That’s Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer, speaking to The Courier-Journal today about the unexpected failure of West Louisville FoodPort, which developers at Seed Capital Kentucky announced yesterday.
The Brown family donated $382,000 to the project since 2012, making the project’s collapse a rare defeat for the founding family of whiskey giant Brown-Forman.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this post misattributed the quote to philanthropist Stephen Reiley, co-founder of Seed Capital.
Gannett Co. has privately sweetened its bid for Tronc, hoping to overcome resistance to a sale from the parent of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, according to a new Wall Street Journal story, which cites people familiar with the matter.
Details of the new overture, which comes after Tronc rejected a prior bid of $15 a share worth $864 million, couldn’t be learned, according to the WSJ. Tronc is expected to respond by the end of the week, some of the people said, indicating Gannett’s long pursuit of the storied newspaper chain may soon come to a head.
Gannett’s GCI shares closed this afternoon hardly changed at $12.14 on the news, which the WSJ reported late last night.
Any deal could have far-reaching implications for Gannett’s existing 109 dailies, including The Courier-Journal, depending on how the company reallocates personnel and financial resources to absorb the Tronc papers. Louisville is a regional headquarters for a customer service center and a page production hub that handles design work for other dailies in the chain.
On Monday, The New York Times said a deal was imminent if Gannett could win over Tronc’s mercurial chairman, the technology mogul Michael Ferro.
A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 6:11 p.m.
PIZZA HUT said it signed a master franchise agreement with AmRest Holdings that gives the Polish company the right to own, develop and sub-franchise more than 300 restaurants in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, and Slovenia over the next five years; AmRest already operates 80 Huts (press release).
Wall Street rallied around the news: YUM shares closed this afternoon at $90.76, after trading earlier at a 52-week high of $90.88.
The expansion comes as Yum CEO Greg Creed is on the offensive against rival Domino’s on the domestic front, especially in technology such as ordering apps that attracts younger consumers. Pizza Hut, headquartered in Plano outside Dallas, is the world’s biggest pizza chain, more than 14,00 restaurants in more than 100 countries. No. 2 Domino’s has more than 12,500 locations in over 80 markets around the world.
AmRest was launched in 1993 with its first Pizza Hut in Poland’s Wrocław and says it’s now the biggest independent chain restaurant operator in Central and Eastern Europe. It operates more than 1,000 eateries in 13 countries through a portfolio of brands that also includes KFC, Burger King, Starbucks, La Tagliatella, Blue Frog and Kabb.
HUMANA: Facing withdrawals from insurance exchanges by Humana, Aetna and others amid surging premiums, the Obama Administration is preparing a major push to enroll new participants in public online marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act. The administration is considering an ad campaign with testimonials from newly insured consumers, as well as direct appeals to young people hit by tax penalties for failing to enroll (New York Times).
On Monday, Aetna blamed anticipated losses for the Hartford insurer’s decision to exit nearly 70% of the exchange markets it’s been serving; that pullout will come next year. The followed a similar announcement earlier this month from Humana, which said Continue reading “Pizza Hut adding 300-plus restaurants in Central Europe; Yum stock hits 52-week high; and White House in big new Obamacare push as Humana and Aetna flee exchanges”
By Jim Hopkins
Boulevard Publisher
For the past two years, developers of the West Louisville FoodPort worked mightily to bring urban farming and as many as 250 good jobs to the heart of a neighborhood yearning for a better future. Mayor Greg Fischer said the project would “change the look and feel of Russell forever.” Their ambitious, $35 million plan was going so well, one of the world’s foremost advocates of organic food paid a headline-grabbing visit last year: Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.
But yesterday, the entire enterprise collapsed when the non-profit developers, Seed Capital Kentucky, abruptly announced they’d lost a linchpin partner, and without enough time to find a replacement. “We don’t have a way to put it together,” Seed Capital co-founder Stephen Reily said. “We are deeply disappointed.”
