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Florida's 2024 Legislative Session Recap · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:11
  Five minutes past the third hour beginning here on the Morning Show with Preston Scott
• 0:15
  eight o'clock in the Eastern time zone, seven in the Central no matter where,
• 0:19
  no matter how, Thanks a lot for making time. We appreciate it.
• 0:22
  I'm personally enjoying this respite in the cooler weather for just another day or
• 0:27
  two. Loved it yesterday, I'm gonna love it today. And we are
• 0:32
  joined here Grant Allen and I are joined by sald Newsa with Consumers Defense.
• 0:37
  Hello, good morning to you. Enjoy the weather. I love it,
• 0:41
  And in fact, I was thinking to myself, we had a very very
• 0:44
  mild winter and so this like I was talking to somebody the other day,
• 0:48
  I was like, I thought we would get a couple more weeks of that,
• 0:51
  you know, thirties and weeks. What did punk Satani Phil say he
• 0:56
  did not see a shadow this year, which means which means we're going to
• 0:59
  get at an earlier spring, or which means that we have a greater than
• 1:03
  sixty percent chance of him being wrong, and we will in fact have longer
• 1:07
  cooler weather. It's all global warming, and I'm gonna change you just saying,
• 1:11
  yeah, all right, we I challenged you. I tasked you with
• 1:19
  what impacts people the most, and we're going to get to that. But
• 1:23
  let's first kind of looking at the session. It's now done. How did
• 1:29
  the governor do? I think the governor largely got everything he wanted, and
• 1:34
  in fact, when they were negotiating the budget before the Conference Committee, I
• 1:40
  believe the House had left off a couple of things in the tax package that
• 1:45
  he had wanted that didn't last very long. They put in some tax proposals
• 1:52
  that he had wanted, our tax relief proposals. So with the exception of
• 1:56
  the amount of the budget, which I think we should get to and talk
• 2:00
  about, I think the governor landed really, really really well. Well,
• 2:04
  is the sharpie read that he's going to be pulling out the sharpie is going
• 2:07
  to be real red? Okay. The budget total was one hundred and seventeen
• 2:12
  point five billion dollars, which the week before, during the Conference Committee,
• 2:17
  it was only one hundred and fifteen point eight So that's primarily a result of
• 2:23
  what's called the sprinkle list. The sprinkle list is the colloquial for the oh
• 2:30
  gosh, it's something the supplemental funding portion, and they just kind of add
• 2:34
  in this for this member, this, for this member of project here,
• 2:38
  a project there kind of firms up the votes, and it's notorious for beefing
• 2:43
  up the budget amount, but I don't know that I've ever seen it this
• 2:46
  much. I mean, it was about a billion dollars, and so I
• 2:51
  would suggest, and I think the Governor's office is kind of suggesting, it's
• 2:53
  a bit of overkill. He was adamant. He wanted a final figure that
• 2:59
  some how would allow him to state that they were cutting the size of government.
• 3:04
  Then there's two ways to look at that. One is in the total
• 3:07
  amount we spent one hundred and eighteen last year or this year we're going to
• 3:10
  spend one hundred and sixteen this year. That's one way to look at a
• 3:14
  cut. The other way to look at a cut is in the per capita
• 3:17
  expenditures. Now, per capita, the state is incredibly lean, so I'm
• 3:23
  not sure how we get there on that. So I'm expecting I think it
• 3:29
  could come in a billion or more in light on a vetos, but that's
• 3:32
  just me surmising at this point where we are right now. Highlights to me
• 3:38
  would include that we have reserves, that we are able to help state employees
• 3:45
  a little bit more, and that we are paying off debt yep. So
• 3:50
  and to your points, we've got ten billion in reserves in the budget.
• 3:53
  So and we had a huge reserve beforehand. A three percent pay raise for
• 3:59
  state employees. A couple of other notes on the education side, two hundred
• 4:03
  and forty dollars per student increase in what's called the FEFP, the Florida Education
• 4:10
  Financing Program. On top of that, a two hundred million increase in money
• 4:16
  for increasing teacher pay. So there was some talk someone had filed a bill
• 4:21
  about wanting to get the starting salaries for teachers to sixty five thousand dollars.
