according to the Wall Street Journal, pouring $500 million into a university campus, pushing a $600-million hospital plan, and developing lots of retail and office space and luxury condos that are setting new benchmarks for value. After a while, it all starts to add up, with a more spectacular built environment, larger numbers of interesting and influential people and increased business and cultural activity creating a magnetic force that draws more of the same. The architects, builders, developers and real estate brokers in the thick of the $100-million-plus market are evolving, too, acquiring ever more elite skill sets that allow them to meet buyer expectations that are escalating along with values. Malinosky said Palm Beach and Manalapan have become an epicenter of the trend in part because of the availability of large pieces of oceanfront property, such as Satter’s 4-acre parcel. “These buyers are attracted by big lots where they can build trophy properties with private, secure compounds close to everything South Florida has to offer,” he said. Satter told the Palm Beach Daily News that the Fischman design in Manalapan will cost $150 million to build, and Burrage confirmed the expected cost. Even if the project sells for less than asking, it may well set a new record in Manalapan and Palm Beach, surpassing Ellison’s $173-million purchase and egging Satter or another top developer to push the envelope further. “Once one guy moves the dial a few notches, the next guy has to move it a few more,” said Burrage, adding that the 55,000-square-foot Paul Fischman design is not the largest homebuilding project he has in the works. “It has become almost a competition.” Fischman said he sees the sizzling $100-million-and-up market spreading outward from Miami and Palm Beach, edging as far north as Hobe Sound in Martin County – which can’t hurt the real estate market in 32963, where waterfront land is still way cheaper than to the south and helicopters can land. 

OOH-LA-LA GALA MUSEUM’S SUMPTUOUS ‘MOVEABLE FEAST’ WAS A TOUR DE FORCE PETER M. AND PAT THOMPSON WITH BRADY ROBERTS.

18 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ The Vero Beach Museum of Art’s 2025 Gala, A Moveable Feast, was a night that guests will not soon forget – toute la soirée était magnifique! The French-themed fête began as close to 500 très élégant invitees strolled under twinkling lights along the Parisian streets of Montparnasse, sipping on cocktails and champagne while perusing the creative street markets, having their photos taken in front of La Tour Eiffel, and listening to the sounds of jaunty accordionist Jim Horzen. Among the market stands, Peter and Karen Coveney had designed a Bouquiniste (bookseller stand) that would have looked quite at home along the Seine. They had printed hundreds of cards representing the cover of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “A Moveable Feast,” written in languages from all over the world. “One more beautiful than the other,” said event chair Pat Thompson, who led a vast committee of volunteers. Thompson had even enlisted the support of their son Andrew to pose BY MARY SCHENKEL Staff Writer Caroline Vandeventer, Delia Willsey and Kathy Harris. PHOTOS BY JOSHUA KODIS MUSEUM’S SUMPTUOUS ‘MOVEABLE FEAST’ WAS A TOUR DE FORCE Ned and Sherry Ann Dayton. Dr. Anthony and Eileen Furino with Karen and Bob Drury. Emily and Ned Sherwood.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 19 as a French waiter last spring, and his image gave a unique flair to the invitation and menu. She credited Caroline Sanford of Ironside for creating all the “amazing visual materials.” “We also enjoyed piping hot pommes frites cooked on the spot by Elizabeth Kennedy’s chefs,” said Thompson. “Wendy and Dane Roberts of Noteworthy by Design manned their Patisserie Stand, and all the muffins and donuts were stuffed dolls with little legs, feet and eyes. So cute!” Tanya McGuire, owner of A Pampered Life, exhibited lavender sachets and bouquets at her stand, La Vie en Lavande, representative of the lavender fields of Provence. Other market stands presented a variety of wines from Bordeaux, assorted French delicacies and, of course, fabulous cheeses and charcuterie. Bereted artists Judy Burgarella and Pearl CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

20 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Lau brought their portable easels and created masterpieces on the spot, very much like les artistes célèbres de la rive gauche. Once inside, guests dined family style on Provençal cuisine at one of two famed Parisian venues, where the charming décor reflected each restaurant’s flair. La Fontaine de Mars, renowned as a chic French bistro, featured “a cool ambiance and mellow music,” and Au Lapin Agile, one of the legendary city’s oldest cabarets, boasted music by Metropolitan Opera singers Sarah Nordin and Tyler Putnam. Diners were surprised to find they were encouraged to sing for their supper, with Thompson leading them in rousing renditions of CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19 Bruce and Gale Gillespie. John Loughnane and Carole Sebbane. David and Jocelyne DeNunzio with Nora Grose and Maris Pascal. Buff Penrose with Tom and Karen Keating. Anna Bain Slater and Rosemary Haverland. Tore and Kathleen Carlson. Steve and Sallyan Pelletier. Angela and Al Diaz. Bill and Joan Hoffman.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 21 “That’s Amore” and “C’est si bon.” “Probably needless to say, it was a mega hit. Everything – the theme, the art, the food, the family-style delivery of the dinner, the music and decorations – 472 people loved every minute,” said Thompson. The French theme was inspired by the newest VBMA exhibition, French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850- 1950, which guests were given a first look at. The selection of exquisite works, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of European art, is on display through June 22. For more information, visit VBMuseum.org.  Tom and Ann Piper with Bob Gibb. Suzi McCoy Shriner, Peg Regan and Tricia Griffin. Drs. Elise and Leon Geary. Mark and Cindy Galant. Bernie and Linda Kastory with Joan and Michael Hoben. Allen and Ann Jones with Gay and Fritz Blaicher. Laura and Rick McDermott.

22 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ The ninth annual Charity Golf ProAm Tournament to benefit the Senior Resource Association’s Meals on Wheels program was another smash hit, the sold-out event raising much needed funds to support less advantaged seniors in our community. “It’s hard to believe that this is already our ninth annual Pro-Am Tournament and Dinner,” said Mike Smith, co-chair with wife Sassy, welcoming everyone to the dinner portion of the fundraiser at Riomar Country Club. During the day, foursomes had paired up on the course with 24 professionals who had volunteered their time, and after thanking them, Smith commented on how exciting it was to see them in action and play alongside them. He went on to recognize others involved, including the team at Riomar, the committee of volunteers and staff, and the sponsors. “Over the years we’ve seen how much this event has grown, but what hasn’t changed is the heart of why we’re here today: to support Meals on Wheels and provide meals for seniors in need in our community,” said Smith. “Tonight, as we dine and share stories of the day, remember that each of us has the power to make a meaningful impact,” he added. Smith spoke about the vital interactions that occur between the recipients and the volunteers who deliver meals, praising all who do so. “The funds we raise today will Charity Golf Pro-Am chips (and putts) in big-time for seniors BY MARY SCHENKEL Staff Writer John and Sally Spilman with Judy and Bill Munn. PHOTOS BY AMY SAVILLE Jack Mandato and Robin Jones Mandato. John Pierce and Tom LaCosta.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 23 help deliver hot meals and critical services. The services portion is huge,” said Smith, commenting on the difficulties faced by homebound seniors. “It’s critical for these seniors who might otherwise go hungry. When you deliver meals, even if it’s one time, you’ll gain an appreciation for everything that’s happening today. Every dollar donated brings us one step closer to making sure no one has to face the struggles of isolation and hunger alone,” said Smith. “With many seniors living alone and lacking the income to pay for these basic needs, the demand for meals is greater than ever,” said Karen Deigl, SRA president/CEO. “Seniors should not have to choose between a roof over their head, medication or food. Thanks to the tremendous outpouring of support from all of you, many will no longer have to make those difficult decisions,” said Deigl. “Thank you for embracing our mission to help seniors who count on the Senior Resource Association each and every day for food, for respite care, for health at home, with simple tasks that they can no longer manage themselves. Together, we make it Shawn and Brad Smith, Kendra Haines, Tom Atchison and Roger Haines. CONTINUED ON PAGE 24 Pud Lawrence with Ted and Dawn Michael. Susan Oglesby, Lisa Thompson Barnes and Gabriel Pedrero. Art Wright, Marty Small, Libby Edwards and Joan Wright.

