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And About Florida's Budget ... · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:06
  Third hour already Monday, here on the Morning Show with Preston Scott, I
• 0:11
  have pages and pages and pages of notes, not just from salnwso, but
• 0:20
  to salnwso. Is this my hate mail? No, no, that I
• 0:26
  even sent you notes this time? This is true. That never happens.
• 0:30
  Very yeah. Ever, while no, it never, It's never happened.
• 0:35
  Salad's executive director of Consumers Defense the website Consumers Defense dot com, and we
• 0:42
  decided we would give you kind of an update on what's going on in the
• 0:47
  aftermath of the legislative session. It still wasn't that long ago, but at
• 0:52
  the same time, we wanted to brainstorm a little bit this morning, talk
• 0:56
  about some other things what might be worth getting on the radar of lawmakers in
• 1:03
  advance of the next session. We've certainly got lots to talk about. So
• 1:07
  let's kind of give an update on bills pasted, bills signed so far.
• 1:12
  Sure, so, you have a total of two hundred and thirty four bills
• 1:18
  that have been signed and twelve that were sent to the Secretary of State that
• 1:21
  didn't require his signature. Resolutions and things like that. Okay, Currently there
• 1:25
  are as of yesterday, thirty four pending on his desk where the legislature has
• 1:32
  sent them to him, and the clock is ticking that fifteen day timeframe.
• 1:36
  He's got fifteen days to sign veto or leave it B. Leave it B,
• 1:41
  which lets it go into which it would then just it'd be I think
• 1:44
  they used to call it a pocket veto in the federal government. But how
• 1:47
  often does that happen. I've never seen it, and it may have happened,
• 1:49
  and I just didn't know about it. So a governor either wants their
• 1:53
  signature on the legislation or veto's it, but they don't want it to just
• 1:57
  go in without them weighing in on it. Yeah, And I don't need
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  and know of an instance where I've seen a law passed that it would make
• 2:05
  sense that that would happen. I just it's just not something that's ever been
• 2:08
  on my radar. All Right. He did add one veto to his list,
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  which I know we're going to talk about in a little bit with regard
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  to the Hemp Bill. But the biggest note of this session is he still
• 2:22
  hasn't signed the budget. Now we're at June tenth, with a fifteen day
• 2:25
  window. The budget takes effect July one. I would imagine he's got to
• 2:30
  get it this week unless he's got everything ready and he's going to just issue
• 2:37
  the veto list and sign it as soon as he transmitted to him. When
• 2:40
  you say the veto list, we're talking about the line items that he's striking
• 2:45
  out, and what if any recourse would the legislature have. Sure So,
• 2:49
  unlike the federal government, the governor does have line item veto power over the
• 2:53
  budget. So the budget and the conforming bill come to him. Every single
• 2:59
  project is like item. He can choose to mark a red line through anything
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  that he wants, and the legislative recourse would be to override that veto with
• 3:08
  a two thirds majority of both chambers. I do not recall in the twenty
• 3:14
  some years that I've been invested in Florida policy there being an override. And
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  I'm trying to think if maybe it happened during the christ era. It's possible,
• 3:23
  and I'm just not thinking about it, but it's so rare that I
• 3:28
  can't imagine it. Okay, the budget itself is marked at what number?
• 3:34
  So we've got a budget of one hundred and seventeen point five billion dollars,
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  and so you know, I expect there to be an above average budget Veto
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  list, but not nearly as much as he's done in prior years, like
• 3:49
  during the COVID pandemic. I think, and this is just speculation, I
• 3:53
  think he wants to be able to say he presided over an actual cut in
• 4:00
  the size of government, and in my estimation, this would be the year
• 4:03
  to do it because a number of federal fund kind of transfers from DC are
• 4:09
  kind of winding down, and so there is an opportunity. And last year's
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  budget, after Veto's, was one hundred and sixteen point five billion. He
• 4:17
  vetoed about five hundred million there. So there's your red line. So if
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  he comes in roughly at a billion dollars in vetos, I think we're we're
• 4:28
  at a place where Florida can say they didn't just you know, cut the
• 4:32
  growth rate, they cut the size of government. Salnwzo with me, we're
• 4:44
  talking about the legislature, and right now we were just talking about the budget.
• 4:47
  Just quickly. What's the delay in getting him the budget? You think?
