Category: Florida

City-only sales tax.

It doesn’t get the scrutiny or media coverage that some other statewide issues–from medical marijuana, Florida Forever and charter schools to Enterprise Florida, Visit Florida and Stand Your Ground do–but it’s an issue with serious implications for several Florida cities. None more so than Tampa.

Mayor Bob Buckhorn and his Orlando counterpart Buddy Dyer have been the most prominent proponents–but Jacksonville, Miami and St. Petersburg are also major players. Basically the mayors all want the right to hold city-only–not just countywide–referenda. And, heretofore, the state legislature has treated their entreaties with disregard, if not disdain.

Buckhorn’s case is straightforward. The one glaring need for this city–as well as this region–is meaningful mass transit. It means quality of life for those of us who live and work here; it means staying competitive for those who recruit and market. A Riverwalk and Jeff Vinik will only get you so far.

It’s beyond obvious. It’s beyond a priority. Absent a city-only, sales-tax referendum, the non-Tampa parts of Hillsborough County can continue to, in effect, veto transit initiatives that pass within Tampa city limits. It happened in 2010. It would happen tomorrow. It is what it is, without belaboring the point.

This time Buckhorn and Dyer elicited encouragement from Gov. Rick Scott. The concept made it out of the Senate as an amendment to a transportation bill. But the House wouldn’t hear of it. It only heard Speaker Richard Corcoran’s mantra: “The House had zero interest in tax increases of any kind.”

Corcoran’s OutHouse is to the right of the Tea Party when it comes to taxes. For anything. It’s unconscionably ham-handed, ideologically expedient, counterproductive and, frankly, undemocratic.

Tampa, Orlando and the other major cities don’t just want to hold their own referenda addressing their own critical needs. They also want to make the case that self-determination isn’t some idealistic, stump-speech phrase that we only support in the abstract.

Conspiracy theorists have plenty to ponder.

Did USF get sandbagged by UF or, more likely, FSU on “pre-eminent” status? Over dollars they didn’t want to split three ways? Did a John Thrasher ‘Nole-mole move the goal posts from a four-year graduation rate of 50 percent to 60 percent? Or was this just a last-minute, transparency-challenged, stuff-happens dynamic in a legislature where nothing is guaranteed except frustration, duplicity and dysfunction?

For the record, USF, an urban university with more diversity than its Gainesville and Tallahassee counterparts, has a four-year graduation rate of 54 percent. That’s a notable improvement from a few years ago–but now shy of the new, last-second standard. For further context, it should be noted that the four-year college graduation rate nationally is 26 percent.

Gwen Graham is officially running for governor. She’s the daughter of Bob Graham, the popular former senator and governor. And she’s a former Florida congresswoman. She’s also running to make history as Florida’s first female governor.

But timing, as we all know, is everything. Just ask President Hillary Clinton.

Regardless of a candidate’s credentials, it’s typically the tempo of the times and the nature of the opposition that matter most.

For Dems intent upon retaking Congress and statehouses, it’s about the “resistance.” It’s about rallying to a cause. It’s ideological, it’s emotional, it’s visceral. It’s anti-Trump and all his calculating, GOPster sycophants. It’s about taking back the country–and the state.

But while Graham made her formal announcement in Miami Gardens, her congressional track record was made in North Florida’s second congressional district. One that wouldn’t countenance a flagrant progressive. That’s why her voting record includes rolling back Wall Street regulations, favoring the Keystone pipeline and supporting tougher immigration restrictions on Syrian refugees. Not exactly the “Indivisibles” idea of a Democratic hat trick. She also opposes gun control. Pragmatic Panhandle pandering won’t be a good enough explanation.

Right now the Democratic Party needs someone to rally around and help gin up the vote in a non-presidential year. Gwen Graham, lineage and name recognition notwithstanding, is not exactly perfectly positioned.

And the opposition? Among others, Andrew Gillum and (likely) John Morgan in her own party. The former is the young, ambitious, black, charismatic mayor of Tallahassee, and the latter is John “For The People” Morgan. Enough said.

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the dean of the Florida legislative delegation, will be retiring at the end of her term next year. She began her Washington run in 1989.

The retirement of the first Hispanic woman elected to Congress should be a time for diversity reflection and even impending nostalgia. Instead, Ros-Lehtinen’s announcement is cause for political speculation as usual. As in Democrats have a good chance to pick up a South Florida congressional seat next year.

In addition, it’s also cause for a sigh of relief.

For nearly three decades Ros-Lehtinen, now 64, has been a loutish, counterproductive mouthpiece for the hard line, Cuban exile community. She has been a key player in thwarting U.S.-Cuba rapprochement that would have benefited this country, this state and this Havana-linked city.

Enjoy your retirement, Ily, even if it comes decades too late.

Will he or won’t he? Savvy pundits have been weighing in on the chances of high-profile, personal-injury attorney John “For the People” Morgan running for governor in 2018. The reasons for are manifest: He loves the spotlight; he’s an excellent, even charming, communicator; he thinks big; he has name recognition to die for; he knows he has a good shot; he wants to accomplish more. And did we say he loves the spotlight?

