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

- [Reporter] Coming up next on "Florida This Week", the governor suspends the Hillsborough state attorney, the governor claims kids are told in schools that they may choose their own genders, local governments are asked to address the housing crisis and the bill designed to protect homeowners from high insurance costs is a windfall for insurance companies.

All this and more, next on "Florida This Week".

(upbeat music) Welcome back.

Our panelists this week.

April Schiff is the Hillsborough Republican State Committee woman, Barry Edwards is a radio commentator and a political pollster, Susan Smith is the chair of the Florida Progressive Political Committee and a Democrat, and Dr. Susan McManus is USF distinguished professor emerita of Government and International Studies.

Nice to see you on the set.

I think this is the first time in two years that four people are here.

Well, Governor Ron DeSantis suspended and replaced Hillsborough county's elected state attorney Andrew Warren on Thursday.

At a news conference surrounded by more than a dozen law enforcement officers from Hillsborough and surrounding counties, the Governor said state attorney Warren had put himself above the law by refusing to bring charges in some cases.

- "We've seen across this country over the last few years, individual prosecutors take it upon themselves to determine which laws they like and will enforce and which laws they don't like and then don't enforce.

And the results of this in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have been catastrophic."

- So April, let's start with you.

Did the governor do the right thing in removing Andrew Warren?

- The Governor believes that he did, there's no question about that, or he wouldn't have made such a bold move today.

He said that our government is a government of laws, not a government of men and he had quite an extensive package in his order that indicates that Warren was not using prosecutorial discretion, which is on an individual basis on each case, but in a blanket statement, he signed with other prosecutors from across the country, that said that he would not prosecute under specific laws.

And that the governor says is what's dangerous and it's just, it's unlawful.

- And we're talking specifically about abortion laws and whether or not minors can change their gender, go through gender reassignment surgery - Correct, and this is the minor transgender treatments and the health treatments, or the medical treatments that go along with that, and also the abortion laws.

The legislature passed the 15 week abortion ban so that abortions can only be given in Florida up to 15 weeks and he had blatantly said that he was not gong to enforce that so he's basically saying that he can change the laws that are passed by the legislature which he really does not have the ability to do that and that's what prompted the governor to move forward with this.

There's two different statements that he had signed with these prosecutors from across the country which indicated that-- - [Interviewer] So in this case, lots of people have come out, Democrats have come out in support of Warren.

Mayor Castor has come out in support of Andrew Warren so have the two gubernatorial candidates on the Democratics side.. What do you make of this decision?

- I think it was a political decision.

I think it was a hit job.

I think Andrew Warren has had a target on his back for a long time and I think Ron DeSantis is running for president and he thought he could win score some political points if he did this and I think he's, just like the Republicans are doing nationwide, trying to overturn the results of an election.

Andrew Warren was duly elected by the people of this county.

and I think this is wrong.

It's 100% wrong and I think the overreach will come back to haunt him.

- In a statement, Andrew Warren says crime is low in the community and the governor did not cite any specific examples where Warren decided not to prosecute a case, that he did take a stand against the abortion laws and take a stand against the transgender laws, but the governor did not cite a specific example where Warren refused to prosecute.

- That's true, I think, we just had a litigation of this issue with Scott Israel, who was suspended as sheriff of Broward, and it went through the federal process and the federal courts were unequivocal, this is a state matter, period.

So that's already been done to the circuit and the appellate trial and appellate level.

And in the state Supreme court, they also gave the legislature, or the governor great deference and said it's a matter of his and the Senate.

So the governor has the authority, that's not even arguable I think by anybody, but he signed those documents.

And I think that either we are a nation or laws or not, and one of my conservative friends, who's a sheriff said, "Well, if I wanted to do the same thing, I don't believe in hate crimes, then I'm not gonna prosecute hate crimes."

So if we allow individual people, whether we like them or not or agree with their policies to do that, then we're opening the door for the other side to do the same thing.

- But Gary, that raises a question, are all crimes prosecuted?

Does every prosecutor in the states prosecute 100% of the crimes in their county?

- As you said in your presentation piece there, it has to be on prosecutorial discretion is on an individual case by case.