• 4:26
  That's not going to happen. Worry at about forty five or something like that
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  now. But I do believe they're moving in the direction where they want to
• 4:34
  be in like the top quartile on teacher pay. They need to be going
• 4:40
  in the direction of leaving starting pay where it is, but now creating funds
• 4:45
  to reward good teachers that have been in the system. And the two hundred
• 4:48
  million in teacher pay is not for starting salaries, it's for boosting and addressing
• 4:55
  what is called salary compression. Which is exactly what you're pointing to, where
• 4:59
  the starting se allies butt up against what teachers who have been in the system
• 5:01
  for ten plus years are getting. If you missed it, Salnuzo now with
• 5:06
  Consumers Defense and the website is Consumers Defense dot com. Look at that.
• 5:14
  They went deep into the bucket of inspiration for that one. I wanted him
• 5:17
  to when they hired me on. I wanted to go def con just I
• 5:23
  loved the idea. Yeah, sure that got shot down. Oh well,
• 5:26
  hell well. We've talked about the legislative session from the perspective of the governor.
• 5:30
  Though he has now the heavy lifting to do. He's got to sort
• 5:33
  through all the different bills the budget, budget first budget first, Yeah,
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  they there had only been a handful of bills that were actually presented to him
• 5:43
  prior to the end of session. We had a total of three hundred and
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  fifteen bills passed both chambers and go on. But I did some math over
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  eighty percent of those bills were passed in the final week. So he's got
• 5:56
  a lot on his plate in the coming weeks. Legislature, how would we
• 6:00
  view the session from the perspective of the House in the Senate amiable. They
• 6:06
  focused far more heavily this session on economic policies versus the social end of things,
• 6:14
  which I think the prior session had a much heavier focus on social issues.
• 6:18
  Probably the big deal that everyone is paying attention to is, you know,
• 6:23
  what are they doing on taxes. It's a two year tax package of
• 6:28
  about one point five billion in tax cuts. Originally, and I had kind
• 6:31
  of mentioned this in the last segment, the original shift on the House in
• 6:36
  the Senate was they were going to more aggressively tackle the business rent tax.
• 6:41
  Yeah, they abandoned that. They went with the governor's proposal of continuing with
• 6:46
  sales tax holidays. They did pair down a little bit of the timing on
• 6:50
  them. But he had also requested some insurance insurance premium tax breaks for homeowners.
• 6:58
  And this last minute deal that he had proposed on it's about four hundred
• 7:02
  and fifty million dollars in a rebate program for drivers who pay more than thirty
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  five toll transactions in a month. So the folks who are driving for a
• 7:14
  living that go, you know, every day they're hitting the tolls. Orlando,
• 7:17
  Yeah, you're going to have rebates coming in. I think it's twenty
• 7:21
  twenty five, I guess is when they'll kick in. You know. The
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  plus side of pushing some of that stuff down the road is that they're cutting
• 7:30
  taxes by one point five what billion? Yep, they're able to say that
• 7:34
  again the next session they're cutting more tax you know what I mean, there's
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  a there's a there's a little gamesmanship there if they want one percent and in
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  a state, and I speak to a lot of groups around the state,
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  and I tell them, in a state growing by one thousand people a day,
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  with the kind of diversity of the economy and the diversity of the individuals
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  living in the state, we have a state with one hundred and seventeen for
• 7:59
  the time billion dollar budget New York State with two million, fewer people,
• 8:03
  fewer people. Their state budget is double what Florida's is. And I would
• 8:07
  argue we get far more out of our state government than New York. I
• 8:11
  was just going to ask you, how many state legislatures do you expect this
• 8:16
  year are going to be talking about the one point five billion dollars in tax
• 8:20
  cuts. None, That's what I mean. I mean, that's I don't
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  think that Floridians appreciate the anomaly that Florida is in the Union. Absolutely,
• 8:28
  and that's something that like from my days at JMI to even now in my
• 8:33
  new role, I highlight just about every time I speak to individuals or groups
• 8:39
  around the state or even the country. I sidetracked you a little bit.
