>>This week on NewsNIght, following last year's high court decision overturning Roe versus Wade, the Florida Supreme Court takes up a case that will decide the future of access to the procedure in the state.

And the 2023 hurricane season sparks a renewed political debate over climate change.

NewsNight starts now.

[MUSIC] Hello, I'm Steve Mort and welcome to NewsNight where we take an in-depth look at the top stories and issues in central Florida and how they affect all of us.

First tonight, abortion access in Florida.

The state Supreme Court on Friday took up a case brought by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU challenging Florida's 15 week abortion ban, which does not include rape or incest exceptions.

The groups argue the law violates the right to privacy clause in the Florida Constitution.

While the government is calling for the court to overrule its long standing precedent that the privacy clause extends to abortion decisions, arguing that was never the intention of the 1980 amendment passed by voters.

>>You have two different warring concepts interpretations of what concept the people enshrined into the privacy clause.

We think it was a protection against informational privacy rights to seclusion.

They think that it protected decisional autonomy.

Those are two very different concepts and concepts and senses.

The Florida Constitution does not establish a right to abortion, and the court should overrule its precedents that hold otherwise.

>>For four decades, Florida's constitution has provided strong independent protections for the fundamental privacy right to decide for oneself without government interference, whether to continue a pregnancy or have an abortion.

Despite that, H.B.

Five's abortion ban has been in effect now for more than a year, violating fundamental rights and subjecting pregnant Floridians to serious and unnecessary risks to their health and indeed their lives.

>>Well, my colleague Krystel Knowles has been talking to campaigners on both sides of the issue.

And, Krystel, what happens next?

>>Well, right now, as you know, it's a waiting game.

So both sides of the debate are waiting to find out what the justices will decide.

This could take several weeks or even months.

I spoke with Planned Parenthood, which is a plaintiff in this case, and the group, Stephanie Fraim, told me that because the Supreme Court is mostly conservative.

Planned Parenthood is getting a plan B ready just in case the decision does not go their way.

>>We will, of course, comply with the law.

We'll deal with whatever they decide.

And we will also continue to work on a ballot initiative where the people's voice will once again be heard at the ballot box, saying, absolutely, we want this right and we want it protected by our Florida Constitution.

>>Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups like Florida Voice for the Unborn are hoping the 15 week abortion ban is upheld because it will mean the path will be cleared for a newer six week abortion ban to come into effect.

I spoke with campaigner Andrew Shirvell and he told me he hopes lawmakers will go even further next year.

>>We are hopeful that if we get a favorable decision from the Florida Supreme Court in time for the 2024 legislative session, legislative leaders and the governor and even the rank and file members in the legislature will now have the green light to basically replicate what's been done in Texas and more than a dozen other red states in completely shutting down our state's abortion industry.

And that starts with a complete abortion ban, with the only exception, if you want to call it an exception.

But to save the life of the mother.

>>Andrew, Shirvell there.

Well, let's bring in our panel now to break it all down.

Joining us in the studio this week, Steven Lemongello writes about politics for the Orlando Sentinel.

Thanks so much for coming in, Steve.

Really appreciate it.

Beth Kassab, editor of the Winter Park Voice, good to see you again, Beth.

>>Thanks Steve.

>>Appreciate your time.

And Nick Papantonis from WFTV, Channel 9.

Thanks for being here, Nick.

>>Thank you.

>>Really appreciate your time today, guys.

Beth, let me start with you on this one, if I can.

This is a a conservative court, right?

Already has several DeSantis appointed justices, I think maybe all but two.

It sounds like from what we heard from from Planned Parenthood there, that that the organization and those on that side of the debate don't necessarily feel good about their chances in this case.

>>Yeah, I haven't heard anyone on the abortion rights side of this debate express any optimism at all about this Supreme Court or the decision.

It is a DeSantis reshaped court, as you mentioned, we're now in this governor's second term.

And so he's had time to to really put his fingerprints on that.

And I think the theory right now is that abortion rights will likely be lost in Florida.

Florida will become the latest state to go to a highly restrictive ban.

And we will see the fallout for that across state lines.

>>And maybe what Andrew Shirvell was talking about, what the legislature might do going forward.

