August 2022 - OnGardens

Life Time’s opening day pitch: ‘Disney of a healthy way of life’

Life Time Athletic Country Club leads one local fitness studio to fold but others don’t fear the industry giant.

The founder, chairman and CEO of Life Time Group Holdings sat in the first-floor bar at the Aug. 11 opening of his 160th club and explained how Life Time stands so far above the crowded fitness marketplace that it doesn’t have to worry about competition.

“Our goal is to create an incredibly exclusive experience but offer it inclusively to all kinds of people,” Bahram Akradi said at the Life Time Athletic Country Club in Downtown Palm Beach Gardens. “To do that you have to create a place that has a magnetism. … It has to be a completely elegant, Four Seasons-like experience every single day.”

He urges his employees to think of it like Disney.

“There were amusement parks before Disney showed up,” he said. Disney “came to Orlando but they built magic. They didn’t build an amusement park. They created extraordinary what was ordinary in other places. And Life Time is Disney of a healthy way of life.”

State House primary battle on ballot in Gardens

New District 87 pits Mike Caruso against Jane Justice; Rick Roth runs west of the turnpike.

For years, Palm Beach Gardens’ sole state House member has been Republican Rick Roth, who first won the seat in 2016 and has defended it ever since.

But with redistricting, the city is split into two House districts. Roth faces a challenge in the November general election in his new District 94, but most of Palm Beach Gardens is not in it.

All city residents living east of Florida’s Turnpike are now in District 87, which stretches up from Hypoluxo and Lantana and includes coastal Lake Worth, West Palm Beach and Riviera Beach before taking in North Palm Beach, Juno Beach and most of Gardens.

Gardens voters will be asked to choose between state Rep. Mike Caruso, whose district now is confined to coastal south county, and Jane Justice in the Republican primary on Aug. 23. The winner will face Democrat Sienna Osta.

Exclusive: FPL seeks to build second building at Gardens site

Florida Power & Light Co.’s plan for a second 1,000-employee building would be a twin of the first and include 150 electric-vehicle charging stations.

As FPL nears completion of its 1,000-employee office center at Interstate 95 and PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens, it is moving forward with a second building, a twin of the first, to house another 1,000 workers.

The building would be erected at an angle in front of the first building facing Kyoto Gardens Drive, Florida Power & Light’s March 21 plans show.