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- Coming up next, the legislature finishes work on a $112 billion budget and a long list of new laws among them, the parental rights or don't say gay bill, which is getting pushback from some quarters, including Disney employees.

The legislature focused on social issues and decided not to address many kitchen table issues such as rising rents, condo safety, or homeowners insurance.

And powerful industries wants favors from this session, including the sugar industry and the nursing home industry.

We'll discuss it all right now on Florida This Week.

(upbeat music) Welcome back, join us this week on our panel, April Schiff is the President and co-founder of Strategic Solutions of Florida and the Hillsborough County State Republican committee woman.

Rita Ferrandino is the innovation consultant at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, and a Democrat from Sarasota.

Darryl Paulson is the emeritus professor of government and politics at USF-St. Petersburg, and Mary Ellen Klas is the Capital Bureau Chief for the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald.

Great to see you, all thank you for coming on the program.

Well, the annual two month legislative session ended this past Monday with the passage of a $112 billion budget, which goes into effect July 1st.

The budget had broad support in the state capital with Democrats and Republicans backing its minimum wage increase for state workers, pay boosts for teachers and law enforcement, state tax suspensions and more.

The budget marked a rare moment of harmony in this year's 60 day a session, which also saw lawmakers fighting over bills involving abortion and teaching about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

The budget raises the minimum wage for state workers to $15 an hour, and all state workers will get a 5% pay raise.

It will also give public defenders, an assistant state attorneys, 5,000 to $10,000 pay increase.

It boosts the minimum salary for state law enforcement officers to $50,000 and raises the minimum salary for teachers to at least $47,500.

The budget includes some tax breaks, including a one month gas tax suspension in October paid for by federal coronavirus relief dollars.

So Darrell, they say that budgets, whether they're federal or state are kind of a snapshot of what the legislature or Congress really cares about.

What do you think this budget says about Florida?

- Well, you know, I've always looked at the budget as the most important political document that any entity of government puts out, whether it's a city government, or whether it's a state of Florida or the national government.

It tells you the government's priorities, what things are important to it and what things don't rank so high.

It tells you how they're gonna get their resources.

So you look at the tax structure and see who pays to fund all of these different programs that the state has and who doesn't pay, who gets a tax rate.

So it's the most important political document, and in many respects, the most ignored political document.

If you look at this year's budget, you'll see a 10% increase in the amount of funds that the legislature had, that's always a great thing for the legislature to have extra money beyond what you anticipated.

Last year, they had a 10% increase, which was about $10 billion extra money.

This year, they've got a 10% increase, which is about $11 billion, so that's $21 billion added to the budget, $112 billion budget in just the two years, that's phenomenal.

And as was mentioned, part of the reason for the jump this year, two things, the three and a half billion dollars pumped into the state of Florida from the coronavirus program.

And secondly, the state tax receipts were much stronger than anticipated.

So that money went into the general revenue, so you get all of these increases in spending, increases in teacher salaries, all sorts of things added to the budget that the state never could afford before.

And you also get all sorts of tax breaks.

I mean, the budget many respects is like a Christmas tree package.

There's goodies under the tree for all sorts of people.

And there's a tax breaks for the back to school, which has been very common in Florida over the past.

You've got tax breaks for hurricane preparation.

You've got tax breaks for diapers and clothes for the first time, a one year tax break on that.

You've got the corporate tax cuts, you've also got the 25 cent gas tax, which strangely enough goes into effect in October, right before the November elections.

So there's a lot of information you can get out of this year's budget.

- Mary Ellen, I wanna ask you two things about the budget.

One is the governors indicated that he may veto some items in this record high budget, last year he veto at about $1.5 billion in item.

But the other thing is, there was talk about corporate tax breaks, and I wondered whatever happened to tax breaks for some of the big corporations that were being talked about earlier in the session.

- Well, when it comes to tax breaks for corporations, there are many proposals in here that give, you know, certain advantages for companies, but it doesn't industries, but the one thing where the state used to piggyback on a federal tax break for the past two, well, more than two years, the legislature chose not to do that this year and that amounts to about a billion dollars.

So this year they chose not to continue that tax break and even though corporations sought that they didn't do it.

So, that I think is a very telling change of direction, and I think they thought perhaps that corporations don't need to continue to benefit from the state reduction in taxes when it's not happening at the federal level.

- And what about the governor's veto pen?

Is he likely to use it?

I mean, what are you hearing from the go governor's mansion about whether or not he's got some items in his veto pen sites?