If you’re the media, you want the 61-year-old to run. He’s a natural. He’s funny. He’s engaging. He’s not scripted. He’s great copy. He’s not Charlie Crist or Alex Sink. If you’re a Democrat, you want him to even out things–and for money to not be an issue.

And yet.

Would a rich, free-lancing, tell-it-like-it-is attorney-entrepreneur want to be, well, confined to Tallahassee and its dystopian, political culture? Where Marion Hammer is an icon, and the Republican OutHouse can veto the common good? Where off-year, gubernatorial elections are a crap shoot because of turnout?

I think he would rather back a winner. But if he senses that only he fits that description, he jumps in late and loud and reminds the electorate that his blunt agenda–from a hefty raise in the minimum wage to a reformation of Florida’s drug laws–will not change. He promises to only serve one term and reminds the electorate that re-election scenarios cannot compromise him.

Among bills being considered–by both houses–in Tallahassee this session is one that would require all high school graduates to take a financial literacy class.

How relevant. How necessary. How have we waited so long?

Exhibit A: We now have data showing that about a third of Americans approaching retirement have saved nothing for it. No pension plan, no savings account. No accounting for this disquieting version of “American exceptionalism.”

And while we’re at it, why not make sure that the fundamentals of real-world, American capitalism are combined with a Civics requirement?

When barely half of the voters turn out for a presidential election, we have reason to worry. When electorate pandering results in a President Trump or a Governor Scott, we have a crisis. When voter indifference and bias can prevent, say, regional mass transit, we have a fundamental problem in citizen involvement–the lifeblood of democracy.

And while we’re still at it, let’s include a primer on modern media–and its manifest minefields.

If our schools are truly to prepare students for viable lives in this free-enterprise, morphing-media democracy, the curricular status quo can no longer be maintained.

Whatever is ideologically done–or not done–on the state-employee budget front, there is a stark reality that remains a concern. No state has fewer full-time state employees per 10,000 residents than the Sunshine State. It’s approximately half (87) the national average (169). That’s not a typo.

There are two sure signs that Florida will have turned a “Flori-duh” image corner. One is when the state legislature is no longer held hostage by the NRA. The other: when we no longer see those “Poisonous snake loose” headlines. Stuff happens, and creatures will periodically escape from their enclosures. We get it. But venomous snake licenses?

Being against the death penalty is a stand that normally won’t draw overwhelming criticism these days. The system is manifestly fallible, circumstances matter mightily and there’s even a terse commandment that forbids killing without any contextual loophole.

But when you’re a U.S. State Attorney and you make the pronouncement that you will not seek the death penalty in ANY first-degree murder case, you are courting critics across the board. That’s what has happened to Aramis Ayala, the recently-elected  Democratic Orange-Osceola state attorney.

Ayala, the first African-American state attorney elected in Florida history, said flat-out that she would not make an exception in the case of an accused cop-killer. Her blanket stand against the death penalty prompted Gov. Rick Scott to remove her from the case and assign it to another state attorney.

The elected legal establishment, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Prosecuting Attorneys Association, initially piled on in rebuke. But a number of prominent lawyers, including former Florida Supreme Court justices, have challenged Scott’s move as a dangerous precedent. And Ayala herself is legally contesting it.

The rebukes would be grossly unfair if they merely criticized her discretion in this case. A cop-killing suspect guarantees maximum profile and emotion–and even political partisanship. But this is not solely about discretion and judgment in a given case. This is about misleading voters.

When Ayala ran for office last fall, she did not run on an anti-death penalty platform. This uproar is not just about her call in a specific case; this is about her unequivocal position on the issue. She should have made that clear to the voters, especially those who weren’t aware that she accepted $1 million in campaign donations from liberal activist and billionaire George Soros, who opposes the death penalty.

Ayala is not wrong for her position that pursuing death sentences is “not in the best interests of this community or in the best interest of justice.” In fact, I would have voted for her. She is wrong for not making this position public when she ran for office.

* Call it a win for public safety, the sort of victory that is too infrequent when it comes to the law and guns in this state. When Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court Judge Susan Barthle made the decision that Curtis Reeve didn’t kill Chad Oulson in Stand Your Ground-rationalized self-defense, she also made a de facto statement that the process hasn’t been totally hijacked by Marion Hammer and the NRA puppeteers.

By allowing the case to proceed to trial, Judge Barthle made the point that credible physical evidence was lacking. By so doing, she also indicated that firing a weapon in response to tossed popcorn just might be as legally flawed as it is common-sensically absurd.

* In another win for the forces of fairness and common sense, Gov. Rick Scott has signed into law a requirement that all 12 members of a jury must agree for a death sentence to be imposed. The previous requirement–10 out of 12 jurors–was thrown out as unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court last October.

The bottom line, and it took a frustratingly long time to get to it, was this. Invoking the ultimate penalty, one that is reached in far-from-infallible context, should require nothing less than jury unanimity. Of course it should.