Dolphins stadium renovation splits Miami-Dade Democrats

@PatriciaMazzei

The Miami Dolphins’ push for a subsidized renovation to Sun Life Stadium appears to have divided the local Democratic Party, whose leadership has opposed the plan for weeks.

The divisions were evident Wednesday night at a forum the party organized featuring Miami-Dade Commissioner Barbara Jordan, a renovation proponent, and former Commissioner Katy Sorenson, a critic. Both are Democrats.

Jordan accused the party of “bias” for taking a public stance against the Dolphins’ proposal.

“If the party has taken a position on this, there’s bias,” she said. “The party should stay out of this race.”

Party Chairwoman Annette Taddeo-Goldstein issued a statement last month opposing the stadium deal, which will go to voters in a May 14 referendum unless Florida lawmakers block Dolphins-backed legislation by Friday.

At the forum, party members said that while the party’s steering committee took a vote against the stadium renovation, the full Democratic Executive Committee will not weigh in until Monday.

After bizarre, chaotic Wednesday, Florida House returns to normalcy

After spiraling into near-chaos late Wednesday, the Florida House returned to normalcy Thursday, with no robot-voices, threats of lawsuits, procedural brinksmanship or petty bickering on the floor. 

“Today is a new day,” said House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel. He said he planned to close out the session in a way that is “befitting” to the Florida House. 

Weatherford also hailed the House’s auto-reader, nicknamed “Mary,” as the session’s MVP, and relieved her of her duties. 

Wednesday was the last day that House Democrats could stall the legislative process and protest a stalemate over healthcare reform by requiring all bills be read in full. In a 12-hour marathon session, lawmakers sat and listened to a robotic-reading of hundreds of pages of legislative text. 

The stall-tactics mostly ended on Thursday, as Democrats no longer had the option of requesting that all bills be read in full. However, several bills remained at risk of being sidelined by the slowdown, including a sports stadium tax package that could benefit the Miami Dolphins. 

The House planned to take up the state’s $74.4 billion budget, which is the only law legislators must pass, on Friday.

Trauma train on life support in Senate, prognosis not good

Sen. Aaron Bean's 135-page bill has been saddled with 250 pages of proposed amendments and so, the sponsor said, it may be time to pull the plug.

"We had a record 57 (amendments),'' said Bean, R-Fernandina Beach. Among them, inserted by some of the busiest lobbyists occupying the Fourth Floor rotunda: provisions to change policy not only on certificate of need for trauma care centers, but dozens of other health care programs from HIV programs to carving out dental care for medicaid reform to tightening regulation on assisted living facilities. 

Bean said early Thursday the bill "may just not come up." In Tallahassee parlance, that's another way of saying it may be loved to death. 

One provision of the bill, that remains a major interest of Senate President Don Gaetz -- which would allow his local county to build a trauma center -- is likely to be added to another bill relating to certificate of need for a nursing home for The Villages.

Bob Graham visits Tally, urges rejection of efforts to weaken environmental rules

Former senator and governor Bob Graham is back in Tallahassee today, this time urging legislators to reject a handful of environmental bills that he believes will have a damaging impact on the environment. 

He spoke Senate Democrats urging them to reject HB 999, a bill relating to environmental permitting that prohibits local governments from regulating fertilizer sales and application between now and 2016 as well as local government efforts to regulate wetlands. 

"There seems to be a number of bills that have the effect of removing local control,'' he said. "The irony is this is a time when there has been a substantial reduction in the financial and human capabilities of the water management districts or the state to provide the oversight that currently."

He also urged them to reject SB 1684 which ratifies a no-bid Everglades lease agreement between the state and sugar and vegetable farmers. It as approved by the governor and Cabinet in January and is now being challenged in court by the Florida Wildlife Federation. The bill will "have the practical effect to terminate that litigation,'' he said. "We would encourage a no-vote on the bill on final passage because we don't feel the bill will be in the public interest." 

Graham, a member of the Florida Conservation Coalition, noted that the special interest push to weaken environmental laws is occurring because the window is open. "For some interests, they see this as the best train to get on for the foreseeable future." 

 

 

Five Things To Know for Thursday's Legislative Session

Thursday is the next-to-last day of the 2013 legislative session. Here are five things to watch:

 

* The House may consider one of the most significant bills of the session that awaits a floor vote: changes to Florida election laws, including mandating eight days of early voting and expanding the number of early voting sites.

 

* "Mary," the mechanical auto-reader who has been "reading" bill texts aloud for the past two days in the House, can take the rest of the session off. Under legislative rules, the House can only take up returning messages after the 58th day. Those do not need to be re-introduced, so there's no way to read them aloud.

 

* Legislators can take a vote on the budget anytime after 1:37 p.m., which will be 72 hours after the compromise spending plan was first available on Monday.  

 

* The Senate plans a final vote on a bill that makes a number of changes to Florida's driving laws and creates several new specialty license tags.

 

* The Senate will adopt a resolution honoring the memory of Bill McBride, the Tampa lawyer and 2002 Democratic candidate for governor who died last December. McBride was the husband of Alex Sink, the 2010 Democratic candidate for governor.

