Category: Florida

Who knows, perhaps this state’s Republican Senate primary will come down to a hug-off. Obama-Crist vs. Sansom-Rubio. Picture that.

 

The Charlie Crist campaign, having been bludgeoned with footage of the governor embracing more than the president’s stimulus help for Florida, is now circulating a payback photo of Marco Rubio hugging Ray Sansom, the sleazy, former House Speaker. Take that, conservative, pin-up lad. More image damaging than a subsidized back wax.

 

Actually, if this primary descends into Hug-gate, the advantage should be Crist’s. The governor may be an empty ideology suit, and this may be a ploy born of desperation — but he has a pragmatic case. He hugged for a helping hand during the worst recession in memory.

 

He need apologize to no one for stimulus money that, in effect, bailed out state government. More than $2.5 billion alone went to Medicaid. He certainly need not apologize to the thousands of teachers who would have been laid off or the 1 million residents with expanded unemployment benefits.

 

The federal government estimates some 112,000 statewide jobs were saved or created by the stimulus help. Locally, the stimulus-jumpstarted I-4 Connector project, now underway, is worth thousands of projected jobs – from construction to Port of Tampa-related business.

 

Florida figures indicate more than $6 billion has already been spent – with another $17 billion still in the stimulus pipeline. Crist did the right practical thing by embracing the stimulus help; the wrong strategic thing by hugging the stimulator in advance of a Tea Party-skewed primary fight for his political life.

 

As for the Sansom-Rubio snuggle up, it would be political mud-slinging as usual if not for the uproar over the Obama-Crist hug. Now it’s all unfair game.

 

While the context is clichéd photo op, the connotation that comes with a Sansom hug is hardly helpful. It’s unsavory. The disgraced, indicted Sansom recently quit the House – to pre-empt an ethics trial.

 

And Rubio, while Speaker, did work closely with Sansom – even making him his budget chief in the 2007-08 legislative sessions.

 

And it’s a not so subtle, if cheap-shot, reminder that Sansom isn’t the only legislator to score a higher-ed job at a university that he had helped steer money to. It’s neither illegal nor uncommon. Merely business as usual in Tallahassee. Typically that’s no big deal unless, of course, you’re trying to portray yourself as pristinely principled and primed for conservative canonization.

For Crist, the Sansom-Rubio hug is an opportunity – after long ignoring Rubio’s rapidly ascendant candidacy – to re-define his opponent as something much less than an attractively packaged, GOP luminary-in-the-making.   

 

For supporters of Rubio, who is still outpolling Crist, the mantra remains “Tea Party on.” For supporters of Crist, who needs a game changer, it looks like “huggery helps.”  

First, the bad news.

 

Another year, another legislative session, another balanced, Potemkin budget. With urgently-needed, revenue-raising reform still politically off the table, the bar for legislative accomplishment necessarily remains irresponsibly low. Florida’s fiscal future remains fragile – and unaddressed.

 

Now, the good news. There’s still the prospect of some easy money – and the possibility that common sense could yet prevail on something of life-saving importance. Perhaps this term-limited, experience-light avatar of underachievement can get this much right:

 

• Easy money in hard times should be a no-brainer, even among the cerebrally challenged. That means the legislature finally signing off on Gov. Charlie Crist’s $433-million Seminole tribe gambling compact. And putting some gambling parameters in place would be a bonus.

It also means, without apology to Congressman Kendrick Meek, doing the right

thing on Florida’s impractical, feel-good, class-size law. If the governor can ever

locate that bully pulpit – and make common cause with key legislative leaders – a

re-configured, more flexible, class-size formula could actually result, one that

could easily pass muster with voters and save Florida upwards of $3 billion next

year.

• And let’s hope that 2010 is not another do-nothing year on the ever-alarming issue of ever-increasing numbers of motorists who text while driving. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, distractions caused by mobile devices are major factors in 6,000 highway deaths a year nationwide. Such preventable fatalities are now regular media staples.

 

Numerous studies have shown device-distracted drivers comparable to those

      impaired by alcohol. Or worse. Arguably, most legally drunk drivers are at least

      looking at the road. That’s why 19 states and the District of Columbia have

      already banned texting while driving.

 

      Surely something meaningful in Florida can result from the dozen bills already

      Proposed regarding cell phone use and texting at the wheel. Surely. 

Seemingly everybody but Charlie Crist agrees that the challenges of a stimulus-skewed, Potemkin budget are onerous this Legislative session. Maybe $3 billion worth.

 

Would that this were finally the year that revenue-raising — the formula dates to the Leroy Collins’ era and is based on the Ponzi-schemed, go-go growth years — was finally addressed. And, no, cuts in health and human services, a token reduction in the state corporate income tax, and reliance on trust-fund raids, fee hikes and casino spoils don’t count.