- Well, every governor wants to give, you know, send the message that he's really scrutinizing the budget.

And when you have $112 billion, which has Darryl said is over $11 billion more than it was last year and it's, or I'm sorry, an 11% increase over last year.

And it's, you know, an enormous amount of, it's a record breaking budget.

I don't think it's going to be hard for this governor to find a record amount of projects to veto.

Plus what we have is the governor wants to make sure that, you know, people who didn't go along with him on some of his priority legislation, and specifically, I suggest that might be redistricting, that he's not gonna reward everybody for disagreeing with him.

So, the word is that he is going to do some pretty significant cuts, but the seven Republicans who voted with him on redistricting are likely to be spared.

So that that's what I'd watch.

- Rita for a long time people have complained about wages here in Florida, and we've seen some wage increases in this budget, teachers who were 47th in nation just two years ago, Florida teachers, now they're gonna get a pay increase.

Have we solved the problem of the number of vacancies that we have in the teaching force around the state of Florida?

- Well, I don't think this budget does anything to go far enough in solving more Florida's biggest problem, which is our workforce shortage of workers.

So our workforce crisis was not really addressed by these wage increases.

Tampa Bay, the inflation rate here is 10%, the state workers just got a 5% raise, there's still losing.

When you do the simple math, our lowest paid workers are making $600 a week or $2,400 a month.

Here in Sarasota, the average rent in Sarasota is 2000 a month.

This doesn't go anywhere near enough for those hardworking minimum wage $15 an hour workers to even be able to come close to living where they work or having housing and food.

Now, when it comes to the teacher, we are 47th in the country.

We lead the world in the number of teacher shortages we have here, and this goes again, if you look at the lowest paid teacher making 47,000, you know, that comes to gross of 4,000 a month.

Average rent here to live is 2000, that means over 50% of their salary is just going to try to live in the place where they work.

- [Rob] All right.

- So, no, I don't think it's enough.

- April, what would you say back to Rita?

- Well, there's no question that our teachers deserve to make more and that we have an issue that we need to really provide for that.

I think the challenge comes with the, each county is different.

We can look at Hillsborough County, who's got record funding in education and still they don't have enough.

And so it's more the county school boards, I think that are controlling what's going on here.

And a bigger picture, the legislature did put some significant money about 289 million into after school programs to try and boost things like the STEM learning, civics and Holocaust education learning, remedial reading intervention, and professional development for reading coaches.

So there's definitely some fundamental things that are gonna come out of this by this extra boost that they're gonna give to the students where it's needed.

- Okay.

Well, Disney workers are holding walkouts during their breaks every day this week to protest there CEO's slow response in publicly criticizing Florida's parental rights, or don't say gay bill.

According to a Disney employee website, the protests will culminate this coming Tuesday with a general walk out by LGBTQ workers and their supporters at Disney work sites here in Florida, California, and elsewhere.

Disney will pause all political donations here in Florida, after they took criticism over how the media giant responded to the legislation with the Disney CEO apologizing for not to a more forceful stand against the bill.

The bill in question was passed by the state legislature and awaits the governor's signature.

The preamble of the bill says the purpose is to prohibit classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.

But later in the bill, the words classroom discussion, are change to classroom instruction, that part says, "Classroom instruction by school personnel "or third parties on sexual orientation "or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten "through grade three or in a manner "that is not age appropriate "or developmentally appropriate for students."

So, Rita, what do you think about, what is this bill gonna do for Florida?

A lot of the bill has to do with parental rights, and I think the governor would defend it on that.

There is a small portion of the bill that deals with the gender and sexual identity, what do you think this bill is gonna do for Florida?

- Oh, I think this bill is designed to cripple our public education system.

The language is unclear, there are legitimate reasons why teachers and school leaders are fearful of being sued, and the floodgates for lawsuits will open.

We need to look at the money flow and the groups who will benefit from this law.

We have loosely interpreted law that will allow parents to Sue a school district for any proposed violation.

A lawyer just needs to go to a parent rally, pass out business cards and say to parents, I can get you money and the floodgates are open.

We know there are well funded conservative parent groups set up to through school districts across this country as a strategy, and this bill just gives ambulance chasers more.

So when you look at the financial implications from this bill to a school district, which includes dramatic insurance needed to cover this liability, you're gonna see district legal defense money needing to skyrocket.

There's gonna be potential settlements of payouts, they're all a financial risk and will need to be accounted for and budgeted for.