Many, many other people were disappointed as well: the mayor, who’d pushed the project as a centerpiece for revitalizing the Russell neighborhood, only to see it steadily scaled back amid community infighting; some 150 residents who helped shepherd the project past months of political hurdles, and the Russell councilwoman, Cheri Bryant Hamilton, “heartbroken” last night over its failure, The Courier-Journal said.
But less publicized was the distress almost certainly felt by a high-profile Louisville family who had invested heavily in its development: the Browns, founders of the spirits giant Brown-Forman. It was an unusual defeat for a family that’s often in the vanguard of high-profile causes ending in resounding success.
The Browns were there at critical junctures for the FoodPort, including last year’s goodwill tour by Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. In a speech at the Cathedral of the Assumption on that overcast Friday in March, the CJ reported at the time, “the prince credited his visit to the persuasive powers of Louisville philanthropist Christina Lee Brown, matriarch of the family that controls Brown-Forman.”
Indeed, in 0ne photo with the newspaper’s online story, the unidentified woman in an orange coat and strands of pearls, beaming in the royal couple’s wake during one of their walkabouts, is Christina, known to many in Louisville as Christy.
As one of the city’s best-known philanthropists, she and her immediate family have formed the core of the extended Brown family’s support of Seed Capital. Her daughter, Augusta Brown Holland, an urban planner and investor, is one of the non-profit’s six board members. Another daughter, Brooke Brown Barzun, has a more direct line to Buckingham Palace: Her husband, Matthew Barzun, is U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
The Browns donate multimillions of dollars annually to charities from coast to coast, although especially in Louisville. But they don’t often seek attention for their contributions.
In fact, Seed Capital only hints at the family’s hefty financial support,
on a difficult-to-find page of its website with a barebones alphabetical roster of “funders.” Of the 16 names listed, six are Brown family members or their personal charitable foundations. A seventh is the source of their $6 billion fortune: Brown-Forman, the nearly 150-year-old producer of Jack Daniel’s and other well-known brands. And an eighth, the Community Foundation of Louisville, is home to at least 10 individual Brown donor-advised funds.
Brown family foundation public IRS tax returns fill in details. In 2012-2015, six of the foundations donated a combined Continue reading “In FoodPort’s sudden failure, a rare defeat for Louisville’s blue-chip philanthropists: the Brown family”
The trades were all on Monday, according to a series of Securities and Exchange Commission filings this afternoon, after stock markets closed. They were:
But their sales were dwarfed by the 1 million shares founder and CEO Jeff Bezos sold Aug. 2 for $757 million, his SEC filing showed. That brought to $1.4 billion his total sales in the past three months, according to GeekWire. But he still owned 80.9 million shares after that big trade, worth $62 billion.
Bezos’s SEC filing said the most recent sale was made under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, which allows company insiders to sell a predetermined amount of stock at a set time, to avoid the appearance of insider trading.
The retailer’s AMZN shares closed today at $764.63, up 59 cents. The three executives sold for prices ranging from $768 to $771.
Amazonpays its top executives far more in stock than cash. See how much they got paid last year and in 2014 in Boulevard’s highest-paid executives databases.
In this year’s “Lo and Behold,” The Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog “dissects the virtual world from its beginnings to its speculative future possibilities,” according to the Speed Museum Cinema. “Always asking provocative questions, Herzog investigates the ways the online world has transformed virtually every aspect of the way contemporary life is conducted — from business to education, space travel to healthcare and to how we as humans interact with each other.”
98 minutes. Rated PG-13. A selection of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival; BAM Cinefest and 2016 AFI Docs. Watch the trailer:
Tickets: $9, adults (non-Speed members); $7 members. Click on a showtime below for more details and to buy tickets.
The 142-seat theater is part of the newly renovated museum’s expansion. It’s equipped with state-of-the-art technology, including 16-mm, 35-mm and DCI-compliant 4K digital projection systems.
Boulevard 