- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Coming up next on WEDU, more Floridians could wind up at top levels of Donald Trump's administration.

Rents in many large cities in Florida are outpacing incomes.

Tampa Electric customers will soon see the costs of electricity go up, and the Pasco County Sheriff's Department ends a program that predicts which residents are most likely to commit crimes.

All this and more, next on Florida This Week.

(dramatic music) - Welcome back.

Joining me on the panel this week, Janelle Irwin Taylor is a journalist and the publisher at Southeast Politics.

Eric Deggans is an author and the TV and media analyst at National Public Radio.

Mitch Perry is the senior reporter at the Florida Phoenix, and Ray Roa is the editor in chief at Creative Loafing in Tampa.

Wow, what a panel for this week.

Nice to have you here.

- Thanks for having us.

- Well, before we get to our other topics, let's talk about the troubled Rays Baseball Stadium project.

Late this week, the St. Petersburg City Council voted four to three to approve bonds to help build a new Rays Stadium and develop the area around it.

The next step is a vote by the Pinellas County Commission on December 17th.

The commission could approve the county's share of bonds, but according to the Tampa Bay Times, even if the Pinellas County Commission approves the funding, the project would have a shortfall of $312.5 million because of projected one-year delay in opening new stadium.

The Rays are already promising to pay 700 million toward the deal, but have indicated that they cannot afford the additional 312 and a half million.

So, Janelle, does the vote by the city council on Thursday make this no longer a dead deal, as some people have been saying the last few weeks?

- It does, in the sense that it keeps the existing agreement that was already approved before the hurricanes alive.

But there's a lot of questions still remaining about whether or not the Rays are actually going to be in this.

And I think that what you saw last night with the Thursday night with the city council vote was an attempt to kind of shift the obligation to the county.

At issue here is if the Rays back out of this deal, the city keeps their land development rights.

Yeah, exactly.

If the city or the county are the ones who break the deal, then the Rays get to keep some of those development rights.

So that's a big hunk of change right there that's on the table.

And the Rays are trying to hold on and the city's trying to hold on, and this kicks the can over to the county and puts the ball in their court.

- So, I didn't understand why the cost of building the stadium would go up 312 and a half million dollars if the building of the stadium was delayed for just one year.

- Rob, I don't think that's actually accurate.

That is the commitment that they, Pinellas has already put out there.

Now, you're right, the Rays have said since the hurricane, and they've already put invested some money in the delayed vote, they say now it's gonna cost them more from the 700 million, whatever they said they're gonna have to pay, but we don't know what that amount is.

The big issue will be what's gonna happen next or a couple weeks when the Pinellas County Commission, there are some on... - [Rob] On December 17th.

- Supposedly four votes against it, but I think that there's some possibility that that might change.

I know the Rays are supposed to talk to Dave Edgar, one of the commissioners who was in support of the deal earlier, and then Chris Sheer, one of the new people got elected a couple last month, is also supposedly maybe gonna be talking to them.

So that's the, obviously we'll all be watching for, to see if they can be persuaded, because if if they not, then that thing is gonna die.

- The Rays have been silent pretty much the last few days.

- Yeah, I think that was disrespectful, quite frankly.

They weren't at the city council meeting yesterday.

I know that was that Henkawics said that.

Yeah, I mean, come on, you're asking for, you've got 287 million and half approved yesterday.

The bonds issued for.

The least you can do is show up.

- Well, I think on that point though, Mitch, and Rob Garrett at the meeting on Thursday night pointed this out.

He was the one who told the Rays, "You don't need to be here."

And then Gina Driscoll likewise had a conversation with them where she said that she thought that them being there would actually be a distraction.

So they were told not to be there.

- Okay.

- Well, I was interested, you know, John Romano had a great column in the Tampa Bay Times where he called this, "A billion dollar game of chicken."

And really there's a sense that that's what's happening here, where who's gonna be the first one to sort of cry uncle and back out of this deal?