24 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ possible for the older adults to continue living at home as long as safely possible,” she added. In a video presentation, Marty Small and Jack Haire, two of the more than 250 dedicated MOW volunteers, spoke about the experience. “When your client tells you that this is the only meal they might have that day, it really opens your eyes. To see that, it really puts things in perspective. We are so fortunate in our lives. It just makes me happy to be able to do something for someone else,” said Small. Sassy and Mike Smith with Karen Deigl. Mark and Judi Bradley with Jerry Hobbs. Heidi and Chuck Stewart. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23 Lauren Michaels and Jen Cole. Brett Belade and Lisa Garrity.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 25 “The best part about volunteering is you get more than you give. It completes your picture of the world you live in. To be able to do this and help people survive, and help people stay in their home, and help people get a nutritious daily meal, is really a gift to the giver,” said Haire. “Thank you all for being here; thank you all for your support. It’s life changing,” he added. On the annual March for Meals on March 10, people interested in volunteering can ride along with a MOW volunteer. For more information, visit SeniorResourceAssociation.org.  Sherry Ann and Ned Dayton with Tommy Farnsworth and Dawn Michael. Travis and Jackie Stoelting with Susan and Steve Wright. Sally Lurie with Ann and Tom Piper and Robyn Orzel.

26 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ At this year’s annual Starfest fundraiser, Childcare Resources of Indian River offered its supporters a choice of a luncheon at the Quail Valley River Club or an evening event at Quail Valley at the Pointe. Through its various programs and initiatives, the nonprofit plays a pivotal role in training and developing early childhood educators and providing high-quality early education to ensure children ages 6 weeks to 5 years receive the foundational education necessary for future success. “We have purchased a new campus located in the heart of Vero Beach that we are super excited to have as our permanent home for our organization, that will help in growing and creating opportunities for the young children of our community,” said Tracy Sorzano, board president. “This is a really exciting chapter Childcare Resources’ new campus gets ‘Star’ billing at benefit BY STEPHANIE LaBAFF Staff Writer Liz Bahl, Jean Mathieu, Bridget Lyons, Shanti Sanchez, Bridget Lyons and Randee Bok. PHOTOS BY JOSHUA KODIS Shannon McGuire Bowman and Dan Wuori.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 27 in our organization and we’re really happy to have all of you here to be a part of it and to be a part of our growth and vision,” Sorzano added. She explained that the new facility will enable them to meet the increasing demand by enhancing their three core programs – school, wellness and early intervention – as well as their outreach programs, and noted that they have launched a Transforming Tomorrow capital campaign. “The Indian River Community Foundation voted to make our project their very first impact investment. They will be investing $1.5 million into our project,” shared Shannon McGuire Bowman, executive director. She said they received a contribution from an anonymous donor, and they are working toward obtaining tax credits to help close the funding gap, and still need to raise about $1 CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 710 15th Pl., Vero Beach, FL 32960 I 772.999.3292 VBAutoSports.net Hours: Mon-Fri: 9:30 am - 5:30 pm Saturday: 10am - 4pm I Closed Sunday Buy I Sell I Trade I Consignment I Financing 2014 Mercedes-Benz E550 Cabriolet 1999 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible, 29K Mi. 1972 DeTomaso Pantera 5-Speed 2005 Ford Thunderbird 50th Anniv. Ed., 35K Mi. Mercedes-Benz G-Class G-550 SUV 2016 BMW Z4 SDrive28i M-Sport PKG, 24K Mi. $25K $22K $28K $26K $99K $65K Family Owned & Operated NOW OFFERING Vero’s Exclusive Destination for Exciting Automobiles Specializing in Exotic, Luxury & Collectible Automobiles RECONDITIONING | DETAILING Lance Lunceford, Wanda Lincoln and Casey Lunceford. Mary Sue Brown, Joan Gee and Barbie Horton. Suzi McCoy Shriner and Joan Gee. Jennifer Schirard and Mary Johnston. Monica Cheslak and Linda Teetz. Elizabeth Sorensen and Matilde Sorensen.

28 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ million to fully fund the project. “Over the last 31 years, we’ve curated a pretty unique program in the world of early childhood,” said Bowman. Last year, through their school, wellness programs, early intervention and outreach initiatives, Childcare Resources impacted some 4,000 local children. Bowman noted that 44 percent of households in Indian River County are ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) families, who earn more than the federal poverty level but who still can’t afford basic needs. “These are folks that are working full time but earning a wage that is economically difficult for them because of the high cost of living here in the neighborhood,” added Bowman. She added that they are currently funding the early education of 20 children from homeless families. “Why do we do that? Because the early years are so important,” said Bowman. She said research shows that children who have had a high-quality early learning experience are more likely to show up prepared for kindergarten. “Less than 50 percent of the children in our community show up to kindergarten ready,” added Bowman. This year’s keynote speaker was Dan Wuori, Ph.D., a nationally recognized advocate and policy expert in early childhood education. After having toured the Childcare Resources School earlier in the day, Wuori commented on the irony of speaking about his book, “The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong About Early Care and Education.” “A lot of the challenges that I wrote about in this book are not things that are happening in the same way at Childcare Resources. They are a special program and sort of an outlier in the field in terms of their compensation of teachers, provision of healthcare, and retirement benefits. These are not the norm in the field of early childhood education, unfortunately,” said Wuori. He likened the way society currently views the importance of early childhood education to the contrast of the flawed Food Pyramid of 30 years ago, which resulted in a tripling of obesity rates, vs. the food guidelines of today. “There is nowhere in public policy that we are more misguided and more upside down than in our approach to young children and families and the professionals who serve them,” said Wuori. Childcare Resources strives to ensure that every child has access to the resources and support they need to thrive. Their goal is to elevate and promote the highest quality early childhood development and education for all children, with a focus on economically challenged children and families. For more information, visit childcareresourcesir.org.  CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27 Chris Ryall, Lenora Ritchie and Kerry Bartlett. Tori Hume and Richard Giessert. Susan Pyles and Glenda Floyd. Mary Orticelli and Peggy Cunningham.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 29 The expansive inner courtyard of Bob and Gerri Ripp’s gorgeous Orchid Island home presented a lovely setting for the annual Orchid Outreach Scholarship Cocktail Reception. Orchid Outreach, which was founded in 2002, provides scholarships to Orchid Island Golf and Beach Club employees and their families, first responders and their families, and other local students to assist them in pursuing their educational goals. Contributors, scholarship recipients and their guests, and representatives of the foundations through which funds are administered, chatted with one another while enjoying the copious 22 students benefit from Orchid Outreach’s scholarly approach BY MARY SCHENKEL Staff Writer CONTINUED ON PAGE 30 Bob and Gerri Ripp. Bill and Daphne Schumann. Donna Thrailkill, Lucy Reinhardt and Maureen Baus. Eddie and Sylvia Brown with Linda and Frank Adams. PHOTOS BY AMY SAVILLE Sherrerd and Greg Flasinski.