He signed documents that he wasn't gonna follow laws that have been upheld by Florida courts.

and that's the difference, that's the difference.

- Is the gender issue on the books, that doctors can be punished for doing surgeries?

- That's a longer statement.

- It's there, when was it passed?

- I think it might have been passed this session.

- Because DeSantis makes things up.

- No, that was not made up and anybody who says that hasn't been following.

They really should follow but so the law on abortion is in the law and it's been upheld right now, they tried to get a stay and the stay has been pulled.

So what he signed is a clear violation of law, whether you like him or not.

- He hasn't done it.

He signed the document, he hasn't done it.

He hasn't done it, there's no evidence that he's done it.

- We don't need to argue about it.

- He signed a document-- - He's being punished before even he did it.

(crosstalk) - So Susan, you're saying that people that don't like hate crimes, they don't wanna prosecute minorities or gay people.

that if a prosecutor doesn't wanna do that, that's fine.

- I'm saying this is a political hit job, that's what I'm saying.

- When you say that there are no exact instances of cases where he hadn't prosecuted, the governor in his order today left it open that if more things were discovered during this process, that the order would be amended and those things would be added to it.

So there's no question they will continue to look at his conduct in office, but I don't know if you remember, but during the riots, all those people that were arrested during the riots in Hillsborough County, they dropped all the charges and refused to prosecute them.

- Except for one who, a guy that burned down a restaurant on Fowler Avenue was sentenced to a felony conviction because he committed arson and he's been put away for a decade.

- Okay, good, but I'm sure there were more crimes committed than one with all of that bedlam that was going on during those riot.

- And also let me just say one other thing.

I think it sends a terrible message when the governor is up there surrounded by law enforcement, it looks like the brown shirts are behind him when he's punishing a political enemy, and that's the message that a lot of people are gonna take away from this.

- Dr. McManus, what do you think about this?

I mean, it's not unprecedented.

There have been other people removed from office by governors in the state.

- In Florida, under the Florida constitution, a governor can remove officials for a variety of things, malfact, malpractice and misinformation, public drunkenness, dereliction of duty, incompetence due to some sort of attribute, a wide variety.

And I think he cited a neglect of duty in this particular one, but what this shows, and I guess we need to move on here is simply like everything else, we're in a political season, we have two sides of politics and two views.

This is a very, very polarizing issue and people are going to from just about everything controversial, look through the prisms of their party leanings.

- All right, well, during a news conference in Tampa last week, in which he defended the parental rights, or don't say gay bill, Governor Ron DeSantis claimed that school teachers are instructing children to switch genders.

- "This'll be for elementary school kids where they're instructed to tell 'them, "Well, you may have been born a boy that may have been what you said, but maybe you're really a girl."

That's wrong, that has no place in school.

So that is happening in our country, anyone that tells you it's not happening is lying to you.

So I think what we did in Florida was very important to lay down a marker, to make sure that that's not something that gained a foothold here in the state of Florida and that, again, our kids are able to be kids."

- The human rights group Equality Florida's press secretary, Brandon Wolf on Twitter called DeSantis comments, "a blatant bigoted lie".

So Dr. McManus I think the question is, are school teachers really telling kids they can choose a gender?

- I don't know, and I don't know anybody at this table that knows, but what I do know is this is an election year again, school politics is rampant.

There are districts in this state where nine to 12 people are running for the school board.

But what is telling to put it in national perspective is recent polls by very reputable firms now show that a very small percentage of Americans, sadly, have confidence in their public schools.

And in fact, it's the lowest it's ever been.

Is this debate contributing to less and less confidence?

Of course it is.

- Barry, what do you think, is the governor, right?

Are teachers going into classrooms saying you can choose your gender?

- I try to, you know, be like people on the right and the left so I'm one of the last interest in the country.

But if there's, if you take 10,000 teachers, one of them is gonna say you and I are the best journalists in the world, they'd be right about you, but they'd be wrong about me.

So I'm sure that there's one teacher out of 50,000 or 100,000 teachers in Florida that said that, but you're talking about one out of 100,000.

I think this is a little overreaction for a problem that doesn't exist.