And then what happens to the land rights as a result?

Because it seems obvious the city wants to make it happen.

The county so far as probably opposed to it, and the Rays just wanna hold onto the land rights, and they don't, they don't seem to have a whole lot of interest in following through on the deal either.

So, and at stake is, you know, billions of dollars in public money.

And that's the thing that's most disheartening about all of this, is that you don't have leadership willing to sort of stand up, and put a line in the sand and sort of say, "This is where we need to go."

Instead, there's all this sort of passive aggressive kicking cans down the road to... - Can I just, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I was gonna say one thing, that is, I don't know even if the commission approves this, I don't know where it goes because Rays say they need, you know, it's gonna cost them more money now.

And the city and county said, "We're not gonna spend more money "than we've already committed to."

And the Rays are complaining though that like now it's gonna cost them more money.

So I mean, if the County Commission approves this, I don't know if that means it's all done.

- They're talking to some private entities for some additional funding.

The Chamber of Commerce, there's naming rights at issue, so there's some ways.

- Let me ask you one last question.

It's kind of a big picture.

You're a media guy.

I hear that if the Rays leave, the next most likely city is Nashville, Tennessee, which I think is the 29th media market.

We are the Tampa Bay, Sarasota, Lakeland area is the 15th largest media market?

Does it make sense for the Rays to look at a city that's much smaller media market?

- Well, if that's city is much more committed to giving them whatever they want to come, then yeah, it does make more sense.

And one of the things that I always found kind of interesting, I mean, I've been here a long time, and the area's commitment to attending games and supporting the team has always been tough to gauge.

You know, particularly when they're not winning.

So if they can go somewhere where they feel like they're appreciated, regardless of how the team does, it also might make more sense for them to move.

And there's a lot of folks like me, and I think maybe Janelle, who are like, eh, you know, see, don't let the door hit you where the good Lord's putting you, so to speak.

- Big baseball fans, all right.

Well, a lot of people being selected as potential top officials in the new Trump administration are from Florida.

The incoming president is already named North Florida's Susie Wiles his Chief of Staff, Hillsborough County's Pam Bondy as his Attorney General, Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Daytona Beach area Congressman Mike Waltz for National Security Advisor, and former Florida Congressman Dave Weldon, a vaccine skeptic, to head the Centers for Disease Control.

One of his other Florida choices, Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister, was to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, but he is already withdrawn his name from consideration.

And one other Floridian could be named depending on what happens to Fox News personality, Pete Hegseth, Trump's first choice to become Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth is facing allegations of excessive drinking and mistreatment of women, and Florida's governor Ron DeSantis is being tagged by some as a possible replacement for Hegseth.

So Mitch, let's talk about Hegseth and DeSantis.

How likely is it that DeSantis might be chosen over Hegseth since DeSantis' name has been floated out there the last week?

- Yeah, that was pretty wild that his name came up.

And it looks like that is, you know, authorized for the Trump camp, putting him out there.

So it's not idle speculation.

As we tape on Friday, it looks like it was Hegseth and Trump are behind him, Hegseth standing firm, and trying to get through this process.

Of course, the confirmation hearings won't be for another month.

So who knows what story's gonna land in the next few weeks when it comes to Pete Hegseth.

So I think, you know, Ron DeSantis this really can't act or do anything, you know, as we know, he hasn't talked about this publicly at all.

And it puts him in a interesting position here.

I think, no doubt on paper, he's better qualified candidate, frankly, than Pete Hegseth.

He has run this big organization called the State of Florida for the last six years.

He's was a Jag lawyer in the Navy, and he doesn't have nearly the, you know, politically, he's controversial, obviously, with Democrats, but he doesn't have the stuff that, you know, Hegseth is being, you know, followed with.

So we'll have to wait and see, obviously.

- Eric, what do you make of all these selections?

A lot of these selections are people that appear frequently on Fox News.