• 4:53
  You know, I've been trying to think about this, and I've asked
• 4:55
  some folks that say, well, it's not really that laid he's done budgets
• 5:00
  earlier than others have in the past. You know, it could be that
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  they're taking a really hard look at a number of projects. There was talk
• 5:10
  that at this point the Governor's Office of Policy and Budget, there is a
• 5:15
  team of individuals who are some are appointed in summer career service, where I
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  mean the governor is at his desk going through line items. They take by
• 5:28
  category all of the project lists and all of the line items in the budget
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  and if there's a you know, a protocol for all right, these are
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  definitely ones that we you know, have to sign or are definitely going to
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  sign, and then it kind of goes down the rating and then they make
• 5:44
  presentations to the governor and the team and the head of Office of Policy and
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  Budget, who Chris Spencer was. He's now heading up the State Board of
• 5:51
  Administration. He may still be in the in the position now. So is
• 5:56
  the governor redlining in advance of quote getting the budget? Yes, okay,
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  yeah, there is a process likely from the time period where the budget was
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  passed. I mean it's a public document. His team has been pouring over
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  it. There's going to be some questionable calls. You have groups like Florida
• 6:15
  Tax Watch, it does their Turkey list. They'll take a look at those
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  things and then write up recommendations and then they try to arrive that. Like
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  I was mentioning in the prior segment, if they want to get to a
• 6:27
  cut in the actual size of government, they've got to come in under one
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  sixteen point five. So they're like, all right, well, can we
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  get to a billion dollars in vetos? If we can? What does it
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  look like who is being impacted? The other thing I thought about, and
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  I don't know how much of a of a of a reason it might be
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  or how much it plays into it is there was talk of a special session
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  with regard to some things related to constitutional ballot measures, some other stuff that
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  they were talking about. I wondered if if they were keeping the budget line
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  item veto list under kind of wraps, wanting to make sure that they were
• 7:08
  able to exert as much influence over any special session where they might have needed
• 7:14
  a voter or to here or there things along those lines. I'm not sure
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  if that's going to be the case, And it does not look like,
• 7:20
  at least that I've heard lately, there's going to be a special session about
• 7:24
  anything related to ballot initiatives, but that was something I was wondering about.
• 7:30
  If you just step back and look at the budget overall, a lot of
• 7:33
  money coming back to Floridians and different tax breaks, different tax holidays. For
• 7:39
  lack of a better way of putting it right, Oh, absolutely, I
• 7:42
  mean they expanded out. It's over a billion and a half total when you
• 7:45
  count in the toll receipt program, all the roads. Yeah. One of
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  the things that I point out, and I know I've done it on here
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  a number of times, I say it oftentimes when I speak nationally, is
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  that when you look at Florida state government operation, we are number fifty in
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  terms of the expenditures per capita. We are the leanest state operation in the
• 8:11
  entire country. If you look at the State of New York, which has
• 8:13
  about a million and a half or two million fewer residents, their budget is
• 8:20
  double what the State of Florida's is, And I would argue that we get
• 8:26
  more value from our state government than the State of New York provides to its
• 8:33
  residents. And so all of that, you know, there's not a whole
• 8:37
  lot of room to cut, and yet we still figure out how to do
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  it, and every month that transpires the revenue projections, we beat them on
• 8:46
  tax collections. It just happened a week or two ago, the revenue projections
• 8:52
  understated the actual amount of tax revenue collections by tens of millions of dollars.
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  So it is a it's a statement of success that you can govern conservatively in
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  ways that you know, California, Illinois, New York have yet to figure
• 9:07
  out. Is the underestimation in large part due to the migration into the state.
• 9:11
  I think that's part of it. I think another part of it is
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  the level of tourism activity that's been continuing to grow. But I just think
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  that the revenue estimations are accounting for national trends that Florida just continues to buck.
• 9:28
  I love it. I love that consumption tax models are working in Florida.