I mean, the thrust of this, Nick, is that Florida's constitutional right to privacy, as we heard the the attorneys talk about there.

I mean, how do opponents of this abortion legislation argue that it prevents the legislature from passing restrictions?

>>You know, if you go back to the last Supreme Court decision that was made some years ago, they they essentially said-- >>Florida Supreme Court.

>>Florida Supreme Court, they said the right to privacy.

You know, a health care decision like abortion is the most you can get in the privacy realm.

>>Yes.

>>And so they're arguing that this right to privacy, even though it doesn't mention abortion, it encompasses it just because of the nature of what it is, is a very invasive procedure in a sense.

You're going inside someone's body.

>>Steve, there are some significant conflict of interest questions here for for the Supreme Court case.

Right.

What are the concerns?

>>Yeah, well, Justice Kennedy, his wife, is a legislator who actually, you know, co-introduced one of the abortion bans.

Then we have Sasso, whose husband was on the DeSantis appointed Disney board before he resigned.

What he's I think he was still listed as one of the people being, you know, sued and countersued in that whole situation.

So there's, you know, two people with significant ties, including one on that specific issue.

>>Beth, could a potential Florida Supreme Court decision, do you think, have sort of broader implications beyond our state borders?

>>Sure.

We've seen that as other states like Texas have implemented more restrictive bans.

We've seen over the years women traveling to Florida for care.

And certainly if what happens is as expected, which is which is the ban here in Florida, then we'll see Floridians travel across state lines for care.

Certainly, care won't stop.

People will have to go farther for that.

A lot of the pro abortion rights groups have talked about shifting their focus from providing care here to providing funds so that women have access to care elsewhere.

>>Nick, we heard Stephanie Fraim from Planned Parenthood, Southwest and Central Florida talk about a voter-led effort to put abortion issue the abortion issue on the ballot.

I mean, tell us about that initiative and its chances.

>>So this initiative is essentially protecting the status quo if it were to pass and our ballot initiative.

And the thing that has been remarkable to see in the journalism sense, it's been a very rapidly moving process.

It was just announced a couple of months ago.

They're already starting to hit signature milestones and they're getting very close to getting the number that they need to have the Supreme Court review it and potentially get it on the ballot.

The biggest question really is not if they'll do it at this point.

The question is if the Supreme Court is going to allow them or if they're going to find a way to keep that from the voters hands.

>>Well, I guess a lot of eyes are on the Florida Supreme Court and what it might end up deciding in the end.

You can find a link to the challenge to Florida's 15 week abortion ban filed by Planned Parenthood on our website.

It's at wucf.org/newsnight.

All right.

Next tonight, the politics of climate change.

Let's hear from President Biden and then Governor DeSantis.

Both speaking after Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida's Big Bend.

>>I don't think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.

Just look around.

Historic floods.

I mean historic floods, more intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we've never seen before, not only throughout the Hawaiian Islands, the United States, but in Canada and other parts of the world.

>>I think that the notion that somehow Hurricanes are something new, that's just false.

And we've got to stop politicizing the weather and stop politicizing natural disasters.

We know from history there have been times where it's been very busy in Florida, late forties, early fifties.

You had a lot of hits of significant hurricanes.

So I think sometimes people need to take a breath and get a little bit of perspective here.

But the notion that somehow if we just adopt, you know, very left wing policies at the federal level, that somehow we will not have hurricanes.

That is a lie.

>>Well, in the recent GOP primary debate, the governor sidestepped the question of human involvement in climate change.

But is the reluctance of Republican leaders to address the issue representative of conservatives broadly?

Well, Bob Inglis is a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and is now the executive director of Republic(En), a group at George Mason University that promotes what it says are conservative solutions to climate change.

>>We are a 501c3 educational outfit that it gathers up and educates conservatives who care about climate change, believing that conservatives are essential to building the consensus that will make it so we can have this 30 year process of decarbonization that's crucial to solve climate change.

We definitely need to stop politicizing climate and get about solving it, not about castigating the other side as though they are somehow against us.

We're all in this together.

Smart is hard.

Dumb is easy.

You can tell people stupid stuff and they will stand on chairs and cheer for you.

You tell people smart stuff and they'll look at you sideways trying to figure it out.

Right?

That's the thing that's so disturbing, I think, in the political process.