What do you make of them?

- Yeah, I, you know, I saw one columnist say, you know, we're being governed by a Fox News grandpa.

And that's pretty much what's happening.

You know, he's watching these shows, but you know, when he, when he was president before, he was notorious for calling Sean Hannity after Hannity's show was over and discussing policy.

So this is not necessarily something that's new.

What's been interesting about this, for all the obloviating people have said about the irrelevance of traditional media, the reason Hegseth's nomination is in trouble is because of reporting by traditional media.

We've seen blockbuster stories in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, just, you know, in the, what, 10 days or so, two weeks maybe, that we knew that he was gonna be suggested to be the Secretary of Defense.

We've seen detailed reporting that allegations about drinking and about toxic work environments, and about badly mismanaging two nonprofits that he headed.

And he's just supposedly filling out the paperwork for an FBI background check now.

So we may see even more, you know, revelations after that gets going.

So that's the power of traditional media, still to uncover things that frankly are making the Senate think twice about whether they want to confirm it.

- Ray, what do you think of the other nominations, the president's president-elect elections?

- You know, with Mitch, as we tape here, it's ironic that there's 45 days left until the inauguration, and we're thinking about 45 now, 47 doing all this stuff, the chaos of a Trump presidency.

But I mean, the other stuff, thinking about Pam Bondi, I think anybody who's been around for any amount of time feels something, maybe even warmth, to see somebody locally ascend to that position.

That's the attorney general, that's a huge deal.

And I think as a a local person, you feel a little bit of pride, but as a news person, you know, you think about that $25,000 donation to her PAC long ago, and then all of a sudden an investigation in the Trump University is dropped.

You know, you can't ignore that.

And we should say that I think a committee cleared her of any wrongdoing of that, but what does that say about, you know, how that department's gonna run?

- She's also called for the deportation of students that protest the Israeli action in Gaza.

- Yeah, and you know, it's funny, I think yesterday was the first anniversary of the Tampa Five having their charges more or less dropped by Susie Lopez, and Susie's office has been quiet on that.

But what does that look like?

What does dissent look like?

What does it look like for media going forward?

You know, Eric brought up a great point about all this great reporting that's happening, but I think about Brett Kavanaugh's.

If we live in this country where these kinds of allegations obviously didn't matter to voters anymore, right?

I like your optimism.

Perhaps maybe the Senate will care.

- Well, they mattered to, they may have mattered to a lot of voters, just not enough, right?

- So, you know, hopefully in the confirmation hearings we see something, but... - Mitch, let me ask you about Sheriff Chronister.

He backed out from heading the DEA this week, saying that he's committed to staying in Hillsborough County.

And let me put up what President Trump opposed this week, on Wednesday, after Chronister pulled out, Trump said, "He didn't pull out.

"I pulled him out because I did not like what he said "to my pastors and other supporters."

Across conservative media and even in Republican circles this week, there was the allegation that Chronister somehow was too hard on pastors locally over the Covid restrictions.

That's not exactly what Chronister did.

- No, and this happened four years ago.

And like you think there's a thing called Google that, you know, the Trump transition team could look at.

I mean, he's acting like we just heard about this the last three days.

I, this is the whole thing's kind of weird, okay?

And I don't know who to believe here, because somebody's not telling the truth about who backed down.

But yes, we saw some conservative opposition to Chad Chronister being announced, and he backed down.

But I don't know if that's really, that's what led him to go away, or Donald Trump said, "You're going away."

It's just kind of confusing.

- Because the story is he eventually met with the minister, and then he backed away from enforcing the Covid distance restrictions.

- You're correct, Chad Chronister got heat from Republicans when he did this in March of 2020, and he did have lunch when he was still, the case was still pending in front of Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren at the time.

The case was dropped and everybody, you know, was moved along here.

So that was controversial back then.