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  We wanted to talk about bills that impact people. We've got time for one
• 8:45
  before we take a quick break. Okay, So looking at this bucket of
• 8:48
  what I call governance, I would suggest that probably HB one P fifty one
• 8:54
  related to the Florida Retirement System is going to be the most impactful for view
• 8:58
  for listeners in this area. Some positive employee positive changes to the DROP program
• 9:05
  as I was reading them, along with a mandatory cola for specific categories of
• 9:09
  employees on what a crews in the retirement fund. That's going to be a
• 9:13
  positive. You also have some stuff where they're trying to address affordable housing like
• 9:18
  eight twelve CENTIBIL eight twelve expedizing expediting residential building permits, trying to build on
• 9:26
  some of the efforts from last year. And then the other one that I'll
• 9:31
  highlight kind of at the end of this segment, House Built ten twenty one
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  it's called Condo three point zero. More enforcement of the record keeping for condo
• 9:41
  boards, disclosure rules on conflicts for board members, think about vendors providing services
• 9:46
  to those condos, Requirements for inspections, beefing up DBPR to help enforce.
• 9:52
  This is kind of in the aftermath of the condo collapse in Miami. They
• 9:58
  came back and really started to get aggressive on these and they're continuing that and
• 10:03
  I think they'll continue on in future sessions. We're back talking about the legislative
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  session that was they dropped the handkerchief on Friday and brought it to a merciful
• 10:18
  end. And so it's our recap and we're talking about the things that impact
• 10:22
  you impact the state in the most direct ways, and there's a lot that
• 10:26
  we have to weed through in all of this. I say we because I
• 10:30
  just like to feel part of the team, though I did not, event
• 10:33
  president, you are part of the team. No, No, not on
• 10:37
  this one. Fal what else? So in the kind of bucket of entrepreneurialism,
• 10:43
  business, the conduct of business, you got a number of things.
• 10:48
  So HB forty nine, it was on life support last week. It is
• 10:52
  the bill that would alter the regulations for individuals sixteen and seventeen years old in
• 10:58
  the working place, they could write more hours. It made it through.
• 11:03
  It was paired with another preemption bill on like locals enacting some really crazy regulations
• 11:11
  on workplace conditions. What moves it from life support to suddenly getting passed.
• 11:15
  They amended it onto another bill that was moving, or they amended another bill
• 11:20
  that was moving onto it. So it happens every session, you know,
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  the shells of kind of moving the chess pieces around. It happens every single
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  session where things are moving, they're on a time constraint. They're trying to
• 11:33
  move different things. One bill hasn't gotten through enough committees. They can take
• 11:37
  the language and amend it on because it's opening the same statutes and so on.
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  So what this does is this allows more hours for sixteen and seventeen year
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  olds to work. I believe it's thirty hours. It goes up to thirty
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  hours. Okay, You've also got Senate bill to eighty, which is a
• 11:52
  big deal because after four years of really kind of a Yeoman's ephyrt, Senator
• 11:58
  Nick de Segli finally gets the regulatory system underway for short term rentals across the
• 12:03
  state. So this new system would largely preempt what the locals have been doing
• 12:09
  trying to regulate solely the airbnb so passing ordinances only on the short term rentals
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  as opposed to passing those ordinances for all of the properties in the jurisdiction.
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  There's gonna be some reporting and some tax collection stuff that's regulated up to the
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  state and the So is this good news for the people listening that have their
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  homes listed on Airbnb and verbo or whatever. It's good news for them.
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  It is not so good news if you are one of the individuals who's lodging
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  a ton of complaints because there's an Airbnb or a vrbo in your neighborhood and
• 12:46
  they might be, you know, behaving in ways that you do not like
• 12:50
  as a homeowner. Okay, The interesting bill an account for kind of walking
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  back some of the reforms that were done to the criminal justice system a few
• 13:01
  years back. HB five forty nine retail theft, so kind of recognizing the
• 13:07
  changing landscape and what a lot of states are dealing with, namely blue states
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  that choose not to prosecute retail theft in ways that Florida is just going to
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  kind of plant a flag in and say nope, you're not going to get
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  away with that. Here are we changing the mounts required for it to be
• 13:24
  a felony. There's some change to the amounts, but it's more kind of
• 13:31
  also changing the degrees, so I think it bumps it up one degree.