30 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ amounts of delectable hors d’oeuvres and finger food prepared and passed around by committee members. So that 100 percent of contributions can go toward scholarships, Orchid Outreach underwrites the cost of their events. “On behalf of the members of Orchid Outreach, thank you for your commitment to our scholarship program,” said Maureen Baus, who chaired a committee of some 40 ladies. “Since its inception 23 years ago, Orchid Outreach has given the gift of an education to students by awarding Ted Bedford, Jacki Chernoff and Mary Lou Bedford. Sydney Granitur with Richard and Kathy Dunlap. Trish Joaquim, Lynn Orczyk and Latonya Holiday. Bill Cunningham, Krystal Escalante-Nelson, Nick Lange and DeeDee Cunningham. Nancy Milsten and Donna Waterson. Paul Knapp and Hope Van Dyne. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 31 2008 BENTLEY CONTINENTAL GT • 36,455 Mi. 2022 BMW 8 SERIES 840i • 22,751 Mi. 2017 MERCEDES-BENZ AMG • 27,848 Mi. 2024 MERCEDES-BENZ AMG GLE 53 • 15,933 MI. 2012 BENTLEY CONT. SUPSP. ISR • 18,937 Mi. 2014 BENTLEY CON. GT SPEED • 11,194 Mi. 2018 PORSCHE 911 CARRERA 4 GTS • 19,717 Mi. 2014 ASTON MARTIN VANQUISH VOL. • 13,638 Mi. 2018 PORSCHE MACAN GTS • 25,340 Mi. $114,440 $48,840 $61,440 $78,840 $81,840 $98,840 $99,840 SELL US YOUR CAR. WE PAY TOP DOLLAR. IMMEDIATE PAYMENT. INDOOR AIR CONDITION SHOWROOM. • WE SERVICE ALL MAKES AND MODELS • FINANCING AVAILABLE HOURS Monday - Friday: 9:00AM - 5:00PM • Saturday: By Appointment Only • Sunday: Closed Service Hours: Monday - Friday: 9:00AM - 5:00PM ROSNER MOTORSPORTS Contact Us Sales: (772) 469-4600 rosnermotorsports.com 2813 Flight Safety Dr., Vero Beach, FL 32960 TREASURE COAST’S LUXURY DESTINATION SHOP 24/7 AT ROSNERMOTORSPORTS.COM 53 Years In Business! $128,850 CALL FOR PRICE almost $700,000 in 178 scholarships. And, thanks to your continued generosity, we are able to maintain a combined corpus at the Scholarship Foundation of Indian River County and the Indian River State College Foundation of close to $1.5 million,” said Baus. “That corpus, along with our ongoing donations, ensures that we will be able to continue to help many more qualified students achieve their dreams in years to come,” she added. This year, scholarships were awarded to 22 students, 20 of whom are attending Indian River State College. IRSC students can apply for scholarships over multiple years and mulJurie Fontanilla and Joanna Fontanilla. CONTINUED ON PAGE 32

32 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ tiple degrees. The scholarships cover the tuition, books and other related expenses for full-time and part-time students pursuing associate and bachelor’s degrees or trade certificates. “We are fortunate to have 11 of those scholars here with us this evening. I’m sure you will recognize several of them who are second- or third-year Orchid Scholars. We also have four representatives of IRSC with us, Annabel Robertson, Terri Graham, Brianne Hutchinson and Sherri Moons,” said Baus. The IRSC scholarship recipients were: Melissa Quickel, Jurie Fontanilla, Joanna Fontanilla, Tess Paterson, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31 Donavyn Holiday and Bill Kennedy.

PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 33 Krystal Escalante-Nelson, Anthony Dekker, Cari Dekker, Parker Smith, Donavyn Holiday, Skyler Almand, Casey Dean, Jenna Simmons, Laysha Magana, Adrianna Larkey, Hailey Holland, Emma Grunzweig, Matthew Macdonald, Dorian Trammell, Rossie Jenkins and Ellen Kalogris. Additionally, two scholarships were granted this year through the Scholarship Foundation of Indian River County. These are partial scholarships for full-time students attending any college or university in the country. “Caleigh Presley is attending Florida State University in Tallahassee with a major in Fine Arts and Jasmine Delgado is studying mechanical engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando,” said Baus. She noted that while the students were away at school and unable to attend, Camilla Wainwright, executive director of the Scholarship Foundation, was there to represent them. Recipients, who were each also Carly and Tom Bentley with Gayle Kelly. Allan and Tracy Lamport. Tess Paterson and Ann Bourque. Rossie Jenkins, Twig Stickney and Janice Jenkins. given a chance to share a little about their backgrounds, majors and the degrees they were pursuing, all proffered thanks to the Orchid residents for their generous contributions. As the students’ relatives looked on with pride, so did the donors, delighted in the part they are playing in helping these deserving scholars achieve their educational aspirations. “As I’ve said before, the giving spirit of Orchid members is one of the reasons that Orchid is such a special place. Once again, thanks for your generous support of Orchid Outreach,” said Baus. 

34 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ The Women’s Club of Vero Beach is embarking on the extensive restoration of its landmark property, which was completed in 1916. Now one of the oldest buildings in the county, it predates the incorporations of Vero in 1919 (it became Vero Beach in 1925) and Indian River County in 1925. A group of progressive ladies formed the club in 1915 with the goal of establishing a library and reading room for the growing town of about 300 people. After raising the money to build and stock the library, they operated it for about 45 years, all while working on a whole list of other projects to benefit the community. The county took over the library system in 1962 and built a larger facility, followed in 1991 by an even bigger one, this time right across the street from the Women’s Club. “My goal is to restore this historic building so that we can get back to our original mission of providing charitable outreach to the community through philanthropic projects. We also want to engage our members in various social activities,” says Gail Alexander, current club president. “It’s often called the oldest service club in Vero Beach. We were like the hub of the town. But a lot of people don’t even know this club is here. It is one of your oldest historic buildings in town, which is exciting. So I want to create awareness and educate the community on what this building is all about and how meaningful it is to Vero Beach,” she adds. In a 70th anniversary commemorative piece in 1985 by Charlotte Lockwood titled “If These Walls Could Talk,” she wrote: “Vero was where the action was, and the Woman’s club [sic] was usually in the middle of it.” Even then, Lockwood described it as the oldest public building under continuous ownership in downtown Vero. An attractive brown-shingled structure with white trim, glass windows all around – a rarity in its day – two fireplaces and a kitchen, the building was added to the U. S. National Register of Historic Places in 1995. After rejecting the offer of a houseboat, the industrious ladies had decided it would be less expensive to build their own facility on a corner lot offered by the Indian River Farms Company. The location happened to be near the home of its first president, Irene Young, wife of Vero’s first mayor, Anthony W. Young. “They did a lot of fundraising where the proceeds went to the cause of building the Women’s Club early on. There was a fair that took place and they had dances too,” says Anna Brady, a historic preservation specialist on the restoration committee. One of their creative fundraisers involved borrowing a patch of land to raise and sell cabbage. “After that they started doing different projects for the community. It was the community building,” says Brady. “Beautification during that time was so important because the land was still really rough. They laid out the town but the sidewalks didn’t come in till about Scott and Gail Alexander with Joan Hoben, Anna Brady, Charlotte Terry and Bob Puff. PHOTOS BY JOSHUA KODIS CONTINUED ON PAGE 36 BY MARY SCHENKEL Staff Writer Women’s Club of Vero all in on exciting building restoration

