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  • 💵Who's rich in Texas; A bigger Omni Hotel; Treehouse homes?

💵Who's rich in Texas; A bigger Omni Hotel; Treehouse homes?

+More bite-size news to keep you informed and make you smarter

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🗞️NEWS OF THE DAY:

A $217-million expansion and update of the Omni Hotel in downtown Fort Worth is moving forward. The addition of a new tower will bring 400 new rooms, meeting space and a parking garage. Construction is slated to begin in Spring 2024 with a two-year timeline. When work is complete, the hotel will have 1,008 rooms covering two blocks across from the Fort Worth Convention Center.

A conceptual footprint was reviewed yesterday by the city’s Downtown Design Review Board.

Hillwood Communities, founded by Ross Perot Jr., has broken ground on an 800-acre, 2,500 home community called Treeline just west of Justin in the Alliance area. The treehouse-inspired community will have an elementary school, parks, amenities and commercial space. Homes, from just under $400k to mid-$500k, will be available for sale in mid-2025, Hillwood said American Legend Homes, Beazer Homes, David Weekley Homes, D.R. Horton, Highland Homes, HistoryMaker Homes, Pulte Homes and Tri Pointe Homes are lined up to build more than 700 homes in the first phase.

The WARM Place has expanded to eliminate its waitlist of nearly 100 cases. The expansion added 3,329 square feet of space and increases the number of children and their families who can be served by 25%. The WARM Place provides grief support services to children ages 3 1/2 to 18 and young adults ages 19 to 25 who have experienced the death of a loved one.

Fort Worth-based Ben E. Keith Foods celebrated the 40th anniversary of its annual Supplier Appreciation Day by recognizing Hormel Foods Corporation with the 2023 Supplier of the Year award.

Neighborhood Services, Code Compliance, Police and Fire coordinated their Fort Worth budget requests totaling $1.6 million to address the dramatic increase in homelessness. Neighborhood Services department’s budget recommendations encompass permanent housing needs, while the Police and Fire departments, and Code Compliance budget recommendations relate to the Homeless Outreach Programs and Enforcement (HOPE) team and the need to put more resources into homeless camping cleanup.

The Fort Worth police department ($708,323), UNT Health Science Center ($787,330) and Tarrant County ($600,000) have received nearly $2.1 million in federal dollars as part of the Debbie Smith Act to end the backlog of untested DNA evidence from unsolved crimes and increase capacity to avoid future backlogs.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which has a regional office in Dallas, officially issued U.S. design patent 1 million to a Fort Worth entrepreneur. Granted to Agustina Huckaby, the USPTO said that it is a design patent for the ornamental design of a dispensing comb.

Entrepreneur Agustina Huckaby called the patent a “major milestone and accomplishment.”

 

Rangers see spike in attendance in 2023. Thanks in part to the team’s first winning season since 2016, attendance at Texas Rangers games increased 25.9% year over year, according to the Sports Business Journal. The Rangers ranked No. 16 among the 30 MLB clubs, up two from their rank of No. 18 last season. The Rangers averaged 31,272 fans per game, an increase from 24,832 in 2022. The team swept the Tampa Bay Rays in their Wild Card series this week and will take on the American League East division champion and top-seeded Baltimore Orioles at noon this Saturday.

Mark Cuban Companies has launched MCC Network, an interactive network for entrepreneurs and industry titans to share ideas with each other. Network members include founders, industry leaders and athletes from Cuban’s portfolio of more than 200 companies. Interactive conversations hosted by founders allow MCC Network members the opportunity to communicate directly with each other. The MCC Network is free to join, with programs streaming on the Fireside app. More information can be found here.

Elon Musk ($251B), Jeff Bezos ($161B), and Larry Ellison ($158B) top Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people in 2023. Notable Texans to rank near the top of the list were Michael Dell (#11, $71.5B), Alice Walton (#15, $66.5B), Autry Stephens (#45, $14.8B), Stanley Kroenke (#47, $14.6B), Jerry Jones (#48, $14.5B) and Andrew Beal (#50, $13.8B).

 

“I’m bullish on America overall. I’m just very negative on the politics and lack of fiscal responsibility inherent in our government.” 

— John Goff, Chairman, Goff Capital in an interview with the Dallas Business Journal

Striking out. The correlation between MLB payroll spending and wins is the weakest it’s been in more than three decades. Two decades after its publication, the Moneyball premise of doing more with less fared well this season.

Nothing to do with business: The UK-based Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards have announced their finalists for 2023. Our vote goes to the monkey that uses it’s tail as a fake moustache. See the finalists here.

👞👞PEOPLE ON THE MOVE:

  • Valor: Hires Stephanie Scott as a senior accountant

  • TCU: Adds Jonathan Jenswold as Adjunct Professor of Global Business

  • Westlake: City promotes John Ard to Fire Chief over Fire-EMS department

  • National Medal of Honor Museum: Hires Rebecca Rodriguez as VP of Marketing & Communications

✂️SNIPPETS:

  • This year’s top 10 highest-paying college majors include some you may have never heard of.

  • Mortgage rates march toward 8%, pushing demand to the lowest level in 27 years.

  • Before strike's effect, GM’s third-quarter sales jumped 21%.

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