 

What does count – closing unjustified sales-tax exemptions, including services, and getting serious about being part of the national push to collect Internet sales taxes — won’t happen. Again.

 

Crist’s watch has been defined by a tectonic shift in economic reality. A strong, gutsy leader was not merely preferable, but mandatory. Florida didn’t come close. Too politically risky for a career opportunist. The state still hasn’t adjusted. The fiscally fragile future will soon be Bill McCollum’s or Alex Sink’s — and everybody else’s — worry.

 

That dereliction of meaningful, pragmatically targeted leadership should be the Crist legacy – not that his ideology-free politics got him Tea-bagged by Marco Rubio.

No, it’s not second-guessing.

This space and others have long urged Governor Charlie Crist to make the future solvency of this state more of a priority. More of a priority, that is, than his own popularity and empty-suited ideology of self interest. No, an onerous recession is obviously not Crist’s fault, but keeping Florida woefully unprepared for an inevitable day of reckoning is on him.

Recall that he never exhumed the bully pulpit his predecessor had used for FCAT-shilling and bullet-train killing to bring Florida revenue-raising in line with something other than growth and sprawl forever. Florida had become a Ponzi state, fueled by ever-more move-ins. And a revenue formula that was good enough for LeRoy Collins wasn’t a good enough rationale.

And the beat goes on. Crist’s $69.2 billion budget proposal would once again rather rely on the sunniest of scenarios. These include Fed money, a gaming agreement and local-option school district taxes. He would also —  again — tap into Florida’s dwindling reserves, which can adversely impact this state’s bond rating, rather than look at alternatives that might upset key special interests.

Sales-tax exemptions, for example, are too numerous and ill-allocated – especially services. He’s never made an effort to work with other states on an internet retailers  tax compact. He’s never made the case – or tried to raise the political consciousness – about what unfettered trade with Cuba would mean for Florida. Now more than ever. Why should Washington change its policy of feckless incrementalism when the chief executive of the biggest beneficiary state remains cowed and quiet?

But before long that will all be somebody else’s watch and worry. He assumes most voters won’t even remember that he gutted growth management laws and appointed his former chief of staff as Mel Martinez’s senate-seat warmer. Right now Crist’s concern is getting through one more hurricane season and hoping a Marco Rubio love child turns up before the August primary.

There’s partisan pandering and there’s the self-serving screed. Then there is RubioSpeak.

No, we’re not talking about carefully parsed, revisionist references to government stimulus that makes Charlie Crist look like a straight-shooter. No, we’re talking about Marco Rubio’s recent rhetoric that was a new low – even for calculated, conservative, Cuban-American politicians.

“My parents lost their country to a government,” said Rubio, the Tea Party poster lad who’s running for the U.S. Senate seat that Gov. Crist thought was reserved for him. “I will not lose mine to a government.”

How outrageous that he would analogize the Communist Castro dictatorship to contemporary American governance. Why not just stick with basic GOP talking points and “socialism” slams? As if the incumbent administration believed in government ownership of the means of production. Frankly, Rubio’s political cheap shot is not unlike comparing George W. Bush to Fulgencio Batista. It’s rhetorically repugnant and ideologically obscene.

But if Rubio truly wants a relevant — and ironic — analogy to what his parents faced, then he need look no farther than his own, South Florida back yard. That’s where, for two generations, those who dared to exercise their freedom of speech to speak against the Cuban embargo and in favor of unfettered travel to Cuba have been routinely intimidated and smeared – and worse. Where the prevailing ideology was a hybrid of vendetta and right-wing extremism. Arguably, that would have been the place to start before moving on to fix Washington.

First, the good news for Florida. According to Education Week’s 2010 Quality Counts report, the Sunshine State is number eight in the country. Maryland, New York and Massachusetts were the top three. EW’s report, which is considered credible in education circles, factors in school funding, policies and student achievement – including rates of improvement. Gov. Charlie Crist and Education Commissioner Eric Smith are already basking in the results.

The bad news for America: 8^th-ranked Florida is 46^th in the nation in high school graduation rates. One in four don’t make it.

We know that Florida’s state universities have necessarily become more selective – and now we see this reality reflected in average test scores of incoming students. Average SATs, for example, range from New College’s 1322 and the University of Florida’s 1279 to Florida Atlantic’s 1069 and Florida Gulf Coast University’s 1031. USF came in at 1151, which was seventh out of 10 universities.

There are, however, 11 in the state system. FAMU didn’t reply. Here’s hoping that was an oversight.

Advanced Placement — or “AP” as it’s usually called — is now a hot-button topic in local and state pedagogic circles.

