• Five years ago, Thomas Gordon (left) appeared in Judge Mallory Cooper’s courtroom because of an error in judgment during his senior year at Arlington Country Day School. Cooper decided to withhold judgment to allow Gordon to attend Kentucky Wesleyan College. He played football for the Panthers and had a double major in accounting and criminal justice. He recently returned to Cooper’s courtroom to let her know he had graduated and earned a spot at the Kansas City Chief’s training camp where he hopes to make the team as a wide receiver or special teams player.
• The Green Grants for Non-Profits project, a partnership between the City and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy and Conservation Block Grant, provided a grant to Jacksonville Area Legal Aid to replace its T-12 bulbs and magnetic ballasts with T-8 bulbs and electronic ballasts, which can reduce lighting energy costs up to 35 percent. The grant also allowed JALA to add motion sensors to all restrooms and conference rooms in the building and convert all of the exit signs from incandescent systems to LED. JALA began the GG4N project Jan. 1 and the grant provided about $38,000 for the conversion. The total cost for the project is slightly more than $50,000.
• Patrick Coleman, an attorney with the Jacksonville office of GrayRobinson, has been elected to the Salvation Army advisory board. Coleman is Florida Bar board-certified in labor and employment law and focuses his practice in the areas of labor and employment law, litigation, appellate and mediation.
• McGuireWoods LLP announced that four partners in the firm’s Jacksonville office have been named Florida “Super Lawyers” for 2012: Donald Anderson, environmental; Thomas Brice Jr. and Scott Cairns, employment and labor; and Halcyon Skinner, securities and corporate finance.
• The Trust for Public Land released its latest Parkscore study analyzing the park systems of the 40 largest U.S. cities and Jacksonville ranked No. 34. San Francisco earned the top spot while Philadelphia was the highest ranked East Coast city at No. 10 and Atlanta was the top city from the South at No. 26. The trust’s analysis is based on what it believes are the most important characteristics of an effective park system: acreage, services and investment, and access.