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

(gentle music) - Next on WEDU, a ban on some kinds of speech in schools moves closer to passage.

The state is threatening to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to some school systems.

Outlawing abortions in Florida after 15 weeks moves closer to reality.

And the housing affordability crisis gets worse for young people and some full-time workers.

All this and more right now on "Florida This Week".

(dramatic music) Welcome back.

This week, our panelists are Aakash Patel.

He's the founder and CEO of Elevate Incorporated, and a Republican.

Victor DiMaio is the president and CEO of DiMaio and Associates, and a Democrat.

Tara Newsom is a lawyer and political science professor at St. Petersburg College, and Darryl Paulson is the emeritus professor of government and politics at USF St. Pete.

Nice to have you all here for a regular show.

- Yeah, it's good.

- So a bill that supporters call Parental Rights and opponents call the Don't Say Gay bill cleared a House committee on Thursday and took another step toward becoming law.

Wording of the bill was changed by the sponsors in the House after critics accused the proposed law of being too vague.

When it was first filed, the bill said school districts may not encourage classroom discussion about gender identity or sexuality in a way that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.

The new language now prohibits classroom instruction, instead of discussion, of gender or sexual orientation.

The full House could vote on the bill as soon as next week.

The language was changed after the pro LGBTQ group, Equality Florida, issued this ad earlier in the week about the bill.

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- So Aakash, what's the problem that the Republicans in Tallahassee are trying to solve there?

What are they trying to do?

- Well, I think they're trying to give control to the parents on how to educate their children.

I think some of these topics are very, very taboo, if you will, and a lot of children are not mentally ready for these things, and the way the school teaches it could be conceived a wrong way.

- Tara, do you think that there's a lot of third graders getting information from their teachers about the GLBTQ question and movement?

- I think that what we need to look at is a sterilizing of the classroom.

That's what this effort looks like.

Increasing access to information, no matter what age you are, increases freedom of thought and critical thinking, and inclusivity of ideas is important to growth, no matter what age.

Listen, I work at St. Pete College, where we're firmly committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and we know from our students that some of those walks happen at that age, and if we don't have access to information at home, at school, and the library is another way to find it.

And it would be really important for our legislature to look at the experience of the UK.

They tried something in 1988 with section 28 that tried to do the very same thing.

They ended up repealing it, and the cost was mental health of both teachers and students, not to mention First Amendment, in America, First Amendment enforcement issues.

So this seems to be a boondoggle on the state level.

- But Darryl, this is a national movement.

I mean, I think the Republicans want to say that parents have rights and they don't want their kids exposed to ideas that the parents don't tell the kids about that are controversial, like sexual orientation.

But I still wonder how often our first, second and third graders today are even being exposed to these concepts.

- Oh, I hear that's all they talk about on the playground, Rob.

You know, I think this is making much ado about nothing.

It's an attempt, I think, on the part of DeSantis and many governors throughout the nation to engage in symbolic politics.

The find a hot button issue, they don't have to deal with the critical problems facing their state, and yet DeSantis himself said, I don't want the schools to be playgrounds for ideological disputes.

And that's precisely what he's done, is put the schools right in the middle of ideological disputes because that's where he wants them to be.

And when asked well, who's gonna resolve what is age appropriate, he said the parents, and all of a sudden the parents have become the teacher.

So something is grossly wrong with respect to how we treat our teachers and how we approach education in the state of Florida.

- And Victor, this would open up the doors to parents suing schools if their kids are taught something the parents didn't want them to teach when it comes to GLBTQ issues.

- Exactly, and that would be a total disaster.

Can you imagine every parent in the state not liking one thing or other that the teacher didn't say or discuss?

I mean, do you see this?

This is where kids learn nowadays, okay?

The internet is wide open, and third graders have one of these little doohickeys, and you can find anything anywhere in the world that we didn't have.

Look, when I went to the academy in Jesuit, the nuns didn't care to give us sex education, they cringed to do it, but we did it, and Jesuit was very open-minded about discussing all types of subjects.

We were very diverse about that.

So you've got to teach now, even when I went to school, at an early age, because this will, if they don't teach it in school, this is where they're going to get it, and there's so much BS on the internet that it's better to be taught be a teacher that they respect than getting it from here.

