Florida's Latest News

'Lean Year' Ahead For Florida Higher Education As Senate, House Propose Cuts

 House and Senate budget leaders are eyeing cuts to higher education spending, but early recommendations would go about it in different ways.

A Senate budget proposal released last week, for example, calls for a nearly $217 million reduction in spending on the state university system.

But as the Senate considers a controversial separate bill (SB 86) that would tie Bright Futures scholarship awards to amounts set aside in the budget, Senate Education Appropriations Chairman Doug Broxson, R-Gulf Breeze, said the proposed spending plan would fully fund the program at more than $651 million. Currently, the program uses a tiered structure of providing Bright Futures aid at either 75% or 100% of tuition and fees.

Democratic House leaders, Gov. DeSantis agree on affordable housing funding

The issue of affordable housing funding has put Democratic House leaders and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in the unusual instance of being on the same side.

Infrastructure projects took center stage in the multi-billion-dollar budget proposal the House released Saturday. To complete the projects, the budget pulls money from the Sadowski Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Democratic Policy Chair Rep. Fentrice Driskell in a press conference Monday criticized the “sweep” of the Sadowski trust.

“We know that Floridians who spend more than 30% of their income on housing, it makes them so cash strapped that they’re not always able to afford other basic necessities. This was a problem before the pandemic, and it certainly has been worsened by the pandemic,” Driskell said.

DeSantis vows to ban ‘vaccination passports’ as he signs law shielding businesses from COVID-19 liability

Florida businesses soon won’t be able to screen customers based on whether they’ve received the COVID-19 vaccine, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday, even as he signed a bill designed to shield companies from pandemic-related lawsuits.

“It’s completely unacceptable,” DeSantis said of what he called “vaccination passports,” a card or some other method of proving an individual has been inoculated against the virus. “You want to go to a movie theater, should you have to show that? No. You want to go to a game, [or] a theme park? No. So we’re not supportive of that.”

DeSantis said an executive order was coming soon, possibly by Tuesday, against vaccination passports, and he called for the Legislature to pass a bill making a ban permanent. The Legislature is nearing the midway point of a 60-day session scheduled to end April 30.

Bill to scale back controversial toll road project passes Senate

A massive multi-million dollar infrastructure project facing both a growing chorus of angry voices and a tight budget year, found itself an easy target for the chopping block in the Florida Senate.

Late last week the Florida Senate approved a bill that does away with much of a controversial toll-road plan, called the Multi-use Corridors of Regional Economic Significance (M-CORES).

Approved by the Florida legislature in 2019, M-CORES called for building a toll road from Collier County to Polk County, extending Florida’s Turnpike to connect with the Suncoast Parkway, and extending the Suncoast Parkway toll road from Citrus County to Jefferson County.

Plans to build these tolls roads through rural areas in the middle and northern part of the state drew public outcry from community leaders who said the roads were not needed or wanted and would cause environmental harm.