Chad Chronister, it's been known that he's given to Democrats financially, but he hasn't in the last four years.

He was with Ron DeSantis when they suspended Andrew Warren side by side.

So he's been a good Republican of late because the criticism of, again, of Chad Chronister has been sometimes from people who think he's been conservative enough, and I can't believe that the Trump people didn't know that beforehand.

- And Janelle, you wanna make a point about that?

- Yeah, so I mean, I think it just goes to show how long the memory and the MAGAverse is, right?

Like, it doesn't matter if he went, "Oh, that made people mad," and he did an about face and got more conservative.

What they see is what happened four years ago, not what happened after that.

And it's worth noting that that pastor endorsed him, supported him for being head of the DEA.

So if that guy's not mad about it, what's the deal with all the other guys?

That's just that once you've been labeled rhino, you're always rhino.

- Well, I also think it may have been about loyalty above everything.

The one thing you can say about all these people who've been nominated is that there is no question how loyal they are to Trump and how loyal they are to MAGA, except for him.

- Well, according to a new study of Census Bureau data, Florida is ground zero when it comes to rents outpacing incomes.

- [Narrator] Ideally, no one should pay more than 30% of their monthly income for housing.

Nationwide, more than a quarter of renters are now paying more than 30%, and the number is growing.

In Florida, the problem is the worst in the country.

62% of renters here pay more than 30% on housing, and one in three renter households in Florida spend more than half of their income on rent.

Among the metropolitan areas, with the nation's highest rates of rent burden, seven of the top 10 are located here in Florida.

Cape Coral leads the way with more than two thirds of renters facing burdensome rental costs, followed by Miami at 65%, Tampa and Orlando at 61%, and Northport at 60%.

Ray, why is this happening?

Don't we have enough housing?

Or are wages too low?

Or is this something else?

- Well, I mean, we definitely don't have enough housing.

You know, yesterday it was nice to watch Tampa City Council, Abby Filiate confirmed in her new role, she talked about housing going up at 80% AMI.

But I wrote this down, looking at the numbers, you know, AMI in Tampa, 67K, you know, 53K is 80% of that.

If you're making $29 an hour and working actually 80 hours a week, you're still making 62K, and that's well below that, right?

So we can continue to build housing.

What's been disappointing to me about this conversation, all these studies, is as we champion affordable housing and building these developments, why aren't we talking also robustly about rental assistance?

You know, these are great programs that help with first, last month's rent, things like that.

And they've been funded, and we talk about 'em, but we don't talk about 'em with the same gusto that we do as far as, you know, building the housing.

So I would love to see the conversation change on that.

I talked with a friend yesterday that sells apartments.

He argued that a lot of places are giving you the first two months rent free.

There's too much housing, but that housing's at this higher price.

We're talking about people at the lower end here who are renting the cheapest apartments who just can't keep up.

- Mitch, I wonder where service workers and blue collar workers are gonna live if this is the trend here in Florida.

- Yeah, I mean, it's a housing crisis in America, but Florida was trying to adopt, adjust to this and deal with this.

2023, the Live Local Act, which was Senate president Kathleen Pasadomo's big signature bill to address workforce housing they talked about, it's not really working that great.

They tweaked it last year.

And I'm just wondering, you know, Orlando dropped out last week, several counties, orange, OC, they're not gonna deal with this.

Paso Counties had big issues with Live Local too, so... - Was the idea to build more local housing?

- Well, it was offered for more to the AMI, but a higher AMI.

So not so much, you know, even affordable housing, but workforce for like firefighters, police fighters, you know, policemen.

But I saw there was a report by the Florida Policy Institute that came out the other day that says 83% of the assessed areas are unaffordable for a three-person family on the average salary of a firefighter with what even the offers there, with the incentives.

They basically gave a lot of tax incentives to developers with this Live Local.

And that was supposed to address this.

That bill, by the way, also got rid of rent control and other measures that local cities like St. Petersburg and Tampa were doing to deal with a crisis here locally here.