36 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 PEOPLE Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ 1924. So it was scrub; some of the lots weren’t cleared yet,” Brady adds. Alexander notes that three female architects, led by Chris Baker of Moor, Baker and Associates Architects, have developed renderings of the proposed restoration. The committee is also working on obtaining the required permitting. “The No. 1 thing is to preserve the building and keep the bones intact, and then bring the building up to code so it can survive another 100 years,” says Alexander. A friend of Baker’s, a historic preservation architect and University of Kansas professor, flew in to vet the building, and helped Alexander obtain a grant through the State of Florida historic preservation matching grant program. The structure has been modified and improved over the years, including a sprucing up before it served as the headquarters for the county’s 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. They were assisted then by celebrated architect James Gibson, who designed plans for Riverside Theatre, the Vero Beach Museum of Art and John’s Island. Then, as now, the intent was to restore the character of the building while bringing it up to modern day use. “We don’t know what we’re going to find until the inspection. We do want to keep all those floors; protect the windows, that glass. We want to keep everything that we possibly can to preserve the historic integrity of the building,” Alexander explains. Among the top needs: the electrical wiring, plumbing and kitchen need updating; the building needs to be brought up to code, including ADA compliant bathrooms; and storage space is desperately needed. Alexander envisions having a reading room on one side where members can work or relax, and a banquet room on the other for fundraisers and other activities. Alexander says club membership is on the rebound, especially with new women moving into town who are seeking ways to meet other people and get involved. “So they can join and they get to know and make friends, and then it kind of blossoms from there. But we need a building for those people to go to,” says Alexander. “We want it to be a modern-day club members are proud to come to, and they’ll take care of it like it’s their own. We want it to be nice and historic, but with some modern amenities within,” she explains. In the larger banquet room, which was added in 1929, the proscenium arch will remain but the raised stage will be removed, and the main entrance will shift so that it opens into that room. In keeping with its character, a unique outside ‘door to nowhere’ at the front of the building will remain, as will its mini balcony, where people would stand to make announcements to the populace. In the smaller room, paneling installed in the 1970s will be removed to keep it more in line with how it looked ‘back in the day.’ “We’re going to keep all of the history here, keep the original, as far as we can,” Alexander stresses. Although the planned addition of a back porch and landscaping with native palms and trees will cut into parking, there is plenty of room at the courthouse lot across the street. A Building Restoration Fund at the Indian River Community Foundation, which itself has contributed a grant, has already raised about $200,000. The campaign calls for $1.5 million, which includes an endowment to operate the facility rather than relying on rentals. “We’ve had good experiences with rentals and we’ve had bad ones too,” says Alexander. “If we have an endowed fund, we can focus more on giving back to the community and having events here.” For more information, visit VeroBeachWomensClub.org.  Regyne Heurtelou, Chris Baker and Kiera Tucker. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 34 Gail Alexander, Lisa Mangel, Ali Schlitt and DaLynn Feely.

MILAN – The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, which will take place this time next year, will be the most spread-out Games ever, stretching hundreds of miles across the Italian Alps from Milan to the borders of Switzerland and Austria. Past Winter Olympics were confined to one or two places with indoor sports such as figure skating and hockey based in a city and the outdoor competitions on mountains a reasonable drive away, making it possible to attend events at both sites in a single day. The 2026 Games will dismantle that concept with venues spread across seven mountain villages reached only by narrow, winding roads and connected by a mix of trains and shuttle buses that will make the trips take hours. The sprawling plan is an attempt by organizers to control costs by limiting the building of new facilities and to take advantage of Italy’s best ski slopes and courses. But it also creates logistical challenges never confronted at a Winter Olympics. Among them: two Olympic cauldron lighting ceremonies in cities 125 miles apart. Multiple improvised Athletes’ Villages instead of one for the city and one for the mountain. Men’s and women’s Alpine skiing events on separate slopes for the first time, in separate regions of the country. This means U.S. skiing star Mikaela Shiffrin, after participating in her events, won’t be able to watch her fiancé, Norwegian racer Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, compete in his. And Czech snowboarder and ski racer Ester Ledecka will have to choose between going for her third consecutive gold medal in snowboard parallel giant slalom or trying to win a second gold in Alpine skiing’s Super G because the women’s downhill (which she also races) and key Super G training runs will be at almost the same time as the snowboarding and on separate mountains. The most outlandish possibility involves Cortina’s sliding track not being ready, which would lead to bobsled, skeleton and luge competitions being moved to a backup site in Lake Placid, New York. Organizers say they don’t think that will happen, but no one is certain. None of this will matter much to the millions watching on television. All they will see are the ski racers in Bormio hurtling down the mountain to a centuries-old village yards from the finish line or ski jumpers soaring above the snowcapped treetops in Predazzo. They won’t know of the challenges athletes will face to get to those mountains or that some of the Athletes’ Villages might not feel like Olympic Athletes’ Villages or that many Olympians will be weighing the merits of traveling to Verona for the Closing Ceremonies in a nearly 2,000-year-old arena. “We have valleys that are very close to each other if you look at a map, [but] it takes longer to get [to them] by road,” Milan-Cortina Olympics CEO Andrea Varnier said. Milan-Cortina organizers are leaning into the sprawl, often making it the first thing they talk about when meeting with sports federations, Olympic executives and the media. Their Games will be very, very different, they say.