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  Kind of a second degree felony would be a first degree felony, and so
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  on and so forth. Okay, Senate Bill sixteen ninety eight it made it.
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  This is the massive regulatory increase on the hemp industry. It will restrict
• 13:52
  many of the I'm calling it fake weed products. It's derived from hemp,
• 13:56
  but then it's used in some products that are being old in retail facilities,
• 14:01
  and you do not need a medical marijuana license. There another big bill,
• 14:07
  the vaping Bill, it got changed to limit its scope to only single use
• 14:13
  mechanisms. So if you have a cartridge and you add products into it,
• 14:18
  no change at all for the single use items, the ones that you buy.
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  It limits it to twenty three items approved by the FDA. All of
• 14:26
  those are currently large tobacco company products. And then kind of in the healthcare
• 14:33
  space, the really big bill seventy sixteen seventy eighteen. It's a hugely impactful
• 14:39
  bill Senate Presidents Live healthy reform on healthcare, beginning to address a lot of
• 14:45
  the provider shortages in the state. We are a gross state. Two thirds
• 14:50
  of our population growth is over the age of sixty. The cohort that requires
• 14:54
  enough more healthcare. So seven hundred million dollar infusion and healthcare funding, increasing
• 15:01
  medical residency slots, loan forgiveness to get providers into hard to serve areas,
• 15:05
  reimbursement rate increases, and licensing reform, kind of fast tracking approval to get
• 15:13
  providers from other states into Florida. So the bottom line is this is going
• 15:16
  to help the burdensome process of trying to find healthcare. Absolutely, it should
• 15:24
  have a pronounced impact on wait times to get to a doctor and so forth.
• 15:28
  Effective when I believe July one back with sal news oh consumer's defense.
• 15:37
  But we're talking about the legislative session that was, and now we segue to
• 15:43
  what we were just talking about it education, Yep. Education probably the most
• 15:48
  impactful issue in the community. Last year universal school Choice bill passed. With
• 15:56
  any piece of legislation like that, that's kind of as transformational as HB one
• 16:03
  was from last year. Inevitably there's going to be glitches, things that they
• 16:06
  didn't anticipate the implementation of it. They're going to figure it out. So
• 16:11
  the Cleanup Bill, what they typically refer to as a glitch bill, Senate
• 16:15
  Bill seventy forty eight is one of them. From Corey Simon accomplished as a
• 16:18
  host of things, merging the Hope Scholarship with the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program.
• 16:25
  So that's going away, streamline, extending family Empowerment scholarships for the students
• 16:30
  with unique abilities, special needs kids. You've got an additional twenty one thousand
• 16:37
  kids there, taking the cap off of that with three to five percent,
• 16:44
  with a kind of a growth factor in there. Expanding the allowable use of
• 16:49
  funds, which was an issue as the HB one kind of got rolled out.
• 16:56
  You had the left in the media. But I repeat myself trying to
• 17:00
  write narratives about parents purchasing certain things for their school kids. And so they're
• 17:07
  streamlining and developing some kind of guardrails and kind of if you're gonna buy,
• 17:14
  for example, a large screen TV, you have to show in a form
• 17:18
  how you're going to use it for educational purposes. To kind of give a
• 17:22
  sense of kind of accountability to it. Yeah. So, and there's gonna
• 17:29
  be some other things that are going to come down the pike. I was
• 17:30
  talking with a few folks, actually, one of my old colleagues at JMI,
• 17:34
  and there may be a move ahead in the legislative session to come to
• 17:40
  actually look at privatizing Florida Virtual School. And that's something that I think is
• 17:45
  a very intriguing thought because it would effectively open up some competition for how those
• 17:52
  materials are delivered and what parents can access and so forth. So the other
• 17:57
  thing in the educational front is the Gate program. This we talked about early
• 18:02
  on in the session. The Chambers agreed to four million dollars plus an additional
• 18:07
  seven million in scholarships for this program, which would help get individuals without a
• 18:11
  high school diploma or a ged into career training programs. One of the elements
• 18:18
  of the reform that would kind of it's kind of attractive to me in terms
• 18:22
  of it would waive tuition and fees for those who have quit high school but
• 18:26
  who want to pursue vocational diplomas or workforce credentials in the state university system.