So the legislature needs to do more on this.

It's a big problem.

There's no easy fix, obviously, but this is disturbing.

- Okay, well, this week, the Florida Public Service Commission gave the go ahead to increase rates for Tampa Electric customers beginning next month.

- [Narrator] The Tampa Bay Times reports the PSE voted to approve a higher rate increase than was recommended by its staff.

The vote will allow Tampa Electric to continue shifting millions in costs from large corporate power users onto the bills of regular Floridians and small businesses.

- So Ray, Governor DeSantis appoints all the members of the Public Service Commission.

They voted for this increase.

Does the governor now, is he responsible for higher electric rates for Tampa Electric customers?

- I think the Democrats would elect him to be pegged with this.

And I think we have consensus to say, yeah, maybe.

And, and you look at that body, all the appointees, I think some of 'em were placed there by Rick Scott ahead of time, but DeSantis kept them in there.

Who do they serve?

You know, like as you said, they went against their own board's recommendation.

- [Rob] Their staff, yeah.

- So who are they standing for?

Is it on DeSantis?

I don't know.

I think sometimes we give people who are on boards too much of a pass.

Like why can't they stand up for regular people?

Corporate welfare, people talk about welfare, not giving people, helping them live.

Why are we giving all this money to utilities?

- So now TECO's guaranteed an average of 10.5% profit every year for the next three years according to this agreement.

Eric, what do you think of it?

- Well, it's not just that they're allowed to raise rates, it's that the larger companies that use electricity are able to shift that burden to homeowners, and to much smaller users.

And that's what doesn't make sense to me.

- So the defenders of that say it's a way to keep manufacturing jobs in big stores and business so we can employ people.

That's what the defenders say.

- Yeah, but businesses, is a business really gonna pull out of Florida because of its electric bill?

I don't think so.

There's a lot of people sling around a lot of rhetoric about things like this.

But what ultimately happens, we just talked about how high rent is.

Now electricity's going up too.

So who's gonna work at these businesses with these jobs if they can't afford rent, and their electric bill is going up?

At some point, the populist governor has to stand up for the population, right?

- And this is not new, right?

Like the PSC has been approving these types of rate increases for as long as I can remember.

I mean, if you think back to Duke Energy with their advanced cost recovery issues 10-plus years ago, - [Rob] With the nuclear power plant.

- Exactly, like that was quite the debacle.

So this is not a new thing.

And when we're in a state that is having an affordable housing crisis, a legitimate affordable housing crisis, and we're talking about shifting cost burdens to homeowners and renters and things like that, as opposed to big box retailers, because we need jobs.

Our unemployment in the state is at, it's been at historic lows.

So we're not in a job crisis, we're in an affordability crisis.

So to put that onto the backs, I think that that's something that politicians should look at as something that could potentially be disqualifying to them at some point.

Maybe not in Florida, but we'll see.

- I wonder what this does to families that are in their 20s, 30s and 40s, how do they feel about Florida in the wake of high rents and high utility costs?

- I think that there's almost a pass given in these situations because the vast majority of Floridians don't know that this is happening.

Not everybody is reading the news every single day.

Not everybody is in the business of learning about these things the way that everybody at this table is.

So a lot of these people will get a rate increase on their bill and they'll just assume, oh, I must have used more power, or, you know, just pay it, or figure out how to get help paying it, or whatever.

- So we're thinking is there investor owned utilities that people say the PSE rubber stamps whatever they want.

You know, Clearwater right now is investigating getting out of their, when their contract ends with Duke Energy, of going local, basically.

People in Tampa tried to do that, you might remember, like 10, 15 years ago, and Mayor Pam Maioro and others said, "No, we can't do that."

And so you're stuck with TECO for how long this contract lasts.

- And the governor has opposed Gainesville's efforts.

I mean, Gainesville has a publicly owned utility and the governor's trying to take that over.