Best to know from the start that figure skating, hockey and speedskating will be held in Milan; women’s Alpine, sliding sports and curling in Cortina; men’s Alpine in Bormio; snowboarding and free skiing in Livigno; cross-country skiing in Tesero; biathlon in Anterselva; and ski jumping in Predazzo. Best to understand, too, that most are not easy to reach from the other. As Varnier sat in a Milan hotel coffee shop not far from San Siro Stadium, where the main Opening Ceremonies will take place, he called his staff “pioneers” in the concept of a spread-out Olympics. The sprawling Games were not his idea. He joined Milan-Cortina in December 2022 after planning fell disastrously behind during the coronavirus pandemic. He understands that the Winter Games had become too big and costly to host in traditional ways. He can see the advantages of a sprawling Olympics. “It was a very rational decision,” he said, adding that the concept will allow for events at some of the most revered winter sports venues in Europe. “Where is the best male Alpine skiing?” he said, spreading his arms wide. “It’s Bormio. Where’s the best female Alpine skiing? Its Cortina, because the women in Bormio would have a difficult time [and for] men in Cortina it would be too easy. … Where is the best biathlon arena in Italy and perhaps the world? It’s Anterselva. “So the decision to be so spread out and then leave [figure skating, hockey and speedskating] in Milano was a decision that was made to make this Games more sustainable.” Livigno is the kind of tiny Alpine village you might find on a postcard with lanes of shops, restaurants and ski villas stretched at the bottom of a valley deep in the northern Italian mountains. From the peak above, it looks like a strand of Christmas lights stretched across the snow. During the Olympics, Livigno will be one of the busiest sites of the Games, hosting the snowboarding, halfpipe, moguls and freestyle skiing events. More than 10,000 spectators are expected each day for many of the competitions. U.S. Olympic officials, realizing many of the American medals will be won in Livigno, are planning a significant presence there. Getting to Livigno, though, is tricky. During the Olympics this will mean taking a nearly two-hour train from Milan to the small town of Tirano, where shuttle buses will navigate a string of a roads around mountains for another hour to Bormio. The road from Bormio to Livigno is just 16 miles, but it means navigating several hairpin turns often slick with snow and also waiting for traffic to pass in the occasional village where the road narrows to one lane to fit between houses. The trip from Bormio to Livigno often takes an hour in the winter, sometimes much longer. During the Games, Italian officials won’t let many people drive between Livigno and Bormio – or between any of the mountain sites – to reduce traffic. Even local residents won’t be able to use the roads on competition days. Rooms in both towns will be expensive, as will those in all of the mountain sites outside of Milan. But like all the mountain towns at this Olympics, Livigno has a story to tell, one that goes back centuries. Standing outside Livigno’s main meeting and recreation hall one blusThe 2026 Winter Olympics will extend through northern Italy from Milan to the borders with Austria and Switzerland. Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo will serve as the main hubs of activity, but six other cities also will host events. For example, men’s Alpine skiing will take place in Bormio, but women’s will take place in Cortina, 85 miles away (#1). But direct routes don’t exist in a mountainous region. Just getting from Bormio to Milan will take almost four hours by train and bus (#2). The relatively flat part of the trip, from Milan to Venice, can take up to three hours (#3). Then back to the mountains: Traveling from Venice to Cortina can take more than three hours by bus (#4). So to get from one Alpine event to the other can take up to 12 hours. CONTINUED ON PAGE 40 The Stelvio Ski Center in Bormio will host the men's Alpine and ski mountaineering competitions.

40 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39 INSIGHT COVER STORY the world’s top athletes from different sports coming together for two weeks, living side-by-side in clusters of dormitories, learning new cultures and new foods, and leaving with a better understanding of people and places they might not have known before. MilanCortina won’t be able to create a similarly central place. Milan will have a newly built Athletes’ Village, but the other sites will have villages fashioned from hotels, apartments or borrowed military barracks. The U.S. women’s skiers won’t even be in the Cortina village, staying instead at a nearby hotel. The men will be in one of the hotels that Games organizers rented to be a part of the Bormio village. Then there are the Opening Ceremonies and Closing Ceremonies, the most visible and often best-remembered parts of an Olympics. The event probably will be attended mostly by hockey players, speedskaters and figure skaters, though many figure skaters could miss it as well because the team event competition begins the same day. Because of logistics, many athletes probably won’t ever come to Milan, flying to Venice instead because it will be much closer to their competition sites. It’s also unclear how many athletes can attend the Closing Ceremonies in Verona, which isn’t close to any venue. This sort of sprawl, though, might be the future of the Olympics – especially tery afternoon, the town’s mayor, Remo Galli, explained how a half-century ago Livigno was a small farming village tucked deep in the mountains like many of the little towns spotted throughout the Alps. Residents were poor and often smuggled coffee and cigarettes to the Swiss border six miles away, careful to avoid Italian customs officers. Then came a ski resort – and with it the tourists who otherwise would have gone to Bormio. Now Livigno is known as a wealthy town with the fortune of retaining a special duty-free status granted decades ago because of its remote location. “Livigno was poor, and then in 1980, we start skiing,” Galli said. “Bormio has a different story. Cortina was the [host of the 1956 Winter Olympics]. So every town is a little bit different. Every town has special things that we want to bring to the Olympic Games.” An Olympics spread across such a wide area has the danger of not feeling like an Olympics at all. For decades, the Games have been sold on the magic of People stroll in a street of Cortina d'Ampezzo. Birds-eye view of Livigno.

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 41 the Winter Games. The IOC is serious about what it calls “sustainability,” constantly pleading with potential host cities to propose Games that cost less to host and won’t require much new construction. That means finding venues that are strewn farther apart. The other finalist for the 2026 Games was Sweden, which proposed holding indoor events in Stockholm and mountain sports more than 370 miles away. The 2030 Winter Olympics will be based in Nice on France’s south coast and stretch north through the French Alps until almost reaching Switzerland. Even the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, an area teeming with competitive venues, will have softball and canoe slalom in Oklahoma City, and organizers are rumored to be looking at placing cricket in the New York City area. A little more than a decade ago, the IOC was in crisis. The price of hosting an Olympics had exploded: Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games cost more than $40 billion, and Russia claims to have spent more than $50 billion on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Oslo, which was the front-runner for the 2022 Winter Olympics, pulled out after public and government support crumbled over fears of cost overruns. Those Games went back to Beijing, which drew criticism for essentially building resorts on barren mountainsides. Compared to Summer Olympics, the Winter Games are relatively small, but the expansion of snowboard and freestyle skiing events to attract younger fans requires more slopes, more stadiums and more infrastructure. Most mountain towns are unable to accommodate so many events with so many people. Salt Lake City, which hosted in 2002 and will again in 2034, is a rare combination of a big city with a large nearby resort in Park City. Cortina, a village of fewer than 6,000, hosted the entire 1956 Winter Games but can handle only women’s skiing, bobsled, luge and skeleton today. “If we put everything in Livigno or in Bormio or Cortina, it would be too much. There would be too many people,” said Galli, Livigno’s mayor. “It is better to do it this way.” Inside the coffee shop, Varnier shifted nervously in his seat. An important meeting awaited, but he had something he wanted to say, so he stayed for a minute more. “If we put everything in Livigno or in Bormio or Cortina it would be too much; there would be too many people. It is better to do it this way. “As complicated as we are in some ways, I think some of the ideas we’re proposing, that we’re discussing – optimizing the Games – may be useful in the future for everyone. “I think this will open up the world to a new and better opportunity for the Winter Games.”  1. The men's Alpine events in Bormio will finish not far from town. 2. Livigno will host the snowboarding, halfpipe, moguls and freestyle skiing events. 3. A general view of Cortina d'Ampezzo. 4. A boy practices crosscountry skiing in Antholz, where the biathlon competitions will be held. 1. 2. 3. 4. INSIGHT COVER STORY