Right now is people who are quite smart, quite bright, they know the situation, but they also know that they can use people's fears and play on their ignorance.

You know, I'm ignorant of many things.

If I choose to remain ignorant, then I become stupid, you know?

But I can do something about my ignorance by going out and finding out some facts and learning something.

But if I choose to dismiss it all, then I really am choosing to be stupid.

>>Steve, let me come to you first on this one.

The governor has in the past, right, stated that he believes that humans do have a role in climate change.

How have his views changed over time?

>>He was like the Teddy Roosevelt Republican environmental president back when he was elected.

But again, he's running a you know, in a primary Republican primary that's, you know, very, very conservative.

Most Republican primary voters don't want to hear about climate change.

They don't want to you know, they want they don't want to hear that.

They want to hear any sort of like even acknowledgment that there's something happening out there.

So he's just he's just playing to that at the moment.

>>What do you think, Nick?

Do you think politics is the main reason behind that evolution?

>>I mean, we may have already started to see some of this in Florida law or in policies that have been passed.

He's at the moment he's focused on Iowa.

Corn farmers there rely on ethanol to make a living, and they don't want to see any climate policies, especially ones that steer us away from gas towards it, like, you know, solar and electric.

They don't want to see those policies passed.

And he's definitely been playing to them.

He vetoed those credits, the hundreds of millions of dollars.

And that was something that passed almost unanimously in the legislature.

No one still can figure out why he did that.

>>It's interesting.

Beth, the office of Florida State Climatologist says the frequency of major storms in their hazards are in fact, worsening.

Is the science of human caused climate change clear despite this political back and forth that we're talking about?

>>Yeah, the science is clear.

And I think what we need to keep in mind here is that when if we if you want to talk about science, that's evidence based data that a lot of people have analyzed, that scientific groups from around the globe, including a wide variety of groups from different persuasions in the U.S., have looked at and have come to a broad consensus that there is human impact on climate.

There's the warming of the oceans, the warming of the earth's surface, a rise in sea level.

And so with that, again, the data shows-- >>This affects Florida particularly intensely.

>>Affects Florida, particularly if you want to talk about hurricanes, which a lot, that's when this conversation usually comes up.

If this if the sea level is higher, even by a small amount, our friends on the coast are going to get a larger storm surge.

And those of us who live here in central Florida, we consider ourselves pretty far inland for Florida, we're still seeing huge flooding events and more storms that are really more rain events than they are wind events.

And I think, you know, this is having broad implications down into local government.

And yes, I think on the national level, we hear about ethanol farmers wanting to make a living.

But I think what there's very little understanding of now is how this is affecting the individual pocketbooks of people who live in Florida, homeowners and tenants, people who rent, who are going to pay more in storm water collection and management fees.

That's happening all across the state right now.

And the numbers are going up dramatically just for local governments to manage the flow of water on a daily basis.

>>And of course, we're seeing talking about sort of impacts.

We're seeing those flooding impacts not even when you see rain events, sunny day flooding they refer to often in parts of south Florida with those king tides that come along fairly frequently.

Steve, you wrote about the governor's position on politicization.

He said hurricane recovery, quote, has got to triumph over any type of short term political calculation.

I want to be fair to the governor here.

But but did he make a political calculation of his own by not meeting with the president when he came down?

>>Almost certainly I was in New Jersey in 2012 when Chris Christie, the Republican governor there, you know, hugged Barack Obama's >>The famous hug.

>>Yes.

A week before the presidential election.

>>Its still haunting Chris Christie on the campaign trail.

>>So he didn't want that even though he met with Biden last year.

You know, and I think the year before that, over the the collapse in south Florida, he just didn't want it now because he knows anything, anything he does, anything he says even remotely positive will be in a Trump campaign ad by the end of the day.

>>Beth, local governments, as you mentioned before, are spending a huge amount of money on flood mitigation in central Florida.

They're many examples of that happening.

>>Oh, absolutely.

Go look at this.

This is an exciting and exciting thing to do to go look at the storm water budgets for local governments and you'll see how much money they're spending on it.

I happen to cover the City of Winter Park.

They've had to allocate an additional multimillion dollar over at that.