And more importantly, the teacher shortage is just going to get worse and worse culminating in public schools being weakened.

And the people who are gonna profit from this are by far the lawyers, the insurers, and the private charter school industry.

- Rita, is the language, I'm sorry.

April is the language in the bill, I'm sorry about that.

- That's okay.

- Is the language in the bill clear?

- No, I think it is a little vague, that's one of the biggest concerns that people have about it, but this bill is definitely in response to the parental rights bill that was passed the years before.

And that bill required that parents be notified of any significant developments involving their children and what happened or what I'm told happened, what happened was there were discussions and conversations with children in elementary school regarding gender identity between teachers and counselors and administrative personnel that was not revealed to the parents.

And that's pretty much what motivated this so that the parents would be more involved in what's going on with their children and to prevent the schools from keeping the parents from being involved.

So, I mean, I think everybody across the board pretty much agrees that K through three is not a place for any of these discussions to be taken into, you know, to the classroom and to children, it's just not appropriate for those ages.

I think that one of the major concerns is the portion of the bill that just alludes to age appropriate discussions, because who's gonna make that determination?

And what's age appropriate discussions are different for every child?

- Right.

- Children develop at different stages and different ages.

- And that means it's not limited to K through three too.

- Correct?

- Yeah.

- Absolutely correct.

- Well, (indistinct) me to have the governor call Florida the freedom state every breath that he takes, he almost gets that into every message that he gives to his constituents.

And yet at the same time, you're not free to do certain things.

He said, "We don't want our children exposed "to sensitive topics."

You know, I thought that was one of the things that schools were supposed to do, to discuss this in a sensitive way, critical way, where students could understand different kinds of issues.

And yet we've become a state where you can't talk about this.

We know that they're banning books now because of this in a number of different schools across the State of Florida.

So on and on, it seems like we're the freedom state, but only if you say what the governor wants you to say.

- Mary Ellen, I wanna ask you about Disney.

Disney is the state's largest private employer, and the CEO is under fire from his workers for not taking a tougher stand on this issue as it was making its way through the state house and Senate, does this put Disney at odds now, though the CEO has now taken a stand against the bill?

Does this put Disney at odds with the governor?

- I think it definitely does.

It's very clear that that the Disney coming out, so I think publicly with this criticism of the bill, didn't seem to do anything to dissuade the governor or the legislature from moving forward with this.

That is something I've really never watched in Florida before where a giant corporation, especially one as pretty pivotal to our tourism industry, didn't get some response.

But I do think it to signal that the governor is less worried about kind of what this message is in Florida.

And he's more concerned that this is a message that he hopes will resonate with supporters, particularly, I think Republican base supporters at the national level.

- All right.

Rita, I wish we had time, but we don't, and so maybe you could do it as your story of the week.

While lawmakers did pass social issue legislation such as parental rights and ban on abortions after 15 weeks, the legislature did not address some other major issues.

Those include steeply rising homeowners insurance, rising rents, condo safety, and the thousands of Florida children who were about to lose Medicaid health insurance.

Some special interests did get help, the sugar industry maintained access to fresh water from Lake Okeechobee under a bill intended to protect the Everglades.

Florida Power and Light secured disincentives for rooftop solar, nursing homes will now be allowed to reduce the minimum number of nursing hours that each resident gets daily, possibly endangering elderly residents, and businesses will soon be able to Sue local governments if they lose revenue of 15% or more as a result of a local ordinance passed by a city council or a county commission.

So, April is that the way you look at it, the kitchen table issues were ignored in the session and big monied interest got some perks out of the session.

Would you agree or disagree?

- I wouldn't look at it that way.

There were over 3000 bills presented to the legislature this year, and it's all a matter of allocation.

And so they have to prioritize the most important things that they have to get done and time allocated to really get into those and to be able to understand them and to know them and pass them through their committees and have public comment during the committees and to make things work so that they understand what they're doing properly.

The legislature's number one stability is the budget, obviously, and this year redistricting, so that took up a lot of time.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a special session coming back on property insurance, which will ultimately include the congressional redraw maps, because the governors has said, he's going to veto the congressional map that was passed through the house in the Senate.

That's because he has his own map that he'd like to see happen, but that'll end up being a compromise.

But I think that there will be a special session coming up this summer, which is highly unusual in a campaign year as well.

So, we should see that, but there were a lot of things that did, you know, the local business issues that stemmed, I think a lot of this is stemming from what's happened as a result of the pandemic.