- But the parents are controlling those devices too, for their children, so I agree.

I just think the parents should have the rights.

- The kids can know how to override these things faster than a parent can, trust me.

- All right, well, Florida's preparing to pass a ban on almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The bill won approval in Florida's House this week on a mostly party line vote, and makes no exceptions for rape or incest.

Next, the bill moves to the state Senate where it's expected to pass before it goes to Governor DeSantis' desk for his signature.

The proposed law in Florida is modeled after a Mississippi abortion law that's now being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, and their decision could affect abortion access nationwide.

Only about three and a half percent of abortions in Florida happen after 15 weeks.

Florida currently allows abortions until 24 weeks of pregnancy.

So Tara, there are no exceptions for rape or incest in this bill, and it looks like it's gonna pass.

What do you make of it?

- It offers very little empathy for women, and it's a slap in the face for the pro choice movement.

The pro choice movement is committed to a woman's freedom and her autonomy, period, and that respect is certainly set aside with this piece of legislation.

I'm like many Americans who are polling right now, and Floridians.

The polls are saying that most Americans and Floridians believe in that old maxim that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, and because there's no state or federal funding to abortion, it seems that we should honor and respect a woman's right to have this conversation with themselves, their doctor and their own God.

It seems like posturing by the Republican party and aligning with the new Republican mantra of limiting personal freedoms rather than the historical commitment of the Republican party of embracing them, and it's contextualized with all the other pieces of legislation that we're seeing coming out of Tallahassee right now, not just limiting a woman's right to reproductive privacy, but limiting our ability to share information in our schools, limiting our ability of our school systems to offer masks.

So one has to ask is this the new Republican party, limiting individual freedom, and is the Republican party also interested in no longer following their traditional commitment to case precedent?

You know, as a lawyer, we're all taught to follow stare decisis, let the decision stand, and by turning from Roe v Wade because it's politically expedient seems to be a slap in the face to the rule of law.

The other thing that we've got to remember is if Florida, if Roe v Wade is overturned, Florida will be one of the most restrictive states in the country as it relates to abortion law.

- Victor, we have a problem with foster children in Florida, especially in the Tampa Bay area, and kids aren't getting the kind of services that they need.

How does this affect the foster care crisis that we're in if more women will have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term?

- Right, because in this bill, like you said, there's no exception of any kind after 15 weeks.

So if it's rape, incest, you name it, you're done, I mean, you have to have the baby.

There was a Democrat on the floor of the House this week during the arguments, which lasted into the night, that said we should automatically give every parent welfare to raise the kids.

And you know the Republicans, what kills me about this is this is classic over-reach.

Every topic today is over-reach by the Republican party, which our previous guest said, what happened to freedom, which is their mantra?

There's no freedom here of a woman's right to choose.

This should be between a woman and her doctor.

This is ridiculous.

It's sad that this has actually happened after Roe v Wade's been set as precedent for many years.

And actually one last thing is in our Florida constitution, we have a right to privacy.

Women, or men, whoever, have a right to privacy.

This directly conflicts with that clause in our Florida constitution that's protected this in the past.

- Aakash, I don't want to bring you into this by surprise, but what about Victor's point that if Governor DeSantis says this is the free state of Florida, a lot of these issues we're talking about are curtailing freedom.

What do you say back to Victor?

- Well, like I said, I think this issue is going to be controversial no matter which way you look at it, right?

So I mean when the heart beat, and we know when the fetus, the baby comes alive, so Republicans are pro life, and this is a pro life issue.

- Okay, Darryl, wrap it up for us.

- Well, the weakest argument, I think, of the pro abortion forces is precedent.

I mean, they talk about Roe versus Wade.

It's been around, I think, for 49 years now.

But Plessy versus Ferguson, separate but equal, was around for 65 to 70 years.

That wasn't a very good precedent.

That was overturned.

So I'm not saying that's the case with respect to Roe versus Wade, but I don't think that's their strongest argument.

I think the critical issue here is that for poor people in particular, it puts a real burden on those individuals who don't have the resources to maybe travel 500 to 750 miles to another state and stay for several days in those clinics before they can get an abortion procedure.

