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Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(light music) - [Rob] Next on WEDU, the legislature passes its version of new legislative maps.

While the Governor indicates he doesn't like the new congressional maps that are being considered, a Bradenton group claims it is information about voter fraud.

What is Tallahassee doing about skyrocketing homeowner's insurance?

And a bill restricting what can be said about LGBTQ issues in schools moves forward.

All coming up right now on "Florida This Week".

(cinematic music) Welcome back.

Last week, lawmakers in Tallahassee finished work on their legislative redistricting maps.

New configurations position Republicans to be able to keep control of the state legislature for the next decade.

Senate Joint Resolution 100, which includes the Senate and House legislative maps now goes to the Florida Supreme Court for a final review before it becomes law.

It takes effect for this year's elections.

The Senate map gives Republicans a likely 23 to 17 advantage over Democrats in the 40 member Senate.

That's a one seat pickup for the Democrats over the current map.

The House map gives Democrats as many as seven additional seats in the 120 member House.

Meantime, the Florida Supreme Court told Republican Governor Ron DeSantis that it will not answer his question on whether a Black congressman's district is unconstitutional.

The Court says it's too complicated to simply answer in an advisory opinion.

DeSantis has interjected himself into the once a decade process of drawing new congressional maps, something highly unusual for a governor to do.

The House and Senate had considered maps that largely left North Florida Democratic Congressman Al Lawson's district intact, but DeSantis is pushing a map that would make his district lean Republican.

Cecile Scoon is the president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

The league has been monitoring the current redistricting process and back in 2010 they successfully challenged the maps.

Cecile, welcome back to "Florida This Week".

- Thank you, glad to be here.

- I want to ask you.

The congressional maps are up in the air right now, so I wanna ask you more about the legislative maps and the redraw of them.

How does the league view the fairness and the constitutionality of the maps that were passed by the Senate and the House?

- Well, we raised some concerns in the process of the way they did it and that we had wanted them to look further into making sure that our fair districts, our constitutional fair districts guidelines were followed.

And that is you have to make sure that racial and language minorities have every opportunity to select a representative of their choice.

And since we've had so much population increase for Hispanics and African-Americans, we ask them to make sure about this protection across the entire state.

And what the Senate and the House did is they said we're only gonna double check to make sure that that protection is there on the districts that were designated in 2010.

So we had a difference in the process.

The actual maps themselves they are within reason, but we don't think they went far enough.

- I wanna jump to a different topic, but it's related.

The Governor suggested, has proposed having a police force to look into possible election law violations.

What do you think of that?

- Well, we're confounded by that idea.

When the Governor himself and Secretary Lee over the Division of Elections, they both said that our last elections were picture perfect.

They were examples for the rest of the nation and world to look at.

And so we are not seeing the reason to spend $52 million as the Governor has suggested creating a whole another division, putting them under his control, and spending all those resources when they said their elections went well.

There are so many other needs that are known that we are not addressing for lack of resources to create this agency, which could be threatening to many groups when there's been no need is very concerning.

- You said there are other needs.

If you had that $52 million, what would you advise spending it on?

- Well, healthcare.

We need healthcare access.

I mean, the COVID has definitely had a disparate impact on Black and Brown lower income families, the elderly.

There's so much more that we can do.

Our nursing homes need help.

I mean, COVID has sort of peeled away the inequities, the cover over the inequities of healthcare, and so that would be something I would think we should address immediately with known needs, not fabricated.

I think this may happen down the road, but there's no evidence kind of needs.

- There is another election issue and that is that recently in Florida, there have been these so-called ghost candidates or fake candidates running for office to confuse the voters.

It happen in South Florida, it happen in Central Florida, and they're backed by untraceable money, so-called dark money.

Is the legislature moving to deal with that issue?

- They don't seem to be.

They don't seem to be addressing that at all.

And that is an interesting thing when they were trying to direct law enforcement and funds to areas where there is no need and where we have known examples of harm and fraud on the citizens and harm to candidates with these, who are really running for office with the pretend candidates, the ghost candidate.

It's concerning that there's been no action taken against the known problems.

- So I wanna circle back to the Governor.

The Governor seems to have his own mind about what congressional district should look like.

Is it the right thing for the Governor to put himself, involve himself in the process, do you think?

- I think it's highly unusual.

And when you step out and do things that have not been ever been done before, that's always a little like red flag.

Maybe I shouldn't do this.

But it's concerning and it doesn't appear appropriate when the Governor has his designated role through the statutes and laws, where he has the right to veto the legislative maps from the Senate and the House with regards to state maps.

He has the right to veto, and so it's concerning that he would bring his own maps with the congressional, the congressional maps when he has veto power.