I believe the total figures like $20 million in terms of how much they're going to need to spend over coming years to really get a hold of storm water.

We really value our chain of lakes here in central Florida.

Those are so important to all of us for recreation, for our property values.

But we need to keep those lake levels at a place that is manageable.

And then, of course, the underground infrastructure as well is is really important.

And that's what a lot of this money goes toward is is not only managing lakes, but managing how the water drains down, hopefully ultimately into the aquifer after a big rainstorm doesn't have to be a hurricane.

I will mention that just this week, within a couple of days ago, I was at a meeting and a number of residents were really, really upset about how much their stormwater collection fees are going up.

And I expect that's a story we're going to see a lot more of.

>>Some environmentalists are critical of what they see as sort of Florida's lack of action, I guess, on the causes of climate change.

>>You know, I've heard people describe it as confusing, hypocritical, a lot of different adjectives being thrown around.

And as Steve mentioned, when the governor was first elected, he certainly gained a pretty quick reputation for really trying to be on the right side of history for a lot of these a lot of these issues, particularly the environment.

He has, in fact, spent money on Everglades restoration.

He has, I believe, assigned some funds to help deal with rising sea levels.

But he he's also done some things that would really counteract some of those measures.

So it's really hard to decipher strictly from policy where he stands.

It's it's it's very mixed.

And there certainly doesn't seem to be like a cohesive thread through his administration.

>>Well, it's a fascinating subject that we'll keep coming back to for sure.

Be sure to join the conversation on social media, meanwhile, we're at WUCFTV on Facebook, X, formerly known as Twitter, of course, and also on Instagram.

Okay.

Finally tonight, losses from Hurricane Idalia have topped $156 million as of last weekend.

The scale is smaller than Hurricane Ian last year, but it comes amid continuing upheaval in Florida's property insurance market.

And now some Democrats are calling for yet another special session on the issue.

This week, I checked in with former Republican Senator Jeff Brandes, the founder of the Florida Policy Project.

He does not agree a special session is needed, but he told me what he'd like to see lawmakers do next year.

>>They can go to what we consider one of the best practices, which is a lot more flexibility on roofs for policyholders and for for homeowners to go to actual cash value roof or to a stated value on roofs.

They could adjust the catastrophic fund of the state of Florida to make that more friendly to Florida based businesses versus Bermuda based insurers.

I think that's another strategy they could implement.

But there's a there's probably a 5-10 things that they could do pretty quickly that would make the market rule more robust, that would lower rates and encourage more competition.

>>All right, Nick, before we get into this issue, let's just first talk about your reporting in Cedar Key.

You were up there in the aftermath of Idalia.

What did you find?

And do we know how that community is doing now?

>>I think in terms of hurricane damage, what we saw was pretty standard, pretty average for a storm of its size.

We saw some buildings with holes punched in them.

We saw some with roof damage, with windows blown out, doors blown out.

What we didn't see, though, was entire buildings washed away, which I think some people were expecting when the storm went that direction.

Cedar Key got lucky.

Other communities not so much because that path shifted the very last minute.

But it goes back to what you were saying about the damages being a lot less and that Florida got really lucky this time, whereas Ian hit a major metro center, Idalia chose to target somewhere that was very rural and there wasn't as much to do.

Much lower population density.

And Jeff Brandes told me, you know, he doesn't see Idalia having for that reason, the kind of impact on the insurance market that Ian had.

You know, how do those two storms compare in terms of cost?

>>You know, we saw it.

You said that figure for Idalia about $156 million or so.

Ian at the moment I believe stands at $112 billion.

So it's significantly higher in terms of cost, especially if you just remember those photos that we saw out of Fort Myers Beach.

I mean, the whole town was gone.

>>Yeah.

>>And you didn't see that in Cedar Key and some of the other places up north, even where it was closer in.

And so Florida got lucky.

>>Thank goodness we didn't see that in those communities.

Beth, the cost of damage from Idalia might be lower than some other storms.

But what interested me is that this has happened also in one of the poorer parts of the state.

Right.

So that could impact the recovery in and of itself.

>>Yeah.

You mentioned it's a less dense population in those counties, and that's absolutely true.

But the last few years there's even been some population loss there.

And what that tends to mean and what that definitely means in this case is property values.

Home values are lower.