• 18:33
  So kind of a hand up as opposed to a handout. They're going to
• 18:37
  have to go in and do the work on these things. But the individuals
• 18:42
  participating in the program. But when you look at you know who this can
• 18:48
  impact. This is exactly what I think good government should be about. Who
• 18:53
  will administer this, the community colleges, the vocational schools, the community colleges
• 18:57
  that have voke well, sorry, state colleges that have vocational schools. Where
• 19:03
  does this start? I believe it's going to start with the Department of Education,
• 19:07
  through the Border Regions Board of Governors shown my age there, and then
• 19:11
  they'll develop kind of the system along kind of what it looks like and how
• 19:15
  the money is dispersed in all of those things. Lastly, tech and innovation,
• 19:18
  The biggest story of twenty twenty four has to be the HB one and
• 19:23
  HB three roller coaster. It started out as an outright ban on social media
• 19:29
  for anyone under the age of sixteen, the final form of it after the
• 19:33
  governor vetoed it. It is now a ban still but with parental consent,
• 19:38
  so parents can somehow consent to have their fifteen and sixteen years or fourteen and
• 19:44
  fifteen year olds. However, the age verification method on this is going to
• 19:48
  land this bill in court. There's already been some back and forth between the
• 19:52
  Speaker and the group Net Choice, which represents all the big tech platforms,
• 19:57
  and they're going to litigate this. Arkansas bill, which was similar, was
• 20:02
  already tossed. I don't know how this lands, but it's gonna continue on.
• 20:07
  And the bottom line is there are workarounds. Yeah, the virtual private
• 20:12
  network mechanism in Utah when they passed a similar bill, VPN downloads went through
• 20:18
  the roofs. So it's you know, I applaud the Speaker for the intention
• 20:26
  and what he's trying to do with steering this conversation at where social media has
• 20:30
  gone. It's just kind of an I don't know at this point. You
• 20:34
  know, we've been on the program talking about the dangers of TikTok and getting
• 20:38
  it off your kids' phones, and you know, my approach has always been
• 20:41
  parents be parents. We don't need the government being parents in this. I
• 20:45
  agree with Speaker Renner on its dangers, as I do with everything, but
• 20:49
  it isn't quite the same as smoking, though its impact could be. Yeah,
• 20:53
  and I think at some point down the road there may be very specific
• 21:00
  research out there that establishes causal relationships. I don't know that it's as reliable
• 21:07
  as some of the research that brought down the tobacco firms in the eighties and
• 21:12
  into the early nineties, but I think anecdotally it is abundantly clear that young
• 21:21
  people should have very minimal, if any, exposure to social media, and
• 21:27
  it should be done in a setting like what the legislature passed last year,
• 21:33
  which was a social Media education bill, require the schools to provide a course,
• 21:40
  could be a short course on what are the risks? What are the
• 21:42
  benefits? Like you know, LinkedIn versus TikTok? Do you know you're being
• 21:48
  manipulated? Do you know when you put a photo out on the internet it
• 21:53
  never goes away? Exactly those things? You know, Young people's brains are
• 22:00
  not formed and developed completely in the same way that they are at twenty five
• 22:04
  or thirty. Although that's debatable, but that's where yeah, no kidding,
• 22:08
  but that's but that's where I feel like parents can't be let off the hook.