And if you do have a teacher that says that, you can deal with it.

So I think this isn't an effort where he's pandering not to his base, but he's pandering to try to get under the skin of liberals and progressives to get them off target cause they're talking about that rather than talking about the economy, which will win him elections.

- Is that what the governor's doing, April?

Is he trolling liberals and progressives?

- I don't know if he's trolling liberals and progressives or not, but I do know that there is some evidence where they've seen some guidance that's given to teachers, not necessarily in Florida, but across the country that allows them to, or actually tells them to ask the children what their pronoun is, their preferred pronoun is and it suggests other pronouns that they could be.

You see these are elementary school children, this is crazy.

I mean, elementary school children should not have to even think about what a transgender is or what it means.

Let alone have to deal with, do you want to call me a girl or a boy?

I'm a girl.

It's what it is.

It is what it is.

So, and girls will be tomboys and boys will like to play with dolls and people need to understand that that's how children grow up and that's how they learn and that's what happens.

- Yeah.

- But the governor's right.

We can't allow people to impose those things upon children, let them be kids.

- Susan Smith, the governor was saying this in defense of the Parental Rights bill, is this, what do you make of the defense?

- I think this is another political.

It's a political story that is meant to take our eyes off the housing crisis that we're gonna talk about in a few minutes and the homeowner's insurance and all the people who have died of COVID on his watch because they lied about the numbers and they're telling people not to get vaccinated.

I think he's pandering, he wants to run for president.

He's trying to out-trump Trump and it will work with some people but I think people I think we saw from the election in Kansas the other day that the people are not gonna fall for this stuff.

The extremes of the Republican party are gonna come back to haunt them.

- Okay, well, let's talk about some non culture war issues right now.

Under pressure from housing activists, some local governments are trying to take steps to reduce homelessness and make housing more affordable.

- [Reporter] Pinellas County Commission this week passed the Tenants Bill of Rights that will require landlords to provide advanced notice of rent increases and late fees and will prohibit them from discriminating against renters who use housing vouchers.

The Hillsborough County Commission passed a similar measure.

Some protestors this week in St. Petersburg are demanding rent control where according to rent.com, the average cost of a one bedroom apartment has increased by 35% in the past year to just over $2,000 a month.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, high housing costs are causing some new university of south Florida hires who accepted jobs in St. Petersburg to turn them down because of the lack of affordable housing.

Last week, Tampa City Council members approved a plan to let residents decide whether the city should declare a housing emergency, and if that measure makes it onto the November ballot, and if Tampa voters approve it, the city would be allowed to limit rent increases.

- All right, so among the ideas, Susan Smith rent control, but also greater notification from landlords towards tenants.

What's the solution do you think to the unavailability of enough housing for low and moderate income households?

- Well, I think if we had visionary leaders, which we don't seem to have, we would've thought about these problems a long time ago.

I think we need greater density.

We need public transportation.

We need more affordable housing.

I know that one of the problems and you can blame progressives for some of this, maybe, is all the zoning laws.

The nimbi, not in my backyard, all the hoops you have to go through for building permits and all kinds of permitting.

I listened to a podcast about a year ago, where they were talking about a subway system in a foreign city can be built in five years.

Yet California can't build a high speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco because of all the permitting.

And we've got a thousand different permitting agencies and hoops that people have to jump through to build.

So affordable housing is not feasible for developers because of the costs involved and the delays and the time factor involved.

- April Schiff I think your friend, Susan Smith is making the Republican case.

(laughing) - I love it, - And let's talk about who's in charge of this county right now, because it's not the Republicans that are doing this.

It's the Democratic county commission, okay?

- So it happens everywhere, not just here, but yeah, I think it's a multifaceted problem and we've got to start thinking of the future.

Everybody, including the governor with a lot of these moves he's making, it's very short term for political gain and nobody and the young people in this country are fed up with it.

Because they're starting to understand that their futures are not gonna be any better because the leader, current leaders across the board are not thinking about the future.

- April what's-- - Going back to the old Republican mantra of less government and let the free market run, because that will happen.

Less taxes, less government, free market and this will all be solved.

- Okay.

- Get out of it.