AP comes from a very good place. Why not properly challenge — and accommodate — your very best students by providing an opportunity for them to take college-caliber courses? They can get a GPA spike, and they get an opportunity to test out of general education requirements in college.

But there’s an enormous problem. To get that college credit, students must pass a rigorous, standardized AP test. Alas, an alarming rate of these students are not passing it. In Florida, it’s less than half (42.9 per cent). In Hillsborough County, it’s barely a third (36 per cent).

The cause? As basic as it conceivably could be. Fundamental questions about the quality of students and the quality of their teachers.

The genesis? The AP concept was meant to challenge, stimulate and reward the most talented students. Advanced courses for advanced students. Serious college-level courses are, by definition, only for a select, high school few.

Now, in the name of opportunity, inclusiveness and state grading formulas, the AP classes are no longer as selective as they used to be. Florida, in fact, is considered, dubiously, a national leader when it comes to an egalitarian approach to a merit matter. Middle-of-the-road students, including some with border-line reading scores, are more the norm than the best and brightest in many AP classes.

Moreover, it used to be that the best teachers were culled from the ranks and granted the opportunity — and privilege — to teach AP courses. You didn’t have to be Mr. Chips to appreciate the unique challenges – and rewards – of instructing smart, motivated students and not having to teach down to the lowest common denominator.

            Now we know that with so many more AP students, the need for more AP teachers has become acute. In truth, there are not nearly enough. No surprise, then, that schools can no longer be as selective as they used to be. Consequently, a number of AP students are being taught by those who wouldn’t have been asked previously. Some might eventually become proficient with workshop help and mentors. But a whole bunch of AP students, many of them non-traditional, are not being helped by teachers struggling with the process of gaining on-the-AP-job experience.

Here’s a suggestion: quality control. The concept’s been around for a while. In this case, it can only be implemented in the context of fewer, better-prepared students being taught by the best that high school faculties can produce.

AP needs to return to its Advanced Placement roots. For too long AP has meant Agenda Progress. In the good names of opportunity and diversity, AP has become like so many other facets of contemporary, secondary-school curricula. Diluted.

Fortunately, FSU handled the successor-to-President T.K. Wetherell issue much more adroitly than it did the successor-to-Head Coach Bobby Bowden matter. 

The latter included an awkward, “coach-in-waiting” scenario and an agonizing icon watch while the football program morphed into embarrassing mediocrity. Belatedly, the no-longer-waiting Jimbo Fisher is now firing and hiring and recruiting to send the message that the schizoid days of uncertainty are over. Finally.

As for the former, FSU has named Eric Barron, the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the former dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas, to succeed Wetherell.

In an era when major research universities too often recruit retirees or escapees from the corridors of political power, FSU chose to go with an academician-scientist with people skills. The kind that can recruit scholars and convince donors. The kind that is expected to rally FSU research and lobby the prestigious Association of American Universities for inclusion.

And Barron, 58, is an FSU graduate, class of ’73.

Go, ‘Noles. Well done.

Florida’s special legislative session finally yielded a comprehensive rail plan. To the surprise of everyone — given the controversial subplots involving SunRail — it wasn’t close. Among those working the corridors of the capitol — cajoling and buttonholing state senators right up to the 27-10 vote — was Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard who is also the vice chairman of TBARTA (Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority).

His Pinellas perspective is one we’re not always privy to amid all the heated Hillsborough rhetoric. Pinellas, Florida’s most densely populated county, he stressed, could ill afford to fall further behind in transportation. Enlightened self interest was Clearwater’s motivation.

“On the high speed rail front, a spur all the way to Pinellas County would be ideal,” he said by phone from Tallahassee. “That would give us Orlando to the beaches. But the fact is, that’s not going to happen. We need regional rail to connect high speed to Pinellas.

“We want to be connected, so our people have alternatives,” explained Hibbard. “To go to work. To go to a game. To not be married to a car. And we can all harken back to $4-a-gallon gas. And frankly that day will come again. But even if we had hydrogen-run cars now, we can’t continue to build lanes.

“It’s no secret that we’re trying to compete with other cities for jobs,” underscored the Clearwater mayor. “We’re forced to compete with cities — Phoenix, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, and the list goes on and on — who already have a leg up. They’ve already made their investment in mass transit.”  

Hibbard reflected briefly on what the passage of the controversial rail plan meant and who had helped make it happen. 

“We greatly appreciate the contributions of all the members of the Bay Area Legislative Delegation,” he pointed out. “This vote now allows Florida to pursue billions of federal dollars for High Speed Rail funding – dollars that would have gone elsewhere without today’s action.

“But now our hard work really begins,” he stressed. “We must work diligently to turn this comprehensive rail plan into reality.”