- All right.

- I've got to say one thing before we move on.

Everyone look back to the Ninth Amendment.

The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights did not deny or disparage the rights held by the people.

As a constitutionalist, I have to leave it there.

- All right, thanks Tara.

Well, Governor Ron DeSantis came out in favor of imposing a $200 million penalty on Florida school districts that required mask wearing by teachers, students and staff.

The proposal's in the state House, and would cut state funding to 12 school districts, including Hillsborough and Sarasota, for imposing mask mandates.

Money would be rewarded to other districts that had no mandates.

The 12 districts targeted for cuts had opted to require students to wear masks during a surge in coronavirus cases, but that was in violation of an edict ordered by Governor DeSantis.

The mask mandate ban was later codified into state law by the legislature.

Democrats have criticized the money cuts as a punishment at a time when districts are already struggling to fill critical staff shortages, from classroom teachers to cafeteria workers to bus drivers.

So Victor, the governor issued this order.

He said the school districts weren't following it.

Later it was codified by the legislature, but Hillsborough's gonna lose about 14 million if this goes through, Sarasota's gonna lose about 12 and a half million.

Is it justified to take away the money?

- No, it's not.

I mean, God forbid the school board, you know, we had an international pandemic.

Millions of people have died because of this thing.

God forbid that the school board is trying to protect the lives of our children.

And to hear the parents get up there because a kid had to wear a mask.

You know, kids don't care about the masks.

What's sad is the parents are more freaked out about the masks because I think this is a Trump/DeSantis Republican party thing to make them look strong, and it's total BS.

I mean, masks do help people.

We're getting out of it, thank God, because a lot of people did wear masks, a lot of people did get shots, like myself, but the fact that just wearing a simple mask became such a political issue, and really more so by the Republicans than the Democrats, I think this is sad that we're gonna lose this money because a school board, God forbid, tried to care about the life and health and safety of the children and the teachers and the staff as well.

- All right, so Tara, the governor says look, I have the power.

I can make these orders.

I issued this order.

They violated the order, and the legislature looks like it's going to go along with the governor and remove the money, and the governor said, look, you're gonna possibly lose this money if you go ahead with a mask mandate.

So legally speaking, what do you think?

- Well, I think that we've got to remember that we had a Home Rule Act of 1973 in our Florida constitution, and that had a spirit of home rule and enabling local municipalities, school boards, to give ordinances that made sense without the state blessing.

So I think that the spirit of DeSantis is really going against that, again, traditional belief that local rule should be the one that governs.

But what's even more interesting than Governor DeSantis' attempt to take away the money is that prior to his attempt to do that, he tweeted out that he wanted to increase school board's liability, and really encouraged parents and others to sue school boards.

So he's pitting against school boards, parents, rather than trying to increase collaboration to support public health and student success, and that's even more frightening to me.

- Aakash, what do you think about the possible penalties?

- Respectfully, Tara, I don't think he's pitting school board against the parents.

I think the parents spoke to the school board members and asked them not to penalize their kids, and the school board went and voted for these mandates.

If you talk to the superintendent of Hillsborough county or many of the superintendents you're talking about, Rob, they didn't want this.

The school board members voted to impose masks, and there was no scientific proof of these masks on these students, and these aren't N95 masks.

These are just cloth masks.

And now we're seeing a lot of the masks being revoked, all the mandates have been revoked from Universal and Disney and other places.

So I think this is a way that we look at our school boards and how important they are.

I think the governor stood by, and he was very open from the very beginning, he wasn't a fan of masks.

And so he told the school board members that, and they still voted the way they did.

And the parents went up to the school board meetings and said we don't want this.

- Aakash, with all due respect, there is scientific proof that the masks do prevent the virus from going and infecting people, so I disagree with that.

My brother's a doctor, he wears a mask 18 hours a day in the operating room.

I can't imagine doctors running around an operating room without masks, so if a mask can protect and save a life, one life, wouldn't you want to take that chance?

That's all they were trying to do.

But it is optional, it's always been optional.

So parents could take their kids out of school.

- But the thing is it should not be.