- Cecile Scoon, thanks for coming back in the program, and we're gonna continue to pay attention to this issue of redistricting.

- Thank you.

(serious music) - The Sarasota Herald Tribune reports that a new conservative group with ties to election conspiracy activists says it has collected 5,000 affidavits suggesting that each of those affidavits is a possible example of voter fraud here in Florida.

The group is Defend Florida and it was started by a Bradenton resident, Caroline Wetherington.

It has a pipeline to those in power in Tallahassee having had at least six meetings with Governor DeSantis' top staff, Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee, and top Republican legislators.

The Herald Tribune reports Defend Florida recently hosted prominent individuals involved and tried to overturn the 2020 election results, including Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and Trump Advisor Roger Stone.

Defend Florida held a rally last week in Tampa to highlight its claims of widespread voting irregularities.

But so far officials who've looked into the claims say they are not true.

- Nobody is taking responsibility for ensuring that when you register to vote in the State of Florida, you are a citizen, which is Florida State Law.

- Joining us now is the reporter who broke the story.

Zac Anderson is the political editor for the Sarasota Herald Tribune and he was at the rally in Tampa last week.

And Zac, good to see you.

Welcome back.

- Thanks for having me.

- This group, Defend Florida, claims it has 5,000 affidavits about voting irregularities in Florida in the last election in 2020.

Have you seen the affidavits, or has anyone seen the affidavits, and do they strike you?

Should they be investigated?

- No, I haven't seen the affidavits and that's one of the big pieces of this story is that Defend Florida has been going around telling anyone who will listen, and as you mentioned in your intro, they've had six meetings with the Governor's top staff, including his Chief of Staff and his legislative director.

They've met with Laurel Lee, they've met with top state lawmakers, and they've been telling them that there's all these voting irregularities, basically implying that there's widespread fraud in the state, and yet the elections officials that I've talked to say, and this was as of last week, that they had not seen these affidavits.

That Defend Florida is making these allegations without showing the proof.

Now, a representative of Defend Florida did email me last Friday and said that they had sent a spreadsheet summarizing some of their findings from these affidavits to the supervisors.

But it's not clear to me whether they've really shared the actual affidavits with them, although they did tell me that they've shared them with Secretary of State Laurel Lee and the Governor DeSantis' staff.

But I have not seen them.

- So, this is a Bradenton-based group and many of these affidavits were coming out of Bradenton and the Manatee County area.

Did the Manatee sheriff or the Manatee election supervisor look into some of the allegations?

- They did.

The Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett, who is a Republican, a former State Senator, met with the head of Defend Florida Caroline Wetherington.

And he said that he quickly debunked the example that she gave to alleged that there were big problems with voting in the county and problems with the voting rules.

Bennett told me he has not seen anything that leads him to believe that there's a widespread voting problems in Manatee.

And it's the same thing with other elections officials that I've talked to in Florida.

Wesley Wilcox, who is the Supervisor of Elections in Marion County up in Ocala and is the head of the Election Supervisors Association for the state told me that he doesn't believe these affidavits are valid and that he hasn't seen anything to lead him to believe that voting fraud is a big problem.

And you mentioned the Sheriff in Manatee County.

I contacted the Sheriff's office, they were actually part of that meeting with Bennett and Defend Florida.

They said that Defend Florida didn't turn over any affidavits and there was nothing to lead them to believe that a crime had occurred.

- Yet they have the ear of people in power in Tallahassee.

They have the ear of the Governor's office, his staff, and they have the ear of the Secretary of State.

- Yeah, that's one of the things that's so interesting.

The local officials have dismissed these claims and don't see anything to substantiate them, but the head of Defend Florida Caroline Wetherington, she was the head of Women for Trump in Florida, which has about 3,000 members.

She's kind of emerged as an influential new GOP activist in the state, and her group has been putting pressure on state lawmakers and pushing to meet with state officials.

They've met with Joe Gruters, who is a State Senator from Florida and the head of the Republican Party in Florida.

They've met with top leaders in the Florida House and Senates, and as I said, they've met with DeSantis' office.

So they seem to have a direct pipeline to a lot of very influential people in this state at a time when state lawmakers are rewriting the state's election laws and looking to place new restrictions on voting.

- And Zac, yes or no, the real proof of the pudding is gonna be when these affidavits, if and when these affidavits are made completely public and that other outside groups can look at 'em and find out whether or not they're true.

- Yeah.

I mean, that's the real question here is when you start looking at these things, what are they actually alleging here?

A lot of the things that they're saying is that these voters don't live at the places where they cast ballots.