• 9:35
  Yeah, and by no means does Florida get everything perfect. And we'll
• 9:39
  talk about some of the ways in which, you know, we see the
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  legislature moving in the years ahead, some of the issues that we've got to
• 9:46
  continue to address. But I mean, compared to big tax, big government
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  states, I take this in a heartbeat twenty one past the hour. Then
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  there was the veto joining me sal newsoh of Consumers Defense, a lot of
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  interesting reaction to the governor vetoing Senate Bill sixteen ninety eight, aka the Hemp
• 10:15
  Bill, the Hemp Bill. Yeah, and he just did it. I
• 10:18
  think it was Friday or Saturday, Yeah, yep. So first, let's
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  pluses and minuses why people were excited that he vetoed it and why people are
• 10:28
  not. Well, let's unpack what the bill was. So it would have
• 10:31
  restricted sales of hemp derived products that did include, among other things, alternative
• 10:39
  forms of THC, which is the active ingredient in marijuana. They're marketed to
• 10:45
  provide the same effects. I had to do some digging and ask some friends
• 10:50
  who use these types of products. They're available at various stores, and you
• 10:56
  do not need a medical marijuana car license or whatever they give you in order
• 11:01
  to purchase them. Is it because of the levels of THHC in these products.
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  It's not the level of THCH. It's the fact that the active ingredient
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  that is in those mirrors THG but it's not actually thhd. Okay, but
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  it's still a hallucinogenic or it induces euphoria or something along those lines. So
• 11:20
  the legislature pass Senate Bill sixteen ninety eight, it would have massively restricted those
• 11:26
  sales, eliminated them. You have, is it fair to say that these
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  products are widely available throughout the state? In other words, there are a
• 11:37
  lot of businesses relying on these products. Absolutely the case. You have not
• 11:41
  only businesses that have added them to their existing inventories of things that they sell.
• 11:48
  You have businesses that have established themselves solely to sell those types of products.
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  Are they considered a competition to the marijuana crowd? And that is an
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  interesting point because it leads me down a road of analysis that I want to
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  get to. Ones. And so in the transmittal letter of the veto,
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  he said he shared the goals. He thought that the goals of the bill
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  were commendable, right, but the burden on small businesses was just going to
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  be too much. And you saw I saw billboards even on Thomasville Road here
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  in Tallahassee saying please veto this. However, he did leave the door open.
• 12:31
  He encouraged lawmakers to come back next year with something sensible that included input
• 12:35
  from existing businesses and stakeholders. But the political dynamic is one that I started
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  to run down a rabbit hole on here. I did hear and I asked
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  some folks. I heard from some parties that do use these types of products.
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  Now, what they said was they would be voting no on the Recreational
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  pot Amendment. However, if he had signed that bill and those products were
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  banned, they would have switched their vote and actually voted for the Recreational pot
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  Amendment. Is the hunch that the governor has that polling? I mean,
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  I'm sure he's got the polling. How much of an element of his analysis
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  and decision making went into that? I do know the lobbying or the advocacy
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  effort on trying to get him to veto this was probably stronger than just about
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  any other bill that I've seen this legislative session come through. Okay, all
• 13:37
  right, House Bill twelve O three short version. Yeah, raining in HOA
• 13:43
  overreach, which you know, I have a T shirt that says defund the
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  HOA like I am all for this bill's pass unanimously. Hoas can no longer
• 13:54
  find residents for leaving out their trash cans within twenty four hours before or after
• 13:58
  colle election day, leaving holiday decorations up for longer than indicated in the documents
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  unless they get notified. They can't ban residents from parking personal vehicles, including
• 14:13
  like work vehicles that aren't commercial, on the property, and it also amends
• 14:18
  part of the laws pertaining to parking law enforcement vehicles on the property. The
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  associations that they's trying to combat are these ones that you see on social media
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  there. You know, I hate to say the word Karen, but you
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  see a lot of that happening and videos going about. But it also imposes
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  some more transparency on HOA disclosure processes. I have a good friend of mine
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  that's in an HOA here in town that went through about a two year back
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  and forth that ultimately involved lawyers based on a water leak outside of her property.
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  And so I definitely saw the knee as they pass this, and I'm
• 15:01
  looking forward to seeing how this plays out and what it does in future years.
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  See, I feel like there's a role for hoa's. I think they
• 15:09
  protect property values and you don't have to be in a subdivision that has an
• 15:16
  HOA, it's up to you. But I think is more and more groups
• 15:20
  of homeowners kind of collect and put these together or developers implement them. I
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  understand the rationale. I think what the status seen is this kind of overreach
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  in the same way jellousness, in the same way that local governments have come
• 15:37
  under the thumb of the state via preemption. This is just another way to
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  go about that. I'd be thrilled if the Hoa's out there said to people
• 15:46
  that are renting out their property, you know, you still have to mow
• 15:50
  your lawn, you know that kind of thing. I'd be thrilled with that.
