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Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

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(serious music) - [Rob] Coming up next, the number of COVID deaths in Florida has been setting records in the last month.

Governor DeSantis says he will penalize cities that impose mask mandates.

Previously, he had vowed to penalized school boards.

We'll have a debate.

And the cost of housing is out of reach for many Floridians.

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

(light cinematic music) Welcome back.

The number of COVID-19 deaths in Florida is at its worst level since the start of the pandemic.

According to Johns Hopkins University, 50,000 people in the state have now died from the disease.

Deaths have spiked this month averaging more than 300 a week.

Florida counted for one in five of all COVID deaths in the nation last week.

Vaccination rates are getting better, though.

57% of the state's total population is now fully vaccinated, that's slightly higher than the national rate which is 54%.

Health data related to the COVID crisis in Florida has been hard to come by.

Since June, the state has released coronavirus data only once a week, and the state does not release details on the COVID victims, such as age and race.

So this week, the state's largest news media organizations, including the AP, Ganette, McClatchy, and the Times Publishing Company, joined a lawsuit against the DeSantis administration, trying to make the administration more transparent when it comes to the dimensions of the outbreak.

Monday, Governor DeSantis threatened local governments with $5,000 fines per violation for requiring their employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

It's part of his crackdown on local officials who try to impose stronger safety measures.

His administration has already taken away the salaries of school board members in Alachua and Broward Counties who defied the Governor by implementing mask mandates.

A total of 13 school boards across the state, including Hillsborough and Sarasota, have voted to require masks in schools against the wishes of the Governor.

And last month, the Sarasota County School Board voted three to two to adopt a 90-day policy mandating masks for students and teachers, and majority of the board members said the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases locally necessitated a mask requirement.

This order is in defiance of state regulations.

Jane Goodwin is the vice-chair of the Sarasota School Board and voted in favor of the new rules, and she joins us now.

Jane, nice to see you.

- Thank you for having me.

- A federal judge has blocked the imposition of mask mandates around the state, siding with the governor.

What's the status of the mask mandate in Sarasota?

- The mask mandate is still in effect.

We are carefully looking at these issues as they go through the courts, and we will be determining our next steps.

- You told me before we started this interview that this is all political theater.

I've watched some of the school board meetings.

A lot of parents show up, many are angry at the requirement that students wear masks and staff wear masks, but you say it's political theater.

Why do you say that?

- Well because they're operating from a script that they've been given to talk about certain things that are considered politically correct to talk about, such as CRT, and BLM, and LGBTQ, and oh, by the way, mask and vaccines that they want to abolish.

So anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-sex education, these are things that many parents who were in a proponent of the Parent Bill of Rights are very interested in seeing restored in the State of Florida.

- So are you saying that this is the leading edge of maybe a new culture war at the school boards, at school boards across the state, and across the country?

- Very definitely.

When I talked to some people who insist on calling me or are meeting with me, many of them do not have children in our schools.

They're homeschool, or already have children who are grown, who are older and have never had a child in our school district, or have they ever been in one of our schools, so there's the political theater of that.

And the bullying that's being done in the audience to those who come on behalf of mask and the importance of wearing masks is untold and unheard of before, so it's really been very difficult to do the business of the school board with this type of audience.

- A lot of parents though, have come to those meetings and said, "Look, it's a matter of personal choice, and my personal choice is not to have my child wear a mask."

And they say the students can't see the facial expressions on each other, they can't form those kind of bonds that they used to have and that's why they want to not wear a mask.

What do you say?

- Well, I say that I would really like to not have a mask mandate.

I would like to be free to do all the things that we've done in previous years, but this is the pandemic.

When we talked about this in July and August, our positivity rate was over 25% in Sarasota County.

Whether you have noticed or not, we have a very high incident now of deaths.

We have over 200 people, souls that have been lost from Sarasota Memorial Hospital alone since the beginning of August.

- What's the COVID rate in the schools, among the students, and the teachers, and the staff?

Are the number of cases going up in Sarasota, in the school system?

- They're going down, but I will tell you that today we had almost 1100 students and teachers out, either with COVID or quarantined.

Of that 1200 number, we had 571 who were positive with COVID.

The numbers have gone down drastically from a high of over 230 cases a day down to 26 cases today.

We have a positivity rate that looks like 7.86% today and our policy states that if we bring the positivity rate below 8% for three days, that we will say masks can come off.

So we have to be careful, we have to be vigilant over this weekend and see how things go.

So I think maybe, hopefully, we have crossed the crisis and that we're on the other side of it, but we'll have to see.

- The Governor said he's gonna take away money for the school board members and the school superintendents around the state in the districts that have imposed mask mandates.

Has that happened to you yet in Sarasota?

- No, it has not.

But I have never done this job for money.

I've often said I would do it for free.