(laughing) - That's not what I'm saying.

- Susan Smith mentioned young people.

The issue of housing has really captured the imagination of a lot of young people.

A lot of college students find it hard to afford housing in the area.

- Well, they're very creative also and in some places they've taken old structures and made it work.

And college kids, they're very creative in a lot of ways, but housing is a problem for them.

And of course, once they desire to own a home, the school student loans and all that puts 'them behind on that as well.

And then you just have outright an affordable housing, you know, problem in this state, whether it's single family homes, apartments, you name it.

But the college kids are doing everything.

Some of them, the most of them though, it's not surprising, they're moving back home.

And they sure don't wanna do that, okay?

- Barry, the Sadowski Trust Fund was established in Tallahassee to provide money for affordable housing and to aid people that were first time home buyers.

In the last few decades, the legislature has rated the fund and not steered that money towards its intended purpose.

- One of my favorite saying's is either a trust fund or a maybe fund.

And if we ought to be honest about it, if we were gonna take the money and put it someplace else.

So the governor this last year funded it, but then he vetoed the expenditure so the money got swept back.

They did put 125 million, but that's not enough in a state size of Florida.

I mean, we're 22 million people or give or take a few hundred thousand.

As far as the state of emergency, you only get one year of the rent controls with that under Florida and there seems to be some discrepancy on how you define an emergency.

But even with the secretary, Jerome Paul just was at the hearings and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez was talking about price controls and things like that and he was pretty emphatic that they don't work.

And even Austan Goolsbee and Paul Groman-- - Okay but what they don't-- What about a one year rent control?

- They don't work, as soon as you have put a rent control there's no evidence-- - New York just had their rent control for five decades.

- And they've had housing problems there and people moved out-- - But nobody's talking about a five decade rent control they're talking about-- - No, but San Francisco is the most rent controlled and they have the highest homelessness problem and they have the highest rent problems.

So as soon as you put, there's a supply problem of housing.

If put you rent controls on, people will build elsewhere and somebody's gonna get lucky and have that.

But then with now, like I know a lot of builders, their costs for air conditioners and roofs have gone up 50%, 75%.

They're not gonna be able to pay for the maintenance.

There's a lot of problems, but there's no evidence and in every single freshman economic textbooks, there's case studies that these don't work.

- Okay, so what's the solution?

- Well, there was a story recently I don't remember the corporation that was doing it, but they were actually including as part of their employee compensation packages, housing so that they have workforce housing nearby and people have a place to live and they can keep their workforce that way.

And that, I mean, those types of creative solutions is really what we need to be looking at and it has to be a public private partnership.

The private sector has to step up and do it.

- Okay.

- Can I throw in one other?

- Just quickly.

- Okay, this is also affecting our military.

We have friends whose son-in-law's a commander in the Navy and the cost of them moving from city to city.

They can't find affordable housing and their cost of living are not going up.

- That's a nationwide.

- So that's a nationwide problem.

It's everywhere and it's multifaceted and it needs to be-- - Well almost 60 Florida insurance companies are tapping into a $2 billion fund created by the legislature this year to deal with skyrocketing homeowner's insurance premiums.

- [Reporter] The hope was insurance companies would lower their rates, but that is not happening.

The law creating the fund provided no guarantees that the companies would pass the money that they get from the state along to consumers.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, many of the insurance companies are filing for sometimes large rate increases at the same time, they're asking to take money from the $2 billion state fund.

- So Barry, since January, 400,000 homeowners in Florida have been dropped by their insurance carriers and 275,000 homeowners have had to find new insurance carriers because their companies went insolvent.

- So how many citizens now?

- So the legislature did take a look at this and pass the law, but homeowners insurance rates are still skyrocketing.

- Well, and as you know, a lot of my clients were involved in that debate on both sides of the issues.

One of the things is when you passed a law this year, it's not gonna have an effect on my premiums until next year because of the rates are already set.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why they wanted to move the special session up further because reinsurance had to be purchased prior to the special session.

So those rates are locked in and the Office of Insurance Regulation, OIR, when you do your rate request, you have to say why you're doing the request.