• 15:52
  In the Morning Show with Preston Scott fun Use Radio one hundred POINTSUFLA.
• 16:04
  All Right, changing gears here with Sal Nouzzo of Consumer Defense, we're gonna
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  kind of talk more about maybe some things that the Session ought to take up
• 16:15
  improve, tweak adjust in twenty twenty five. Sure, and I think there's
• 16:21
  one bill that passed recently that the governor did sign that kind of leads into
• 16:26
  some of this, and that's related to the insurance arena. And this is
• 16:30
  when we've talked often about the fact that if there is anything that could in
• 16:36
  any way derail some of the progress and prosperity that Florida has achieved, it
• 16:41
  is the insurance market, and because that's what everybody's saying homeowners auto, it's
• 16:47
  it's hit and hard. Yeah, and even me, I have never had
• 16:52
  a claim on an auto that I've had. I've never made an insurance claim
• 16:56
  on my property. And it doesn't matter. My homeowner's rates I think have
• 17:02
  gone up thirty percent in the last two years. My auto has gone up
• 17:07
  quite a bit. And so that's when and people feel that, I mean,
• 17:11
  that increases your monthly escrow payment, it increases your monthly premium, it
• 17:17
  impacts your disposable income. So the legislature did pass HB fifteen oh three,
• 17:22
  the governor signed it. It allows what are called surplus lines to take policies
• 17:27
  property insurance policies from citizens property insurance corp. A surplus line is a company
• 17:34
  that provides very unique or specialty insurance coverage. Lots of times, very wealthy
• 17:42
  people will have kind of unique insurance policies because they live different lifestyles than the
• 17:49
  majority of individuals. They have companies, they have trusts, they have all
• 17:53
  of these things. Those companies will now be able to take homeowners insurance policies
• 17:59
  from citizens, which is a state funded socialized property insurance program and insert more
• 18:07
  market competition into the market for homeowners insurance. As we know because we took
• 18:14
  economics one oh one. When you insure, when you insert competition, you
• 18:18
  add choice, and you have downward pressure on insurance rates. That's the goal
• 18:25
  the as I mentioned to you kind of offline. If your homeowners insurance was
• 18:30
  one thousand dollars a year and now it's two thousand dollars a year, you
• 18:33
  want it down to one thousand dollars a year. You want it back where
• 18:37
  it was or twelve fifty Yeah, I mean sing one more modest. There
• 18:41
  are two ways to do that, a good way in a bad way.
• 18:44
  The bad way is government passes a bill and says insurance companies you can only
• 18:48
  charge X. That's not the right way to do this. The right way
• 18:52
  to do this is to create more market competition. And what we've seen since
• 18:56
  last year when the legislature passed the Big Tour Reform bill, because we know
• 19:02
  litigation was driving a lot of this is we just had I think it was
• 19:07
  seven or eight new entrants into the insurance market that just was announced a month
• 19:11
  or two back. We now have this bill. I would argue the legislature
• 19:17
  passed these reforms three to five years later than they should have, and even
• 19:22
  they have admitted that that the legislature three or four years ago should have done
• 19:27
  these things. It is going to take some time, but we're already seeing
• 19:32
  existing players announce Okay, we had projected a fifteen percent increase of premiums.
• 19:38
  Now it may only be five or seven percent, and that's what we need
• 19:44
  to see. I wish it were a better answer for homeowners myself included,
• 19:48
  who are now still paying a whole lot more. But this is just something
• 19:53
  that's just got to have a glide path, and that's the way to go
• 19:56
  about it making sense of it. All the Morning Show with Preston Scott on
• 20:00
  news Radio one hundred point seven WFLA. He's the executive director with Consumers Defense.