That somehow these are ghost ballots or somehow that there's problems where people who are voting who are not the actual registered voters, and the Wesley Wilcox who I talked to said, people move all the time.

You could have somebody cast a ballot at one residence and then move, and they're no longer living there.

So there's a lot of questions about the affidavits that they've gathered.

- Zac Anderson, thanks for your report and great to see you again.

- Great to be here.

Thank you.

(serious music) - There's a homeowner's insurance problem here in Florida.

Some companies are sharply raising insurance rates, in some cases, double last year's rate.

And Progressive Insurance is dropping the policies of 56,000 customers statewide.

At least a dozen companies have stopped issuing new policies here altogether or limiting the types of homes that they cover.

Homes with roofs older than 15 years are the ones hardest hit by these new rate increases.

Insurance companies and their allies in the legislature say the problem is fraudulent roof damage claims.

Republican State Senator Jeff Brandes has for years been urging the legislature to address the problem of rising homeowner's insurance.

He serves on the banking and insurance committee in Tallahassee and since 2012 he's represented Pinellas County in the State Senate.

He joins us now.

And Senator Brandes, welcome back.

- Great to be with you.

- So why do you think, what's the reason why we're seeing insurance companies either leaving Florida or raising rates pretty dramatically?

- Sure.

It's really all about one thing, which is excess litigation.

Florida represents just 8% of total US property claims, but we're almost 80% of the litigation that happens in the country.

Florida will see almost 95,000 lawsuits this year filed in the State of Florida.

Most other states will see less than a thousand and that's what's driving homeowners rates through the roof.

- Who's filing the lawsuits?

What kind of lawsuits are we talking about?

- Well, in South Florida it's water claims and Central Florida, in the Tampa Bay market it's predominantly roof claims.

We have contractors going up, giving people Amazon gift cards to go up on top of their roof to see if there's any roof damage.

And they can claim it's from a storm up to three or five years ago, depending on the policy length and type.

And what they're doing is saying we can get you a brand new roof from the price of your deductible, and handing over a homeowner an iPad for their signature and the homeowner doesn't recognize that they're hiring an attorney.

And oftentimes the process is well underway before the homeowner figures out.

Maybe they've signed an assignment of benefits or direction to pay, or have hired an attorney themselves to sue their insurance company.

And that's what's driving up rates through the roof.

- All right.

So you're talking about a scam, but yet we hear from some people who say they can't get insurance if their roof is older than 15 years.

It hasn't lived out its 30-year life.

I mean, aren't insurance companies kind of doubling down in treating Florida differently than other states?

- No, in fact in most other states you can get what they call an actual cash value policy on your roof, which means over the life of the roof it depreciates.

And so the cost of replacing the roof over time is born more and more by the insured and not the insurer.

Florida doesn't offer that for our standard HO3 policies, which is generally what people have on their homes.

And because of that, you get a full replacement cost on the roof.

And that is what's driving individuals to get 20-year-old roofs replaced and why companies are shutting off roofs that are older, because roofs that are older are gonna have wear and tear, and people who are claiming that wear and tear as damage.

And because sometimes the litigation is costing three, four, 10 times what it would cost to repair the roof.

They're repairing the roof but they're also paying the attorney's fees, and they're paying for the roof, and they're paying for their own defense costs, and that's what's driving insurance rates to the roof.

The industry loss, we have the industry loss $1.6 billion last year.

- So you're talking about using the tort reform.

What would be the solution in your mind?

- Truly, the solution is on a couple of different ways.

First of all, you have to let policies match people's pocketbooks.

So you've gotta allow for actual cash value.

If people wanna buy full replacement costs, they're gonna have to pay a little bit more of that, but they should allow for actual cash value or depreciated value on roofs.

You're gonna have to add, allow for higher deductibles on water claims.

Those types of things are gonna have to happen in order for us to begin to bend the cost curve for property insurance in Florida.

- And finally, we only have about 50 seconds left, but isn't the legislature moving on this issue?

Aren't they doing exactly that?

- The Senate pass bills out of it, out of the chamber last year, but the House has yet to act on significant reforms this year.

So what we're seeing is, you know, we're in this waiting game.

But listen, if the legislature doesn't act in the next two years, people could be paying more for their property insurance than they are for their mortgage.

That is unacceptable.

We have to fix it.

Only the legislature can fix this problem.

- Senator Jeff Brandes, thanks a lot.

Thanks for coming back on the program.

- You got it, my pleasure (serious music) - Well this week, the White House weighed in on a controversial bill that's moving through the state legislature.

Florida Republicans want to ban discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity in the state schools.