They're not really keeping pace with what we're seeing in other more urban places.

And incomes are lower.

So it's harder for local government to front these repair costs.

And so the Federal Emergency declarations are really important in order to get people back on their feet quicker.

But yeah, it's a poorer community and that makes any kind of damage just just harder to take it back >>And when incomes are lower, of course, you can have the issue of fewer people having homeowner's insurance, which is what we saw in a lot of communities after Ian when we saw that flooding.

>>Sure, fewer people might have insurance.

People might not have you know, tenants might not have renters insurance.

It's going to be harder for people to get made whole after a storm like this in a community with these demographics.

>>Talking about making people whole, Steve, I mean, it's harder now to insure it to sue insurance companies, right, in Florida since the reforms passed in the legislature.

Is there an indication of how that might play out in this case and in others?

>>It's unclear, obviously, that that was the main thing that they did in these special sessions.

They didn't really do much for homeowners themselves, but there was, you know, bailouts of the companies and just make the apparently the if you if you talk to DeSantis or anyone, you know, during the special sessions, their main thing is like, obviously the problem here is all these these lawyers, you know, suing, you know, suing, which is the problem.

So they cracked down on that.

But whether that's really going to happen, whether that's really the prime reason for all of this is really unclear.

>>Well, we heard what Jeff Brandes says he thinks the legislature should do.

I mean, do we know what might be in store in terms of insurance reform next?

>>There's a lot of like we need to have.

We need to do more.

We need to have another special session.

But there's really not too much details about what they want to do.

Probably like when you hear from Democrats that not enough was done for homeowners, a lot of bailouts of the companies and things like that, and of course, all the crackdown on lawyers.

But like there was no real help, direct help to homeowners in terms of like rebates or anything like that.

So maybe that would be, I think, the main thing they're looking for.

But if you listen to Brandes there, it doesn't seem like there's going to be one.

>>And Jeff Brandes saying that, you know, we're still within that window where we wouldn't expect the impacts of the reforms that were passed in the previous legislative session to have come into effect.

>>But despite the bailouts, despite the bailouts even before this storm, far earlier in the season, before we had really named storms yet, there was more news of companies pulling out of Florida.

>>Yes.

>>People getting dropped in huge numbers.

So those measures are not working.

They have not stabilized the market and rates are up astronomically.

>>And that's where just in that time frame that you're talking about, though, I was speaking to insurance industry insiders and they were they were really just pointing at the time frame.

They say they don't expect this to crest until June of next year.

And when we're kind of hit the bottom and start to rebound.

And so they say they say, at least in terms of the insurance side of things, what Florida did was enough.

It's just a matter of the backlog in the aftermath from what where there was before moving through the system.

A lot of lawsuits being settled.

>>And certainly those on the more optimistic side, including former Senator Brandes, say that we are having more interest now from insurance companies out of state in writing policies in the state.

We'll see how that actually plays out.

I mean, Beth, I was interested finally to look at this in sort of a broader scale.

Other states like California, Colorado, we just saw those fires in Hawaii as well, trying to put together plans to sort of tackle an exodus of insurers because of issues that that appear to be linked to climate change.

Do you think that they could look at Florida for lessons in how to deal with this issue?

>>Possibly for lessons.

Certainly not as an example of what to do.

I mean, you know, it's not too infrequent that I will have people say to me, hey, listen, we don't ever want to become California.

But but if you read any of the news out of California recently, it's a whole lot of people saying, hey, look, we had to do whatever we can to never become Florida.

>>Yeah.

>>And I feel like, you know, that's that's a really important thing for people here to really see and hear and understand because the problem isn't solved.

Other states are looking for solutions, and maybe Florida could learn some lessons from them.

>>Itd be really interesting to see what states like Colorado and California do with their reforms and maybe we can learn some lessons from them as we go forward.

You can find my full discussion with Jeff Brandes from the Florida Policy Project on our website, wucf.org/newsnight.

But that is all the time we have for this week.

My thanks to Steve Lemongello, Beth Kassab, Nick Papantonis.

Thank you guys so much for coming in.

Really appreciate your time today.

We'll see you next Friday night at 8:30 here on WUCF.

In the meantime, for all of us here at NewsNight, take care and have a great week.