Walesbilt Hotel restoration
Original reporting by Zach Sherman
A piece of Florida history is being restored.
A nearly $40 million project will turn it into a new state-of-the-art boutique hotel for tourists and locals.
The Walesbilt Hotel was built in 1962. It served as a tourism hub for the Lake Wales area.
The hotel has been untouched for the past 20 years, but the City of Lake Wales is looking to change that.
A new program, known as Lake Wales Connected, is dedicated to revitalizing the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.
“It’s called Lake Wales Connected. It also compliments our city’s economic development plan. So we’ve been revitalizing the area, Park Avenue, Market Plaza. We’ve got more streets we are redeveloping and they all surround the hotel,” said Lake Wales Communications Director Eric Marshall.
St. Louis Restoration Company is behind the construction of the project.
The group hopes to capture the era it was built in while offering a premium experience.
“We don’t build stuff like this anymore; buildings don’t last this long. This is a hundred-year-old hotel, and now it’s going back to being another hotel and I’m excited to see that,” said SEMCO Construction Supervisor Brian Bennett.
The city predicts the project will take 36 months to complete.
For more information, visit Lakewalesfl.gov.
Drought continues in the Tampa Bay area
Original reporting by Hannah Lau Gleciano
Drought conditions continue in the Tampa Bay area, and new water restrictions are going into place.
Starting Friday, all residents, including those on private wells, are restricted to watering on specific hours and days of the week.
For properties under one acre, outdoor water usage is limited to before 4 a.m. or after 8 p.m.
Restaurants can only serve water upon request under the new restrictions.
“We also had some hurricanes that dumped excess amounts of rainfall. So that was a very wet year and now we’re in another drought cycle. And we just have to wait until the rain comes back again,” said Hydrologic Data Analyst Casie Cutman.
For more information about where to call for county watering schedules, visit swfwmd.state.fl.us.
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Anchors: Grace Senecal & Sofia Celis Avellaneda
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