42 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ INSIGHT EDITORIAL At present, our Pelican Plaza office is closed to visitors without appointments. We appreciate your understanding. Don’t panic, but an asteroid could hit the Earth in 2032 Astronomers around the world have trained their telescopes toward an asteroid they believe has a minimal, but not insignificant, chance of hitting Earth in just under 8 years. Though space agencies say the public should not worry about Asteroid 2024 YR4, its size and impact probability were unusual enough to trigger for the first time an international warning system established in 2013. Now, astronomers will use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most complex ever developed, to better understand the asteroid and its trajectory. Here’s what to know.  Asteroid 2024 YR4 is orbiting near Earth’s region of the solar system, and preliminary estimates by space agencies give it a roughly 2 percent chance of hitting Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.  Astronomers are particularly interested in this asteroid because, if it were to hit Earth, it “is large enough to cause localized damage,” according to NASA.  Astronomers are continuing to track and refine their calculations about the asteroid’s orbit, and their assessment of its impact probability is in flux. So far, that probability has gone up. But astronomers say it will very likely drop to zero as they refine their forecasts. Asteroid 2024 YR4 is estimated to be between 40 and 90 meters wide – at its largest, big enough to approximately cover a football field from goal line to goal line. As of Jan. 31, 2025, it was located about 30 million miles from Earth, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). It was first reported on Jan. 27, 2025, after it came closer to Earth on Christmas and was spotted by a telescope in Chile that is part of a NASA-funded initiative. Astronomers say it will fade from the view of Earth-based telescopes by midApril as it moves away from Earth to orbit around the sun, and it will become observable again only in mid-2028. They are gathering as much information as they can about it in the meantime. “The most likely outcome is that with all the data we catch, we will be able to demonstrate and prove that there is no impact risk, that it will go to zero,” said Richard Moissl, head of the planetary defense office at the European Space Agency. “However, especially if it’s a very close approach to Earth, we might not go below 1 percent” before the asteroid moves too far away, he said, adding that this “doesn’t mean anything dangerous.” “Then we have to wait until mid-2028 to make certain” it poses no threat, he said. Asteroid 2024 YR4 does not pose an existential risk to civilization – it’s not nearly big enough. But it would deliver a significant punch if it struck Earth. In that unlikely event, according to CNEOS, it would impact at a speed of about 38,000 miles per hour. According to the European Space Agency, “an asteroid this size impacts Earth on average every few thousand years and could cause severe damage to a local region.” Asteroid 2024 YR4 is of a scale to severely damage a city or other population center, said Moissl. But even taking into account the low risk of it hitting Earth, if it did hit Earth, it would be much more likely to impact the ocean than a city, he said. “And in the deep ocean, an impact would have no severe consequences either.” Astronomers believe that if it did hit Earth, the impact location would be somewhere along a corridor spanning “the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia,” CNEOS said. According to a memo from the International Asteroid Warning Network, the blast damage could reach as far as about 30 miles from the impact site. Though astronomers say Asteroid 2024 YR4 is highly unlikely to hit Earth, “the situation is significant enough to warrant the attention of the global planetary defense community,” the ESA’s Planetary Defense Office said last week. As a precaution, any object with more than a 1 percent probability of impacting Earth is flagged to other nations’ space agencies and to the United Nations. In 2022, NASA said it successfully collided a spacecraft into an asteroid, changing its motion through space significantly and offering promise that this still-experimental technique could someday be applied as a practical form of planetary defense. This technique is known as a kinetic impactor, and Moissl said it would be the most likely recourse in the unlikely event that the asteroid’s impact probability increased substantially and it were headed toward Earth. “If it came to the point where we need to consider space-based missions in order to deflect the asteroid, the so-called kinetic impactor is the so far only proven method,” he said, though he added astronomers were exploring several other options. The appearance of Asteroid 2024 YR4 has exposed a sticky situation for astronomers. Telescopes and cameras are getting much better at finding the objects roaming the solar system. As a result, this kind of warning is likely to become more common. That will put pressure on scientists to communicate the level of risk clearly to authorities and the public, so they understand that the discovery of a potentially hazardous asteroid is the result of an improved detection system and not a harbinger of doom. And while the risk of Asteroid 2024 YR4 actually hitting Earth is very low, that doesn’t mean astronomers should be complacent. “Anything this size, when it has any percentage possibility of hitting the Earth, it’s a wake-up to get more observations and more modeling and pay attention to it,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist for The Planetary Society, a space science advocacy group, told The Washington Post.  A version of this column by Annabelle Timsit and Joel Achenbach first appeared in The Washington Post. It does not necessarily reflect the views of Vero Beach 32963.

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 43 INSIGHT OP-ED Brenda Franzman can't get all her money back for furniture she sent back to Sam's Club. How can she get the company's attention? QUESTION I have tried for two months to get a refund for four Adirondack chairs and a footstool from Sam's Club, and I keep getting the runaround. I’ve gotten a refund for one chair and one footstool. I need a refund for the three remaining chairs. Every time I call Sam’s Club, I get a different representative, and I have to explain everything all over again, even though I give them the reference number. I’ve talked to two supervisors who have told me that the refund was coming back to my original form of payment. I have not received that refund. Can you please help? ANSWER Sam's Club should have refunded all of your furniture. It looks like the company made a mistake when taking inventory of your return and only registered two items. While you spent a lot of time on the phone, explaining your situation to Sam's Club, phone calls are not that helpful when dealing with an issue like this. You're far better off with a paper trail. However, if you decide to call to get an update, make sure you always get a reference number or a case number (which you did). If you're not sure what's in your case file, ask someone to review it with you by phone BY CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT Why won't Sam's Club refund the $481 for merchandise I returned? It promised! and if it's incomplete, make sure you request that they add a notation. This seemingly endless back-and-forth is not unusual in corporate America. I've spoken with countless other consumers who get trapped in a "customer service" vortex from which there appears to be no exit. I've been in one of these a few times myself. A brief, polite email to one of of the Sam's Club customer service executives listed on my consumer advocacy site might have resulted in locating your missing refund – but based on your past interaction with the company, I can't be sure. I contacted Sam's Club on your behalf. It looked into your case and found that there were multiple orders, multiple returns and multiple forms of payments involved. Hence the confusion. "We refunded the total amount, after tax, to Ms. Franzman’s Sam’s Club credit card," a representative told me. "Because the refund is going to a form of payment different from the one used on the original orders, the refund process may take 7 to 10 business days." As an apology, Sam's Club sent you a $100 eGiftcard. You also finally received a full refund of $481, as promised.  Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy (https://elliottadvocacy.org), a nonprofit organization that helps consumers solve their problems. Email him at [email protected] or get help by contacting him at https://elliottadvocacy.org/help/