And as you know, the legislature attempted to remove our salaries last year in session, so that doesn't surprise me.

I would want to keep my community, students, teachers, and staff safe.

That's why we have a mask mandate.

And that's why I am willing to step out and say, "It's not about money."

We've had a teacher who died this week, a retired teacher who died this week.

We've had many people in this community that I know and love that are no longer with us and we have to do all we can to mitigate this.

- Jane Goodwin, thanks a lot for coming on the program.

- Thank you.

- Well, the mandates over masks in schools are not the only controversy generated by COVID.

We'll discuss those when we return (serious music) President Biden has set out tougher new vaccination and testing mandates designed to encourage more Americans to take the shots.

He's targeted federal workers, healthcare workers, and private businesses that have more than a hundred employees.

He's also criticized elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19 and will push back against the mandates.

Joining us now to discuss the issue are Patrick Manteiga, the editor and publisher of La Gaceta Newspaper in Tampa and a Democrat, and Travis Horn, the president and CEO of Bull Horn Communications and a Republican.

And thank you for joining us.

Great to see you.

- Thank you.

- I wanna start by saying Governor DeSantis is threatening to fine cities and county governments and others that require employees to be vaccinated.

And Travis, let me start with you.

What do you think about that?

- A required mandates.

I mean, look, I'm vaccinated, and I'll let your audience know that I got the vaccine.

As soon as it was available, as an aging male with some belly fat, I figured that was probably a prudent thing to do.

I've probably had worse vaccines in the military.

I just think whenever you're talking in terms of the Americans, if it's a medical procedure, like a vaccine, essentially, or a mask, the word mandate, it has a connotation to it that Americans automatically wanna push back on.

If you say, "You've got to do this.

", well, immediately, there's a situation where folks just wanna recoil and say, "I'm not gonna do that.

I'll show you."

- Well, all right, Patrick, what do you think?

That most Americans resist authority, and so we wanna be independent and therefore- - Well, I think that sometimes we do it, but I think there's tremendous amounts of things that we do because we're supposed to, we cooperate and it's the rules.

When you go on a construction site, you wear a hardhat, you got to wear steel toed shoes, you got to wear long pants.

You've got to join the military, you know you're gonna have to take vaccines, you're gonna have to take up pills, you're gonna have to dress a certain way, you're gonna have to wake up a certain time and do certain things.

You go and work at a restaurant, you gotta wear a hair net.

I mean, there's hundreds of rules that we do, and most of the time we do them.

And do I like to go through a search at the airport?

No, but you put your head down, you get through it and you move on.

A lot of people are wrapping this individualism in the flag, but, I kind of like patriotism by sacrifice.

I think it's a better thing.

"Not ask what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country" - [Rob] Yeah, the JFK (inaudible) - is I think a better way of looking at this and so, if wearing mask helps America move forward, if getting a vaccine helps us get this passed us, gets our economy moving, keeps our children's safe, why not?

- What do you say about that, Travis?

- I didn't mean to imply that because I acquiesced and I did it, more than that, I did the calculation of what I thought was right for myself based on my age and my vulnerability, and I've had long issues in the past as well with pneumonia and bronchitis.

So I thought it was right for me, but I certainly didn't mean to imply that I think that we need a compulsory vaccination program.

And I think that Joe Biden's probably gonna find out that he's overreaching and going too far with proposing that.

I think it'll backfire.

I love always to use a carrot rather than a stick approach.

- I believe you need it compulsory.

We've got to get through this and we're not gonna get through this fighting about whether or not we should or shouldn't.

- Well, what about Patrick's point?

I mean, for the greater good and to get through this, it's really dangerous.

It's like playing Russian roulette.

Some people get a mild case of COVID, some people get a terrible case of COVID, but for the greater good, the mandates, at least in this case, are a better idea than just letting everybody go do whatever they want.

- I don't believe that we're gonna wrap ourself in the flag on this.

I just don't think that that's the right approach.

I think that, again, I knew when I accepted the military service that I was going to have to do certain things like that, but it just seems like we always have to go down the road of pitting one American against another, and that just doesn't seem to be the right approach for me on this.

- But Americans are pitting themselves against each other.

It's not that we're doing it.

You know, if everybody got vaccinated, there's nothing to pit.

If you're wearing your mask when you're supposed to, there's nothing to pit.

So there's this argument about somehow being individualistic and demanding your rights as an American thing, but when people go off to war for us, they're making the ultimate sacrifice.

They're leaving behind everything.

They're not saying this is about me and this is about me and this is what I want and I wanna do, they're making a sacrifice for this country.

What is your risk of getting a shot?

Is it that you gonna have a small reaction?

That's not much of a risk to help your country out.

And we should wrap it in patriotism.

It should be a patriotic thing.