You can't have half a bunch of kids in a class not wearing masks and the others wearing masks.

It's got to be uniformly done.

That's how you protect everybody, with having a mask.

- All right, well, with thousands of people moving to Florida every week, and the state's reliance on a service economy, home prices are climbing and rents are becoming less affordable.

One study found that rents in the Tampa Bay area jumped by almost 30% in the last year.

The Tampa Bay Times reports some of the lowest paid city workers in St. Petersburg cannot afford to live within the city limits, even though St. Pete has a rule requiring its workers to live within the city.

There have been calls for temporary rent control limits until the housing market cools off.

But St. Pete's city council has rejected that idea, and there have been protests, as low and moderate income people demand the government do something to ease the crisis.

So Darryl, no doubt about it, rents are skyrocketing and a lot of people are threatened with becoming homeless.

What do you do?

What should the cities be doing?

- Well, you know, Florida used to be conceived of as one of the least expensive places to live in, and so many people moved here precisely because of that.

They in particular looked at no income tax in the state of Florida.

But more and more recent studies have found that's just not the case anymore, that Florida is becoming one of the most expensive states to live in.

It's true we don't have an income tax, but we do have very high property taxes, and a lot of other taxes are quite high as well.

So it's a situation that many local governments are having problems with.

For example, Key West was one city which had to provide subsidies for their municipal workers because they couldn't afford to live there.

A lot of other communities across the nation have had to do the same thing.

There's been a recent report by the Washington Post which looked at property values, and found that Florida is now number one in terms of the state that has the fastest growth in the value of its property.

But the study also found that Florida property, and especially in the Tampa area, is highly overvalued, by as much as 30%, which means with boom times also comes bust, and at some point in the near future, those sky high property values that you see in Tampa and many other parts of Florida are going to fall and drop precipitously.

- So Aakash, several grassroots groups would like to see rent control passed in places like Tampa and St. Petersburg.

There's also another move that says let the builders build wherever.

Do away with the zoning laws.

Let's just have more and more housing, the more the merrier.

Where do you fall down on this issue?

- Yeah, I don't think that rent control is the answer because it decreases affordability.

You have a family of four that are living together and now they have rent control, so then the two kids get older, they move out, but they still have that big space and so now more people cannot afford to live in that space.

So what you're gonna have is people staying there for no reason.

And so I think these builders, they have their own supply and demand issues, so they're building at cost, and the median wage in Hillsborough county is $55,000.

So at some point you have to.

- Which is at the bottom of the 20 cities of our size, Tampa, St. Pete is near the bottom.

Seattle's at the top of that list when it comes to income.

- Absolutely, and rent control is not the answer to solve it.

- All right, so what do we do though?

- Well, do you know what?

We had, when I worked for Governor Graham, we set up a Sadowski fund, and speaking of rape and abortion, the Republicans for 20 straight years have raped that fund of billions of dollars.

That money's directly, the purpose of the fund was to spend money for low income housing, middle income housing, workforce housing, help people with down payments on their homes.

And that's been, everything's always the next year.

We've got a $6 billion surplus coming up this year.

They need to fully fund the Sadowski fund.

It would help.

- They swept that money out of the Sadowski trust fund and put it in the general fund.

- They've raped it for 20 years.

- To make the budget picture look better in the state of Florida.

- Yes, exactly, and they use the money for little pet projects that mean nothing.

They're not helping us out.

I'm not saying it's a total solution, but it's a huge solution that would help around the state.

- [Rob] Darryl?

- Well, last year, $200 million went from the Sadowski trust to deal with the issue of rising coastal waters.

That's an important project, but that's not what the money was set aside for.

And increasingly governments get themselves into trouble because they set aside money for a particular issue and then use it for something completely different.

- But does anybody on the panel think that we're encouraging too many people to come to Florida, and maybe it would be better if we didn't encourage more people to come to Florida to try to slow down the growth?

- I don't know how you go about doing that.

That's a difficult, I'm sorry, go ahead.

- Well, it's really interesting, because in St. Pete we had the Harvard Kennedy School that just released a study illustrating that our corporate investors from out of state has risen up to about 530%.