46 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Maybe it’s not the most sophisticated critical laurel, but Eric Puchner’s new novel, “Dream State,” made me miss my subway stop. That rarely happens. Falling asleep on the subway and waking up when my book hits the sticky floor? Yes, that happens with alarming frequency. But looking up from the pages and realizing that, in every sense, I’ve been transported away from where I live is a rare pleasure. Although Puchner’s novel is a long, deep ride that traverses half a century, it never labors under the weight of its broad scope. Instead, with every chapter, the story feels animated only by the spontaneous possibilities of moments in which loyalty is respected or ignored, passion resisted or sated. That vast procession of Schrödinger’s cats, stretched out over the decades, gradually coalesces into a family history that feels monumental. The novel opens in Montana in the days before a wedding in 2004. Cece, the bride, has arrived a few weeks early at an empty summer home owned by the parents of her fiancé, an irrepressible, universally adored doctor named Charlie Margolis. The guests on either coast aren’t thrilled about having to travel so far, but Cece has loved this homestead for years. For her, the old house is an embodiment of the family she’s about to join. The Margolises “were everything she’d always wanted,” Puchner writes, “a country unto themselves, with their own customs and traditions. … Just being around them made Cece instantly happy, even delirious.” There’s lots to be done before the wedding, of course, so Charlie makes sure his best friend, Garrett, drops by to help. The trouble is, Garrett is a brooding figure with “one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender.” Puchner, who treats him tenderly even while laying out his considerable flaws, notes that Garrett’s “heart was a haunted doll living in a box.” Cece understands he’s struggling with something – depression? drugs? bad luck? – but she still wishes Charlie hadn’t asked him to officiate their wedding. The strain of being alone with him feels like just one more chore she has to manage before all the guests arrive. Besides, Garrett’s vague offer to help is blotted out by his dreary pomposity. He scoffs at her taste in books. He criticizes the way she speaks. He claims that marriage is a cowardly, joyless trap – “the tomb of love.” “You must be the most cynical person I’ve ever met,” Cece says. “You don’t actually like me very much, do you?” Garrett asks. “No,” she shouts. “I’ve been pretending for Charlie’s sake.” If you’ve never seen “Much Ado About Nothing” or any subsequent romantic comedy, you’ll be perplexed to learn that when Garrett stumbles home, he “couldn’t remember feeling so happy,” and Cece can’t stop thinking of him. What we have here is a Montana version of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in flannel, a confrontation that Puchner carries off with all the requisite charm and humor – and an errant mountain goat. But what can this spark of affection amount to when Cece’s wedding to Garrett’s best friend is just a few days away? That’s the question the rest of this absorbing novel answers, or at least keeps circling around, because, honestly, who can know how things might have been or should have been? In subsequent chapters, we keep encountering Cece, Charlie and Garrett as they age and mature, rage and forgive, and endure “the bends of rocketing through the years.” Regrets calcify into granite stepping stones, and all these characters are pursued by nostalgia as though it were some ravenous beast. Eventually, their kids enter the world, too, and must contend with the effects of that longago wedding still irradiating their families like a notorious nuclear meltdown. The book’s effect is hypnotically telescopic, a vision of people we come to know across decades. Puchner’s manipulation of time is among his novel’s most magical elements. Typically, the years pass between chapters, but the children “moved through Summer Time, in which days were really years.” The pages begin to feel like days of a calendar flipping by in the wind. In one sense, it’s a vertiginous, godlike perspective that allows us to see the erratic way that hopes and dreams germinate or wither on the rough ground of fate; disappointments accrue even as love and friendship persist. Puchner’s narration, which can slip from funny to harrowing as fast as a young man can ski to his death, cradles each of these characters through the vagaries of life. Promising careers sometimes peter out into quiet desperation; dead-end lives suddenly veer into surprisingly fulfilling vocations. And always, there’s each person’s temperament, what Emerson called “the iron wire on which the beads are strung.” Puchner is playing a clever game here, tempting us to imagine that a life’s course can be redirected by a single, startling choice, even as the whole record makes plain that a life is actually the result of a trillion choices and accidents we could not possibly control or calculate. This structure puts Puchner’s skills as a novelist and a short-story writer on parallel display. While exercising full control across the whole arc of the book, he also manages to create strikingly beautiful chapters. At the center of the novel, for instance, we follow the erotically charged relationship between Lana, Garrett’s daughter, and Jasper, Charlie’s son – “her summer ghostbrother.” On its own, this section is a terrific short story, but it also functions as a fulcrum for the whole novel. “How weird life was,” Lana thinks. “There was the song of your life and then there was the mondegreen of it, politely known as adulthood.” I don’t think I’ll ever forget that tragicomic image of adulthood as a misremembered lyric of my actual life. And such petals of insight fall gently on every page of this deeply humane novel. Even as Puchner records the evolution of these friends and lovers, he never neglects the natural world in which they live. I’m reminded of Daniel Mason’s remarkable novel “North Woods,” which focuses on an ancient farmhouse in western Massachusetts. But while Mason starts 400 years ago and moves into the present day, “Dream State” begins in the early 21st century and moves slyly into the future. This isn’t a work of science fiction, and Puchner has little interest in predicting the technological wonders or political horrors ahead, but he pays close attention to the health of the environment. It’s an affecting reminder that all our choices over the next couple of decades – our marriages, births, affairs, reunions and deaths – will play out in a climate growing increasingly inhospitable. Bringing these intertwined lives to a close that doesn’t feel too sentimental or too bleak would be a challenge for any writer. We book reviewers don’t get to say much about endings, but Puchner’s final chapter is one of the most touching and satisfying I’ve read in years. I see you teetering there between choosing to read “Dream State” or not. Jump in.  INSIGHT BOOKS Doubleday. 448 pp. $28 | Review by Ron Charles | The Washington Post

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 47 The tasty trick from nowhere By Phillip Alder - Bridge Columnist Bishop Butler preached in a sermon, “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: Why then should we desire to be deceived?” If only he had been born some 250 years later and become a bridge player, he could have changed the end to “... desire to deceive?” and answered his own question with, “Because it is fun.” There is nothing defenders like more than to deceive declarer into going down in a contract. Today’s deal was first described by Villy Dam, from Denmark. I wonder if he was the unnamed East. Against four spades, West leads the heart king and follows with the heart ace, announcing a doubleton. Declarer wins West’s club switch with dummy’s ace and plays the spade five: jack(!), king, four! Now it looks too easy for South. He continues with the spade queen (or 10) and claims shortly thereafter. But stop for a moment and consider matters from South’s perspective. It seems that East began with the A-J doubleton of spades and West with the 9-7-4. If so, when South continues with a top spade, East will win with the ace and lead a heart, promoting the spade nine as the setting trick. Following his instinct, South leads a low spade from his hand at trick five. Imagine his chagrin and embarrassment when East wins it with the nine. Perhaps South should have been suspicious – East probably would have gone in immediately with the spade ace from the A-J doubleton – but the defenders gave declarer just enough rope, and he hanged himself. Dealer: South; Vulnerable: Both NORTH 5 Q J 9 8 7 A K 8 7 A J 8 WEST A 7 4 A K J 5 4 3 10 9 7 3 SOUTH K Q 10 8 6 3 2 6 5 Q 10 2 6 EAST J 9 10 4 3 2 9 6 K Q 5 4 2 The Bidding: OPENING LEAD: K Hearts SOUTH WEST NORTH EAST 3 Spades Pass 4 Spades All Pass INSIGHT BRIDGE

48 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ How to do Sudoku: Fill in the grid so the numbers one through nine appear just once in every column, row and three-by-three square. The Telegraph SOLUTIONS TO PREVIOUS ISSUE (February 20th) ON PAGE 72 ACROSS 3 Unwanted plant (4) 7 Stockings (4) 8 Sly look (4) 9 Farewell (5) 10 Conversation (4) 11 Tags (6) 13 Spicy sausage (8) 15 At a distance (4) 16 Well-kept (4) 17 Athletics event (4,4) 18 Initiate (6) 21 Animal’s den (4) 23 Last letter in the Greek alphabet (5) 24 Level, rank (4) 25 Mountain goat (4) 26 Indolent (4) DOWN 1 Upper-class (4) 2 Meteorologist (10) 3 Legal document (4) 4 Type of paint (8) 5 Paltry; lake (4) 6 Very tall building (10) 10 Surrender (10) 12 French wine (10) 14 US state (8) 19 Second-hand (4) 20 Resist (4) 22 Notion (4) The Telegraph INSIGHT GAMES Proudly Serving the Treasure Coast for over 40 years 640 Old Dixie Highway Vero Beach, FL 32962 772-569-3874 [email protected] ISA Certified Arborist Hazardous Tree Removal Oak Tree Trimming Specialist Professional Mangrove Trimmers Fully Licensed and Insured

Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 49 HOW TO PLAY: In each “word addition” problem, the answer to the first clue must be reversed before being entered into the grid. Thus, “One more time (rev.) + Sun god” translates as AGAIN spelled backward, plus RA, which forms NIAGARA. Every theme answer is a common word or phrase. As they say, sometimes you have to back up to go forward. ACROSS 1 Enabling eavesdropping, perhaps 5 Some punches 9 ___ the question 12 “Be glad to” 16 Broke a promise (rev.) + Dined 19 Chopper (rev.) + Gold digger 21 Ex-President (rev.) + Pool need 22 Skiing mecca (rev.) + Less bold 24 Boating term 25 Small-town boy 26 Passed on, as parables 28 “Only ___” 29 Johnny’s introducer 31 Ky. neighbor 32 Ky. neighbor 33 Boards 35 Face-off 37 Paramour (rev.) + Turner 40 Pad content 41 “Lazy River” start 44 Maggie’s Jean 47 Borodin’s prince 48 Turf-war sides 50 Fruits (rev.) + Repeat 53 Career soldier 55 Future ferns 56 ___ gin fizz 57 McEntire (rev.) + Tirade 61 Garden fertilizer 62 Places 63 Young ___ 64 March Hare’s offering 65 Haunted-house hangings 66 Uniform (rev.) + Tearing 70 Instruction unit 71 Paul in Exodus 72 Jiff 73 Voice (an objection) 74 Ran, as colors 75 Department store (rev.) + Pay dirt 78 Of hawks and doves 79 Rent sharer 81 Piano pro 82 Cash carrier (rev.) + Kangaroo 84 The Merry Widow composer 87 Escapee from Miss Gulch 89 Spots 90 Make an effort 91 Charlottesville sch. 92 Feudal figure (rev.) + Locks 95 “Why don’t we!” 97 ___ beet 99 Prior conclusion 100 Little fella 102 Irish hero, briefly 106 Airline since 1948 107 Retired Bol of basketball 110 Job safety org. 112 Cookbook writer Rombauer 113 Big name in Vegas (rev.) + Guitarist Paul 115 Do roadwork (rev.) + Speech 118 State capital (rev.) + TV spot 119 First husband (rev.) + Road sign + Road sight 120 Metro station 121 To Kill a Mockingbird state: abbr. 122 Bygone boomers 123 Words of woe DOWN 1 Maid in Die Fledermaus 2 2000 World Series MVP 3 “It’s a deal” 4 Mens ___ (legal term) 5 Chuck Yeager, e.g. 6 Thin as ___ 7 Tower locale 8 Cardinal’s insignia 9 King of the kennel 10 Trade show 11 Effrontery 12 Cheer word 13 Still alive, in dodgeball 14 Restrains 15 Sooner than later 17 Barracks VIP 18 Beyond unusual 20 Kim in Picnic 21 Cheer word 23 Holds the position of 27 Wishes to be in the shoes of 30 Lease prohibition 34 Walk trimmers 36 Dwarf planet that’s bigger than Pluto 37 Hole enlarger 38 Damn Yankees vamp 39 Chicago paper 41 ___ Constitution 42 Spicy hot 43 Of simple organisms 45 Etym. 46 Beyond miffed 49 JFK posting 51 They might roll over 52 Part of the LAPD’s motto 54 ___ shui 58 Make an effort 59 Less prosperous 60 Water gate? 62 Do a gland’s job 65 Took place 66 Gas in glass 67 Roofer, at times 68 Tuning knobs 69 “When ___ my fingers ...” 70 Sow chow 72 Foes of Gargamel 74 Gives a lift 76 Comes ___ price 77 Boy with a bow 78 Drinker’s cry 79 Korean statesman 80 Trick ending? 83 2007 “suburban biker” flick starring Tim Allen and John Travolta 84 Angler’s boxful 85 Speed-reader Wood et al. 86 ___ to do (was busy) 88 Meat-rating org. 93 One-man army of film 94 “___ to recall ...” 96 Knit or purl, e.g. 98 Go ___ pieces 100 Tons 101 Have ___ (quarrel) 103 Trojan War king 104 Luigi’s love 105 Shade at the beach? 108 Goya’s duchess 109 Actress Patricia 111 Palindromic constellation 114 Adder’s kin 116 Anatomical duct 117 Botanist Gray The Telegraph The Washington Post ...This will have you coming and going Back and Forth By Merl Reagle INSIGHT GAMES

50 Vero Beach 32963 / February 27, 2025 Your Vero Beach Newsweekly ™ INSIGHT BACK PAGE Dear Carolyn: What do you suggest about leaving money to one of my children and not the other? My husband of 34 years says his mother, who left us money, wouldn’t have liked that. We have a 22-year-old son and 24-year-old daughter. “M” walked out of my life when she was 18. She cites that I was judgmental, which I was. But she also had an adverse reaction to boundary-setting: curfews, collecting cellphones and other parenting things I did as the “bad cop” mother. I made her go to church, also something she resents. We paid for years of therapy. It’s also true that she spends her birthdays eating in my favorite restaurants, hiking my favorite trails and going on vacation to places I “dragged her” as a child. I offered to go to family therapy with her. She has told me that she “forgives” me but doesn’t want a relationship. I’ve spent years in therapy to accept this. I follow the recommendations of the therapist and have a great relationship with my son. I don’t want to leave any money to “M.” I want to leave it all to my son and the various charities where I volunteer. I don’t want to put my son in a difficult situation, and my husband is upset by this. Advice? – Mother Mother: Ask yourself whether you’d finally feel good about yourself, finally be at peace, if you had it in writing that you’d get the last word. That’s what this is, taking the need to win to your grave. It has already cost you one child – a price that would give most people pause about their methods. But you’re still going. Now you’ve “upset” your husband but aren’t backing down or giving your approach a deep rethink; you’re coming to me instead. And you know you’re putting your son in a “difficult situation.” Anyone who pays any attention to this stuff knows punitive bequests put enormous strain on heirs. This money would be nothing to you. Who cares if she gets it? You’ll be dead. But you will not give your daughter the last word! You want it, and, by God, you’re going to get it. That’s how you sound. Petty. If you don’t want to sound this way, then don’t do it. Pick your justification: Because your relationship could change before your will does. Because you’re more hurt than angry, and this is a forever-angry reaction. Because it’s the endgame in a power struggle that began with an adolescent when you were the adult. Because it’s your husband’s money, too. Because, oh my goodness, is this what you really care about? Let’s talk about the part that does matter: Yes, yes, parents must set boundaries. But yours triggered a massive “adverse reaction,” so. Did you reflect, revisit and revise as she grew, or just my-way her to the highway? I wouldn’t force church, for example, on a kid who’d formed her own, different beliefs. Yes, out of respect. Kids tell parents what they need us to be. If you just hear “pushover!” in that sentence and dig in, then welcome to your power struggle. Don’t take it from me. Pull up a search engine and read about authoritative parenting, which has humility and listening built into its boundaries, vs. authoritarian. Estrangement outcomes haunt the latter. I may have read you all wrong, of course – in which case I’m sorry. Wrong happens. Try admitting it sometime; kids love it. M’s birthday, maybe?: “I really screwed this up. Us. I am so sorry.” Now, that’s a legacy. (Plus half the cash.)  BY CAROLYN HAX Washington Post Mother wants to leave money to only one of her two children