So if you're taking the money from the cat fund and you're saving money from reinsurance, that has to be deducted, but there's other costs that are going up, and just one statistic that the chairman of Census threw out to me when I talked to him last week in an interview, Florida has 6% of the country's population, but 76% of the litigation of the lawsuits and out of, and 90% of the money that was paid out went to attorneys, both defense and plaintiffs, and only 10% to homeowners.

Maybe there's something we need to look at there.

- So you're calling for legal reform, but here in Florida, we pay three times as much as the country average for homeowner's insurance.

So when you move to Florida, you get socked with a huge homeowner's insurance bill so... - I just wanna say the reason there's so many lawsuits is because the insurance companies refuse to pay the claims when they have damages.

And I know people who were involved in the hurricane situation up in the panhandle and they had to get attorneys to go to court.

Their houses were totally destroyed, and they still had to fight the insurance companies over it.

I know that I'm on "Next Door", many of you might be, this is one of the biggest issues on "Next Door".

People are livid about it.

and instead of dealing in culture war issues that are a solution in search of a problem, maybe the legislature should have dealt with this in session last year.

- April?

- So the legislature did set aside some money, but homeowners are still saying, they're either getting canceled, their insurance company is insolvent or they're seeing their rates go up tremendously.

- Yeah, we've seen that everywhere.

It's definitely a crisis and it needs to be dealt with, I don't know what the solution is, but I feel insurance companies are making a heck of a lot of money on both ends, cause now they're taking it out of the fund and they're also taking it out of every homeowner in the state and it's pretty tragic.

- Yeah, okay.

Well, before we go, what other news story should we be paying attention to?

And April, let me start with you.

You're on the big story of the week.

Caught you by surprise.

- Yeah, I'm just gonna be really, you know what, there's an election going on and it's a primary election.

32,000 people in Hillsborough County have already voted.

So if you haven't voted, if you have your absentee ballot or your mail ballot, fill in the boxes, send it back in on Monday 25 or 26.

Early voting sites will open across Hillsborough County from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM every day.

Go vote, make this thing work the way it's supposed to by showing up and casting your ballot.

- Thank you for saying that.

Susan Smith.

- I'm gonna piggyback onto that and say that one of the side benefits for Governor DeSantis with his getting rid of Andrew Warren, Andrew Warren would be responsible for prosecuting any mischief that might happen in the election, and now we have a Federalist society judge in his place and I don't trust her and I don't blame anybody else who wouldn't trust her because we have a great election system in Florida, especially in Hillsborough County, and I don't want that to be tampered with in any way and I'm worried that it will be.

- Dr. Big Maddens.

- Well, I'm gonna give a different spin here.

I'm the granddaughter of a citrus pioneer and grew up in orange groves and whatever.

And the industry's been suffering a bit, but Tropicana has come up with a great new idea.

It's a cereal that you use orange juice instead of milk.

And obviously it's captured the interest of all citrus growers in Florida.

- That's great.

- All right, Barry go, the big story.

- Well, I want to applaud two groups of activists on the Democratic side of Pinellas County.

Kathy Omas an employee of FDP, Isaiah Walker, and I'm gonna be upset, but the women's gonna be upset there was a fourth person.

They organized walkers and volunteers last week after only being in the county for two weeks and got two that knocked on 2,500 doors.

And I also wanna applaud on the Republican side, our friends from this show, Joe Gruters and Christian Ziegler, they've organized voter registration drives in, Hillsborough County has been one of their chief targets and they've moved it from 79,000 to 56,000 in 20 months.

- So, they beat away at the democratic advantage in Hillsborough County?

- Right, so people on both sides are getting active and doing things, and that's all I care about.

- Thank you all for a great show, I wish we had more time.

But before we go, we wanna send our condolences to our good friend and panelists, Paula Dockery, whose husband, Doc Dockery passed away this week after a long illness.

- [Reporter] Doc was a pillar in the Florida Republican party for decades, but he also had a strong, independent streak going to bat for a high speed rail system linking Tampa to Orlando when much of his party's leadership opposed the idea.

He will be missed and we send our best to Paula and her family.

- Thank you for joining us.

Send us your comments at ftwwedu.org and from all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

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