• 20:11
  That website consumers defense dot com and learn more about what they do and
• 20:15
  how they do it. Sal newso with us talking about the legislative session,
• 20:18
  I threw an idea at him in the break, and the idea was,
• 20:22
  you know, when when your car gets to a certain point in its value,
• 20:29
  is there a way to sort of self ensure that part of it by
• 20:33
  saying, look, I don't need the collision insurance anymore. Just keep me
• 20:37
  covered for liability if I'm at fault in somebody's wreck, and maybe a little
• 20:41
  bit of medical. And I'll preface this all with I only know enough about
• 20:48
  insurance regulations to be dangerous. Sure you know, But if you think about
• 20:53
  what we were talking about in the last agent macroeconomic policies, options, competition,
• 20:59
  downward pressure. Now, as an individual who when I owned my car
• 21:03
  outright, I didn't have any loan left, I had paid it off,
• 21:06
  I had very minimal coverage. My car was old, it didn't have a
• 21:10
  whole lot of value, and so I was able to reduce that premium to
• 21:14
  a very low amount. Now, for those of you and myself now included,
• 21:18
  that have a car payment, it's a very different environment. So are
• 21:22
  there options that policymakers could insert in that might maybe serve as a catalyst to
• 21:32
  banks on what they can offer to individuals who finance cars self insurance. Maybe
• 21:40
  a as you pay down the value of your car, less insurance is required
• 21:45
  on the collision aspect of it, or things along. If the value of
• 21:49
  the car that's left you've got covered in savings and you're willing to you're just
• 21:52
  parking that savings anyway, and so yeah, yeah, absolutely, And as
• 21:57
  I mentioned to you in the break, this is one of the biggest problems
• 22:02
  with the fact that Obamacare does the exact opposite. Sure, so it creates
• 22:07
  a one size, tries to fit all approach to insurance that refuses to acknowledge
• 22:12
  that individuals are different in their needs, and so that in the auto market,
• 22:19
  I think you'd find maybe some receptivity. I'd mentioned that the thing that
• 22:26
  makes Florida unique even to other states that I've worked in is lawmakers truly listen
• 22:33
  to citizens and their ideas. There is a representative down in the central Florida
• 22:38
  or down in the Tampa area. He's not in the legislature anymore, but
• 22:41
  he would have a contest where high school kids submit their ideas to him.
• 22:48
  He picks the one to two or three best ideas and actually drafts a bill
• 22:52
  on them. And in one year, I remember that bill actually got passed.
• 22:56
  I can't remember what it was, but Chris lat Vala was the representative's
• 23:00
  name. And those are the types of things that policy makers in the state
• 23:06
  legislature in Florida do that I've never encountered in other states. If there was
• 23:11
  one thing, two things that you think have to be top of the list
• 23:18
  for lawmakers next session, what would you put on that list? Ooh,
• 23:22
  that's a good that's a good question. Is it tweaking something that's somewhat undone
• 23:29
  that they're making work, they're getting headway, but we're not there yet,
• 23:33
  or is it something we haven't gotten there yet. I don't know that there
• 23:36
  are issues where we haven't gotten there yet. What we're seeing, especially after
• 23:40
  the twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three legislative sessions, are a lot of
• 23:45
  this clean up, tweaking the insurance piece. I think the ideas on the
• 23:49
  auto market are definitely there. What I've discovered over twenty five years of policy
• 23:55
  work is that trying to combat the litigation environment is like playing whack a mole.
• 24:00
  You're hitted in one and it pops up in another. The area that
• 24:04
  I was reading about recently, though, that I think we're still going to
• 24:08
  have issue with, is the healthcare arena. We need to address the practitioner
• 24:15
  shortage across all healthcare fields or healthcare kind of job categories. The Live Healthy
• 24:22
  Initiative, it was a package of three or four bills championed by Senate President
• 24:26
  Pasadomo. One of the elements of it was allowing for a streamlined licensing approval
• 24:33
  process for individuals that were foreign trained got their medical degree in medical license in
• 24:38
  a country outside of the US that has a very similar kind of training and
• 24:45
  certification program. So that created an issue with in state providers. Think maybe
• 24:53
  a doctor that left the field wants to come back in after a period of
• 24:57
  years or some of these were fruitment programs that are in state within Florida that
• 25:04
  were pointed out that, all right, that's a great tool. We need
• 25:07
  a more streamlined program within the state to get more practitioners in. I think
• 25:14
  we'd see a whole lot of forward momentum if your legislature continued to press ahead
• 25:21
  in that respect. To be continued, to be continued, we will have
• 25:26
  a signed budget with vetos to discuss in our July program. Thanks always a
• 25:33
  pleasure, my friend, Salnuzo, Consumers Defense dot Com, forty six past the hour