- Back when then Vice President Biden was the head of pandemic response for the Obama administration, H1N1 was killing more young Americans, more adolescents than this virus is.

Why weren't we undertaking these compulsory measures then?

Why wasn't there this battle?

It seems like it's just more of a battle for power, and you're gonna do it my way or the highway.

Science is unclear on whether masks even works.

- What's the upside for the Governor to take this position?

I mean, how does it help advance the cause of Ron DeSantis or the people of Florida by saying we're gonna resist mask mandates and resist vaccine mandates?

- I believe his approach to the mandatory vaccinations or mandatory masking is obviously work.

Florida is doing better by most accounts.

I mean, economically- - [Patrick] That isn't great at the hospitals than it's great.

- I just think that he's definitely- (all speaking at the same time) - The Governor's position is, "Look, the state's open for business.

Restaurants are re-opening, we've got a booming economy or economy that's beginning to boom so he's on the right track.

- Well, we're finding out that we're having a problem with that, that we're sliding backwards, that we are having to redo mask mandates, we're having businesses that can't find employees, we're struggling in different areas.

And so there's this retreat.

Hospitals are filled.

We are getting reports that people can't get in for the stuff they need to.

If they have a heart problem, there's no bed for them.

And so we are having these problems.

It is not all rosy out there.

You look at what just happened in California with the governor recall, and a huge amount of people voted for governor that's been very tight on the issue of mask and vaccines, and has kept California shut down for a long time.

So obviously out there, because I think of the recent comparisons to Florida, it looks better what they've done.

- Actually, going back to your previous question.

I think that there are more Americans who love freedom than who don't, or who believed that they need to wear a mask and need to be mandated, need to be told that they have to wear a mask, certainly to get an injection.

Again, I believe that more Americans ought to get injections.

I believe that vaccinations work the science behind it.

I got vaccinated.

Do I believe that that's ought to be mandated by the government?

No.

I just don't think that, fundamentally, it's going to help.

- I would like it to not have to be mandated, but obviously, we've got a whole industry out there promoting not to get vaccinated.

We have people who are working hard to spread lies in this country to scare people from not getting vaccinated.

And so that's a problem.

It isn't that these people are just making a choice, they're being convinced into doing this.

They're being fed falsehoods and creating this situation.

So it's not that somebody just woke up tomorrow and decided that they're not gonna do it.

They were told it was gonna make them impotent, it was gonna hurt their baby, that a spoon was gonna stick to their forehead.

I mean, all these things are lies.

- Certainly didn't hurt me on any of those.

- Travis, one in five of the COVID deaths in the country two weeks ago were right here in Florida.

And our death rate in COVID is, at least right now, on the way up.

We're averaging about 300 deaths a week.

It's pretty bad out there.

- It is.

I mean, there are reasons for it, and there are underlying conditions, and this is certainly a terrible virus that I don't think anyone wants to get.

I just don't think that the mandatory, first off again, the science on the masking, and I do have to again look back at why didn't we do that before with the kids on H1N1?

Why weren't we doing that?

Were we just not alert to it?

Or was it because the administration then, was getting a pass on it.

- Everyday we learn.

Everyday we learn more.

And just cause we made mistakes in the past isn't no reason to continue to make mistakes.

And certainly with medicine, we constantly are improving and adjusting doses and everything else we do.

So it's certainly reasonable to understand that you need to go to a mask at all in this country.

It took a real national disaster like this pandemic has been to get there.

- So as it stands now, Governor Ron DeSantis would like to become president, would like to be in the race to run for president in 2024.

Given what he's done so far, is he doing better in that hope than he was nine months ago?

Or is he doing worse?

- I don't think that given his response to this, that he's doing certainly any worse than any governor out there.

I mean, this is obviously unplanned contingencies that we're having to deal with.

It's I haven't seen you in person in over two years, and it's unfortunate, but I don't think that he's dying to hurt his chances for presidency.

- [Rob] Patrick, we have 20 seconds, what would you say?

- He's going down in the polls.

He's shooting himself in the foot, and I think he's handling this really badly.

- Well, Patrick Manteiga and Travis Horn, thanks a lot for being on the program.

Great to see both of you.

The ending of the eviction moratorium could cause added hardships to renters here in Florida, and we'll hear from one advocate for renters next.

(serious music) According to Tampa Bay Times, rent increases across the Tampa Bay area this year aren't just breaking records, they're obliterating the records.

As of late August, rents for apartments have increased since the beginning of the year by 21.7% and aren't showing signs of slowing.

Nearly half of American workers don't earn enough to afford a one bedroom apartment according to 2021 Rent Data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Experts say the persistent gap in wages and housing costs is forcing more Americans into unstable living conditions and even homelessness.

In Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando Counties, a full-time worker needs to make $24.44 cents an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Another way of putting it is that it now takes 2.8 minimum wage jobs to cover the cost of a two-bedroom rental.

William Kilgore helped organized the St. Peterburg Tenants Union, a group that helps renters.

They marched in support of keeping the moratorium against evictions, and he joins us now.

William, nice to see you.

- Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me, Rob.

- The US Supreme Court blocked the eviction freeze that was put in place by the Biden administration last month.

How is that affecting people in St. Petersburg and in Pinellas County and members of your union?

- Well, sure thing.

I always like to point out that eviction freeze was very important in keeping a lot of people in their homes.

In Pinellas County, from June of 2020 until July of this year, there were actually over 2,600 writs of possession issued in Pinellas County, those are final eviction orders.

Those were cases that didn't fall under the sphere of the moratorium, so people have still been getting evicted even during the pandemic, but it did protect a lot of people for cases of non-payment and things like that.

Just an example, we were contacted by a couple of guys at an apartment complex where we're currently organizing about two weeks ago, and they had gotten a writ of possession.

They were falsely under the assumption that there was still a moratorium.

They just didn't know.

And they were like, "Hey, I think that the Sheriff's gonna come.".

and they did.

These guys, they were behind about two months on rent so that moratorium, if they had submitted the declaration, if it was still in place, it would have protected them.

But now that it's gone and they did, they ended up getting thrown out.

- [Rob] So they're homeless now?

- Yes, effectively, right.

We've set them up a couple of spite, we're trying to get them squared away.

They're not literally on the street, but yes, they don't have anywhere to live.

- What do you say that people will say, "Look, this eviction is unfair to landlords because the landlords have to pay the banks or the mortgage companies."

So what do you say to the other side of the equation?

- Well, we're talking about profits.

We're talking about a business, and we're talking and trying to balance that or compare that with human lives.

Evictions kill people.

There's a UCLA study that they estimated from the start of the pandemic, the lockdowns in late March, early April until the CDC moratorium was instituted in September of 2020, there were over 10,000 additional COVID-19 deaths that were linked directly to evictions.

And so we're literally talking about people's lives and people's profits.

I think it's not fair to have people die to protect the minority class of owners.

- So what's the solution?

I mean, how do we prevent people from being evicted?

How do we make sure that if somebody has lost their job because of the COVID crisis, I know a lot of people in the service industry and the hospitality industry have lost their jobs because of the crisis, but what's the solution?

- Well, the thing is, is it's really difficult with our political climate.

Tallahassee, unfortunately, they're not gonna make any moves to protect tenants.

Certain things such as rent control is preempted by the state, although it is possible to enact if a local municipality declares a public emergency, they hold a referendum on it, and it's only in effect for about a year so it's a very limited ability.

Regardless, it doesn't look like any of our local leaders are gonna take that action.

And so that's why we think it's important to organize, and that's why we're doing this.

We're organizing tenants because we can't rely on our public officials to keep us safe.

- When you hear that in order to rent the typical two-bedroom apartment in the Tampa Bay area, that you got to have 2.8 minimum wage jobs, what does that say about the situation we're in?

And we only have 30 seconds.

- Sure.

I think that (chuckles) it shows how imbalanced things are.

I mean, even if we were able to, man, I'm sorry.

- Yeah.

You know, part of it, there's gotta be the problem with wages.

I mean, we are gonna be, over the next five years, see an increase of minimum wages, but wages have not kept up with productivity or the cost of housing.

- Right.

Exactly.

And so that's the thing is, people are really getting in deep trouble and so we've got to have emergency measures, or we've got to take measures into our own hands and to organize to keep a roof over the heads of our families and our neighbors.

And that's what we're doing so.

- Well, William Kilgore of St. Pete Tenants Union.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for coming on "Florida This Week".

- Thank you, Rob.

(serious music) Thanks for joining us.

You can view this and past shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app.

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

You can subscribe to it on our website or wherever you get your podcasts.

Well finally, Tampa Bay based musician Joshua Reilly has made a name for himself in clubs around the country.

And as we head into fall next week, he takes us on a tour of Dunedin as he sings his song "Summer's Come And Gone".

Stay safe.

We'll see you next week.

(relaxing music) ♪ Oh, the freedom ♪ ♪ Of this fleeting love ♪ ♪ The king and queen ♪ ♪ Of the unbound ♪ (relaxing music) ♪ Knowing that we're ♪ ♪ Going different ways ♪ ♪ Before the leaves ♪ ♪ Will hit the ground ♪ (relaxing music) ♪ Summer comes along and then ♪ ♪ Summer's come and go again ♪ ♪ Summer's come along and then ♪ ♪ Summer's come and go ♪ (relaxing music) (serious music) - [Announcer] "Florida This Week" is a production of WEDU who is solely responsible for its content.

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