- STEVE BOUSQUET (Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau)

 

Florida Virtual School: Proposed budget would hurt our funding

School districts, teachers and parents are celebrating the $1 billion addition to the state’s education budget.

But not everyone is happy with their slice of the pie.

Florida Virtual School, the state’s public online school, says it will actually come up about $36 million short due to a proposed change in the state’s education finance formula.

FLVS was expecting to see its $200 million budget increased by $45 million next year to cover the cost of 80,000 new enrollments, CEO Julie Young said. But the increase will be closer to $9 million.

That’s because under the new formula, online providers will receive fewer dollars for every part-time student they enroll. As a result, FLVS will have to increase its teacher-to-student ratio and eliminate part-time graders and curriculum specialists, Young said.

“We like to say that FLVS is a place where every student has a front row seat,” Young said. “But with a budget cut this steep, teachers will have less time with individual students.”

Read the story here.

Florida lawmakers put an end to subsidized tutoring

A last-ditch effort by South Florida lawmakers to keep millions of dollars flowing to private tutoring companies suffered a resounding defeat on Wednesday, giving Florida school districts control over $100 million in federal education money for the first time in a decade.

It happened when a pair of Miami-Dade lawmakers tried to attach funding for subsidized tutoring into a fast-tracked bill that would expand online learning. Their fellow senators cried foul, citing an investigation by The Tampa Bay Times that showed criminals were profiting from the controversial program.

“What’s happening this year is we’re having students that are not being served,” said Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee. “I don’t want to go and read some of the newspaper articles on my desk. Remember, there were rapists. There were child abusers. There were thieves. In my hometown, what we call hoodlums and thugs.”

Last year Montford supported a bill that had continued the tutoring through the end of this school year. The measure, which passed late in the session, continued a private tutoring initiative begun by the George W. Bush administration in 2001 — a program meant to help the poorest kids in the nation’s worst schools.

In Florida, supplemental educational services, as it was known, gave rise to a booming for-profit industry that has fought fiercely the past two years to retain its funding.

In a series published in February, the Times revealed that lax state oversight allowed criminals to form companies and earn tax dollars tutoring needy kids. The newspaper also showed that companies repeatedly caught overbilling have continued to operate unchecked by state regulators.

Read the story here.

-- MICHAEL LAFORGIA AND KATHLEEN MCGRORY

No compromise in sight, health care deal likely dead

Despite promises they would work toward middle ground, House and Senate leaders have been unable to reach agreement on health care reform and the session has only two days left. Both sides rejected Medicaid expansion but have very different ideas about what should be done instead.

An excerpt from the story in Thursday's paper:

While Gov. Rick Scott early on endorsed a plan to expand Medicaid, and subsequently the federally funded alternative offered by the Senate, House leaders always were an impediment. House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, made it clear on Day 1 of the 60-day lawmaking session when he called Medicaid expansion a "social experiment" that is doomed to fail.

"I believe it crossed the line of the proper role of government," Weatherford said in his opening day speech to lawmakers. "Florida should not buy it."

Rep. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, said the speech painted Weatherford into a corner. Worse yet, he brought the Republican caucus with him. Fasano was the lone GOP House member to vote to accept federal money.

Now no one wants to cave, even though taking the money should be a no-brainer, Fasano said, noting that the health expansion would be 100 percent federally funded for the first three years.

As a result, the Capitol resembles a dysfunctional family. Depending on who you ask, the older brother Senate is either wiser or unreasonable. The younger brother House is either innovative or unrealistic.

Gov. Rick Scott is the absent father.

Read more here.

Scott details reasons for vetoing alimony bill: unintended, unfair results

Gov. Rick Scott's veto letter for SB 718 relating to alimony:  Download Alimony veto

Fair Districts plotted to "scoop as many Jews" for Wasserman-Schultz, draw partisan districts

@MarcACaputo

A liberal group involved in a lawsuit to make Florida’s congressional districts less partisan engaged in its own partisan efforts by drawing Democratic-heavy Hispanic seats or trying to "scoop" Jewish voters into a district for U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair, emails show.

The emails between the leaders and consultants of what’s known as the Fair Districts Coalition became a central piece of evidence Wednesday in the Republican-led Legislature’s legal defense of the congressional districts it drew in 2012.

Some coalition members sued the Legislature to have the congressional maps cancelled, saying they violate a new state constitutional amendment forbidding lawmakers from drawing districts that favor or disfavor political parties or incumbents.

To show how unfair the Legislature’s maps were, the plaintiffs submitted their own plan as an alternative.

But Republicans note that the emails involving Fair Districts leader Ellen Freidin and the consultants show that the plaintiffs’ proposals were drawn to strengthen Democrats, in general, and Wasserman Schultz in particular.

“I just got off the phone with Ellen,” consultant Brad Wieneke wrote in a Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2011, email to members of the team in discussing Wasserman Schultz’s district.

“They want to scoop as many Jews out of Tamarac and Sunrise as they can,” Wienke said.