The pandemic created a situation where local governments really did create what they thought was the necessary things to do, but what damaged a lot of businesses.

So, this could be something that, it applies only to private for profit businesses.

- [Rob] Right.

- So it wouldn't be the big conglomerate public businesses that would benefit from this.

But there's a lot that they did that had to be done.

- Mary Ellen, I've seen the discussion about the preemption of local laws this time is saying that now businesses have veto power over local city councils and county commissions, is that the way it's being viewed this legislation that would allow companies to sue if their business interests are hurt by a local ordinance?

- Well, the way the bill was initially drafted, it definitely had that potential.

The bill was significantly modified so that you have to be in business a certain number of years, you have to have lost a certain amount revenue.

And you have an opportunity to warn the county and have them repair or repeal the ordinance that you are suing them for.

So there have been some modifications so it's not a one-on-one veto.

With those changes, the Florida Association of Counties and the League of Cities, or specifically the League of Cities withheld their opposition.

Now, there are still a lot of opponents to this and will see how this plays out.

I do think it is a response very much to the pandemic and the fact that there were local governments that were far more aggressive, especially in areas where COVID was just off the charts and their responses were more aggressive.

But this is something that, the legislature may be forced to return to and work out some glitches.

- Rita, how would you summarize winners and losers in this session of the legislature?

- Special interest groups won.

(laughs) Special interest groups won.

We have to just follow the money.

- Okay.

Well, Florida has long been one of the leading states for government transparency.

This week, the Florida's First Amendment Foundation published a report on what the legislature did this year regarding access to public records and public meetings.

The legislature enacted or reinstated 25 exemptions to Florida's public records laws among the items that it will now be closed to the public, the names of candidates initially applying to become president of a state university or community college, those names will now be secret.

The final group of candidates would later become public.

The legislature also wants to keep secret information that could lead to identification of a person or an entity to participating in any aspect of an execution.

This legislation will also prevent the public from knowing about the companies making and supplying the drugs that are used in executions.

So, Mary Ellen, we just have time for you to answer this question.

What's been the trend in the legislature when it comes to the sunshine laws.

- Well, there's no doubt that the legislature has been eager and willing, and this year more than anything, you know, the proposal to exempt information about the hiring of university and college presidents has been something that the legislature has rejected for eight years.

And this year, given the fact that there was so much money, and a redistricting session, they were able to persuade enough Democrats to go on board and pass that.

And I think that is just kind of a signal that these public records exemptions are just gradually, but, you know, significantly being whittled away.

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

An April you're the big story of the week?

- Well, on the public records side, this week we saw Tampa City Councilman John Dingfelder resign from his position to city council and he's a long time serving elected official here in Tampa, Hillsborough County as well for violations of public records law, which were revealed during lawsuit.

So, our public records laws are very significant and everybody needs to be aware of what they are and watch for them.

- And we don't know, I mean, there's a lot of opaqueness about exactly what was the violation there too?

- I think we may be hearing more in the future, so.

- Okay.

Rita, you're the big story of the week?

- Well, just to comment on the earlier question, there are many ways to improve parent engagement and parent communication, suing teachers and crippling school districts with law suits does not achieve that goal.

My story of the week is, why did the Sarasota County Commission elect to award over $825,000 of incentive grants from taxpayer money to Canadian based rumble under a subject called project sunshine?

So I think we are going to hear a lot more about why is Sarasota subsidizing Russian state TV platform rumble.

- All right.

Darryl your big story.

- Well, the worst law that was passed as far as I can see is the law election law.

The governor pushed for this special office and the secretary of states to investigate election fraud.

Even though he just said the 2020 election was the smoothest election in Florida's history, and there was no fraud to be seen.

So they're gonna create a basically 60 person office including 10 sworn police officers, all appointed by the governor to investigate the fraud that doesn't exist at a cost of about $5 million to Florida taxpayers.

It makes no sense to me.

It shouldn't exist.

We are the only state to have it.

You can either say we're the first in the nation to recognize the need, or we're the only state that's dumb enough to put something like this into effect.

- All right, and Mary Ellen, you're the big story.

- I hate to say this, but I think we're gonna be in for a very long summer of redistricting litigation.

In the last week, Common Cause and Fair Districts now have asked a federal judge to draft congressional redistricting plans, that is signal that those lawsuits are on board.

A democratic elections lawyer asked a state judge to do the same thing, that is just the beginning.

- All right, well, thank you all for a great program.

Thank you for watching Florida This Week.

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

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

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