- [Mitch] You're right, yeah.

- And do away with it.

Well, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office has settled a lawsuit that brings to an end the department's predictive policing program.

- [Narrator] The initiative used data to predict who might be likely to commit crimes.

Officers would then monitor and sometimes harass those people.

For a while, the Sheriff's office had access to the Pasco School District's student data, such as grades and attendance, to advance this effort.

This week, the sheriff's office agreed to pay $105,000 to four plaintiffs who sued over the program.

The plaintiffs alleged that their constitutional rights were violated after they became targets of the sheriff's prolific offender program.

People on the list and their families were subjected to prolific offender checks during which deputies looked to cite them for issues, like having grass that was too high, missing house numbers, unvaccinated pets, and excessive window tint on parked cars.

The agency's program was the subject of a 2020 Tampa Bay Times investigation, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting.

A Pasco Sheriff's Office spokesperson said in a statement this week that the settlement was strictly a financial decision, because costs for trial could have reached millions of dollars, paid for by taxpayers.

- Eric, let's start there.

Do you think it was a financial decision to save taxpayers' money?

- Well, who knows?

One suspects that they thought that they were probably gonna lose anyway.

But here is another example of the effectiveness of traditional reporting.

They spent long a lot of time looking through documents and body cam video, and all kinds of things to really figure out what exactly police were doing in order to do this predictive policing stuff, because it wasn't obvious.

And then once they revealed it, it still took four years to get to this resolution.

So, you know, kudos to the Tampa Bay Times and the reporters there for unearthing this, and, you know, shame on the police department for taking so long to own up to something that's obviously crossing a line.

And you know, even within the stories people were quoted as saying, you know, "The goal was to harass people to the point "where they either moved or sued the police department," which is seems to be a terrible policy.

- Mitch, I was looking at the Pasco County crime records this week, and most of Pasco County is pretty much low crime.

I mean, there are a few pockets of high crime, but it's not endemic throughout the whole county.

- Yeah, yeah, they did resist this.

They kind of had a defiant statement about this, but this was at like that movie Minority Report.

Remember that Steven Spielberg movie from like 20 years ago?

And it was really insidious, and I'm glad it was exposed.

And I came across a tweet last night that Matt Gaetz put out when this trial began, and he basically said that Ron DeSantis should think about firing the Chief Police or the sheriff there in Pasco County.

I don't think he's gonna do that, but I mean, this actually united folks on the left and right, and thinking this is pretty outrageous what was going on there.

- Yeah, and it was the Institute for Justice, which is kind of a libertarian version of the ACLU, that brought the lawsuit against Pasco County.

- Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

Janelle, what do you think of this?

- You know, Pasco County is ruby red, and the sheriff there is, you know, maybe not quite as beloved as in Polk County, but it's our Pasco, I'm getting, I always get the Ps confused.

So you haven't, you've seen outrage publicly, but I think within the community, the sheriff still has a lot of support.

There's a lot of community efforts going on with feeding people during the holidays, and things like that, and then other events throughout the year that are high profile, that that's what people tend to notice more, unless you're one of those who are targeted, of course.

So I mean, I think it's just another one of those situations where there doesn't seem to be a political consequence for these types of actions.

- We have just 30 seconds, Ray?

- I would say, you know, that defiant statement, they said they would never apologize for keeping their community safe, but yet they settled this lawsuit.

To your point, they do get a lot of support.

Why not just say, in a world where we want to trust police more, why not say yes, this probably wasn't the best thing for us to do publicly.

You don't lose anything.

In fact, you probably earn so much more trust.

- Dave, thanks for a great discussion.

We ran outta time.

It's great to have you here.

That's it for us this week.

Our guests have been Janelle Irwin Taylor, Eric Deggans, Mitch Perry, and Ray Roa.

If you have comments about this program, please send them to us at FTW at wedu.org.

For all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

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