• 22:12
  It's your job to parent, it's not your phone's job to babysit your
• 22:15
  kid. And I can understand and appreciate both sides of this, because I
• 22:22
  was a single dad for and have been. But I mean, my kids
• 22:26
  are older now, but when they were young, it was at times very
• 22:32
  easy to give them an iPad and say, hey, you know, occupy
• 22:37
  yourself. Yeah, and so I get the lure of it. So I
• 22:41
  I'm with you. I respect and admire the speaker's intention. I you know,
• 22:48
  I would hate to see all of that effort end up being tossed by
• 22:53
  a court. But we'll have to see. So HB one got vetoed.
• 22:57
  HB one got vetoedde HB three was the vehicle that they used for the final
• 23:03
  bill, because the Senate took that language and merged it onto HB one,
• 23:08
  which then the Governor vetoed. So it gave the House that vehicle that bill.
• 23:15
  HB three still to a mend, put the final language on that they
• 23:18
  agreed on with the Governor, and move it in the very last days of
• 23:23
  session. What about Center Bill six seventy six. Yeah, this was a
• 23:27
  preemption bill to ensure that local governments aren't creating regulations on food delivery platforms,
• 23:34
  which some in South Florida were doing. They're trying to get there, you
• 23:37
  know, there get a little bit of revenue off of it, and that
• 23:41
  restaurants have to now actually agree to participate on those food delivery platforms. And
• 23:48
  the impetus for this is you get a lot of times where the food delivery
• 23:53
  platform, if it's a low quality or it takes a whole lot of time.
• 23:56
  You got a restaurant and now you get your food cold. The restaurant
• 24:00
  didn't know that a platform was delivering the food, and they get the bad
• 24:03
  reputation or the bad review. And so it's got to be a they have
• 24:07
  to agree to this, and so I like the idea. There can you
• 24:11
  stay for overtime And in the final three minute segment co over the things that
• 24:15
  didn't make the cut. You got it all right, We're going to do
• 24:18
  an extra segment because we got a list here of what didn't make it,
• 24:21
  what died, and so we're going to quickly go through that list. Next
• 24:25
  one more segment with Sal Newsom. A bonus segment here with Sal. Bonus
• 24:34
  segment with Sal, and we're talking about bills that did not make the cut.
• 24:38
  Yeah, a number of things. You had a county commissioned term limits
• 24:42
  that was bouncing back and forth between the House and the Senate one chamber,
• 24:48
  one at eight years the other one at twelve. It just ended up dying.
• 24:51
  I think it may come back. The folks who sponsored it were they'll
• 24:53
  be back in future terms. This one saddens me. My favorite bill of
• 24:59
  twin four did not make it the requirement for a supermajority to raise the millage
• 25:03
  rate. Sam Garrison, who is in line to be Speaker after Danny Perez,
• 25:08
  I think this is absolutely coming back. He's right on the money in
• 25:12
  terms of trying to get toward truth and taxation. The THHC caps ahead of
• 25:19
  the recreational marijuana amendment, those did not make it. So recreational marijuana is
• 25:26
  going on the ballot. If they want to do anything to regulate the amount
• 25:30
  of marijuana that's in whatever, they will have to come. Well, it's
• 25:34
  going on the ballot if it passes. The State Supreme Court corrightt next biological
• 25:41
  sex on official state documents, so driver's licenses and birth certificates. It's a
• 25:45
  mistake, I do it's a mistake. I do believe it will also come
• 25:51
  back. The repeal of the eighteen to twenty one year old band on the
• 25:55
  purchase of long en mistake. Yeah, and I think you're going to see
• 26:00
  the legislature kind of get a little bit more conservative on this matter as more
• 26:07
  folks from the House get into constitutional carry. Needs to come on. I
• 26:11
  saw another state past it recently, fantasy sports regulation. We talked about it
• 26:17
  a couple of times. The Senate passed a bill, the House just did
• 26:19
  not see it through. And sadly there will be no Italian American Pride license
• 26:27
  plate. I am, I'm gonna go take prozac or something. Then sorry,
• 26:33
  yep, no Canoli's on your license plate. There you go. Yeah,
• 26:37
  that's the last word. No Cannoli's on the license plate. Sorry about
• 26:41
  that. Thanks to sell NEWSOH with Consumers Defense, our guest and a little
• 26:48
  legislative wrap up there