• They didn’t graduate together, but CB Richard Ellis managing director Jim Citrano and Andy Rooney of CBS’s “60 Minutes” both went to Colgate University. Citrano said Rooney was about 10 years ahead of him.
• The ACC men’s basketball tournament is in Tampa this weekend and one Jacksonville company will have a strong presence. Vivid Images USA, Inc. is near the stadium and the company is printing many of the official T-shirts for the tourney. President Dan Tapper said his company is also doing shirts for the 65-team NCAA tournament which gets underway Thursday.
• Mayor John Peyton’s recently-formed Parks Advisory Board met for the first time Monday and named Ann Baker as its chair. Baker has been on several boards and commissions over the years and is currently on the Zoo’s board of directors.
• Paul Dake has joined Amelia Island Plantation as director of sales. A 20-year veteran of hospitality marketing, he was director of sales at Hawk’s Cay Resort and South Seas Resorts and director of Mid-Atlantic sales at the Saddlebrook Resort. Dake also owned and developed Connect LLC, a site selection company that assisted corporate event clients in placing meeting and incentive programs.
• Maybe JetBlue wasn’t so bad after all: According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, airline passengers sat parked on taxiways for two or more hours on 7,405 flights in 2006. It sounds like a big number until you consider that there were 7,141,922 commercial flights last year. Only 36 planes were delayed for more than five hours after pulling away from the gate and just two were parked for more than five hours after landing.
• Dr. C. Craig Fisher, dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, has been pushing to have a section of 8th Street near UF-Shands renamed UF Shands Boulevard. However, according to Fisher, the idea was run past UF President Bernie Machen and Jane Adams, vice president of university relations. Both Machen and Adams nixed the idea. Adams told Fisher Machen said the idea was “premature at this point and (he) would like to delay consideration of it until later.” In a letter to Steve Diebenow, the City’s Chief Administrative Officer, Fisher said he was at a loss to explain the decision and noted the UF College of Medicine has had a campus in Jacksonville since 1982.
• The I.M. Sulzbacher Center for the Homeless had to resend their letters asking for participation in this year’s Transformations event at the Florida Theatre. Thanks to a computer error, every original invite was addressed to “Ms. Hayes.”
• City Council Vice President Daniel Davis is holding a “victory” party Saturday at the Hipps family farm on the Westside. Davis does not have an opponent for the March 20 elections.
“The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society, depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that.
– Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), U.S. president.