The bill's been dubbed that "Don't Say Gay" Bill by equal rights activists.

The proposal states that, "A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age appropriate for students."

Parents could sue a school district for violations.

The White House criticized the bill this week saying in a statement that every parent hopes that our leaders will ensure their children's safety, protection, and freedom.

Today, Conservative politicians in Florida rejected those basic values by advancing legislation that is designed to target and attack the kids who need support the most.

LGBTQ students who are already vulnerable to bullying and violence just for being themselves.

Republican State Senator Dennis Baxley of Ocala who is sponsoring the bill defended it, saying, "Some discussions are for/with your parents.

When you start opening sexual type discussions with children, you're entering a very dangerous zone."

Nadine Smith is the Executive Director of Equality Florida.

She was an award-winning journalist and serves as chair oF the US Commission on Civil Rights Florida Advisory Committee.

She was also on President Obama's National Finance Committee.

And Nadine, welcome back to "Florida This Week".

- Thank you for having me.

- So let's talk about the kind of speech that would be affected by this bill.

What would be prohibited in schools?

- You know, you would have to talk to the sponsors of this bill.

You mentioned in the opening that the Governor had signaled his support for it, and then later the same day, his own Press Team made sure to say that he hadn't actually read this.

And I would argue that the sponsors seem to not have read it, because how they describe it and what it actually does are two different things.

This bill serves one purpose, to stigmatize LGBT young people, and it is really, it's a cut and paste bill that was created by Republican pollsters as a campaign strategy.

So if you said, what curriculum would be removed as a consequence of this passing, they can't answer that because in elementary school there isn't a curriculum built around sexual orientation and gender identity.

It is not only trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, it's introducing a problem and that is stigmatizing and isolating LGBTQ young people, creating an atmosphere that we are already seeing.

It have an impact of having libraries banning books, pulling books off bookshelves is having a chilling effect where safe space, rainbow stickers that are in schools, our teachers are being told to remove them.

And what we know from The Trevor Project and child welfare advocates and parents, all the largest parents group in Florida has spoken out against this, is that when you isolate, when you remove resources for LGBTQ young people, you make the world more dangerous.

And so there's been a spike in calls to suicide prevention hotlines.

The documentation on this is really quite clear.

But they don't care what the language of the bill is, because the intention of the bill is to be part of a campaign strategy.

- The backers of the bill say it's up to parents to decide when their children hear about gender or sexual orientation issues, and they don't want schools or teachers to impose.

You're saying that right now, it doesn't happen very much.

The discussions about gender or sexual orientation from the teacher to the students.

So- - Again, what do they mean?

What do they mean?

For example, if they say, "Hey, a parent should be informed of their child's sexual orientation," do they really mean that they want, if a teacher knows and a parent doesn't, that the teacher should call?

They don't mean that Johnny's teacher should call his parents and say they think that Johnny is straight.

This is not what they mean.

They are very specifically talking about the LGBTQ community and the clarity of it comes when you look at what the Department of Education just did.

They pulled down all resources, all anti-bullying resources if they included specific resources for the LGBT community.

You need look no further than the bill sponsor himself, Dennis Baxley, who has never met an anti-LGBT bill he hasn't supported.

This is a person who is quoted in the paper saying that he will do nothing to affirm the existence of gay families and that he compares gay people to drug addicts and drunks.

That is the mentality of the person pushing this bill in the Senate.

- And Nadine, we only have about 20 seconds left, but would you expect bullying to rise if there's a limit on the kind of anti-bullying messages that are being taught in classrooms?

- Absolutely.

We're already seeing it.

We're already hearing from teachers saying that there's been a chilling effect on what they can and can't say.

And finally, I'm a parent.

I have a student, a child in the school system in Florida.

This bill does not protect my rights, it does not protect my child, and if my child finds a safer harbor with a teacher that he can reach out to, my first instinct is not to punish that teacher but to open the lines of communication and trust.

And that's what schools are doing.

And if you go to any school and ask them, they go over, they do everything in their power to get teachers and get parents more and more involved.

We don't need the legislature censoring and surveilling classrooms and cutting off honest conversations.

There is no curriculum currently that compels young people to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity, but if you have two moms or two dads, you wanna be able to say so in school.

- Nadine Smith, thanks for coming on the program.

- Thank you.

(serious music) - Thanks for watching.

Please send us your comments to FTW@Wwedu.org.

This and past shows can be viewed online at wedu.org on the PBS app.

And "Florida This Week" is now available as a podcast.

You can find it on our website or wherever you download your podcast.

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

(cinematic music) - [Narrator] "Florida This Week" is a production of WEDU who is solely responsible for its content.

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