So the incentivizing of corporate investors in Florida is just as problematic as any individual.

- People always wanted to come here because of the quality of life, right?

Now they have opportunities because they can work remotely.

So that's really what this pandemic highlighted.

And we've always had no income tax, right?

- And the bad part about Florida is they come here, we're cheap, we're free, we have no taxes, and this is the result.

- But they come here because we're a beautiful state, and we're killing the beautiful state by too much growth.

- Right, right.

And there's other funds that can be used for the Everglades, like the professor said, that they didn't have to take the Sadowski monies out.

There's other monies out there specifically for that, but you know, this is priorities.

- Okay, before we go, what other news stories should we be paying attention to?

And let's start with Tara.

Tara, your other big story of the week.

- Good news in Tampa Bay.

Representative Kathy Castor got a $4.9 million grant to expand the Cross Bay ferry, which really will mean that we get to enjoy transportation across from Tampa to St. Pete for work and play, and it's really great news for Tampa Bay.

- All right, Darryl, your other big story of the week.

- Well, we're finishing up the reinforcement process, which happens every 10 years in the state of Florida and across the country.

Reinforcement's sort of like the family portrait.

The only thing you care about is how you come out, and the heck with everybody else.

But we know that this is the first time in 30 some years now where the legislature has re-drawn the state legislative districts, and no one protested those districts.

So that is a first for the state of Florida.

Many indicated we're moving in the right direction, because in 2015 it cost Florida $15 million in taxpayer suits to deal with what many groups considered a violation of the Fair Amendments Act in Florida.

- Nobody protested except the governor, right?

- Except the governor, he doesn't like it.

He's protesting Congressional districts.

He has a veto over Congressional districts, but he doesn't have a veto over the state legislative districts, so whether or not that veto will be sustained remains to be seen.

Two thirds of the legislature need to override that veto.

- Victor, your other big story of the week.

- In one of the greatest unforced errors, a year away from the election of the seat of Tampa, the mayor has decided to choose a candidate for police chief whose claim to fame is that she got drunk and beat up a cop, and she says she won't do it again, but frankly when you get the NAACP and the PBA actually agreeing on a candidate, which is Butch Delgado, which everybody universally loved and thought he would be a great candidate, she passed over Butch for a lady who wasn't even a minority.

I mean, there was an African-American lady from Miami who was very qualified, would have been a great candidate as well.

She has no votes on city council.

- That's what I was gonna ask.

Does the city council have any ability to stop the confirmation?

- Yes, this is one of those picks that the mayor has to go to council for approval, and right now she has zero votes for this particular candidate, so I don't know what's going to happen.

It was a pretty heated discussion yesterday.

The city council's getting 99% of their calls are against this lady to be our next police chief.

So I don't know what the mayor's gonna do.

I think a smart politician would admit defeat and go on and pick the person that would be a great candidate, but this is the biggest drama going on in the city hall right now.

- Aakash, your other big story of the week.

- Innovation and technology.

Yesterday at Amalie Arena, 5000 people attended the Synapse Summit.

It's the fourth year we've had it at Amalie Arena.

A lot of companies and start ups from all over the world were present.

It was kind of like old times.

There's great seminars, networking, socializing and learning about different technologies, and then of course this past week, Cathie Wood from ARK Investments mentioned that St. Pete/Tampa Bay is the next tech city.

- [Rob] Next to Austin.

- And she's gonna build a big headquarters in St. Pete, which is great for the region.

- Do we have the technical expertise?

Are our universities and our schools, are they contributing?

Do we have the brain power here in the Tampa Bay area?

- We do.

I'm a trustee at Hillsborough Community College.

We had several meetings this week with Saint Leo University and the University of Tampa and USF.

They were big presenters at this conference, and most of those programs, like cybersecurity now, exponentially growing at these colleges.

- All right, well thank you all.

- Go to St. Pete College.

- St. Pete College too, okay.

Hey, finally we did a whole show with a real panel, and one of these days, we're gonna be back in the studio.

Great to see all of you.

- Thank you, Rob.

- Thank you, Rob.

- Thank you for having us.

- Thanks for joining us.

Please send us your comments at ftw@wedu.org.

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