This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] Coming up next, the regular session of the legislature opened this week.

And the House.

Speaker makes a surprise announcement about homeowners insurance.

The governor continues to back the idea of doing away with property taxes.

Democrats offer their state of the state message and will have a big announcement about the future of this program right now on Florida This Week.

[music] Welcome back.

Joining us this week, Rosemary Goudreau O'hara is the former editorial page editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Jennifer Griffith is the immediate past chair of the Pinellas County Democratic Party.

Barry Edwards is a political commentator and pollster and a Republican, and Daniel Ruth is the Honors College visiting professor of professional practice at USF in Tampa.

Finally, Steve Bousquet is the opinion editor and columnist at the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

What a group.

Nice to see all of you.

Nice to be here.

Thank you for doing the program.

Well, Florida's homeowners have been hurt in the past several years by the rising cost of homeowners insurance.

This week is the regular session of the legislature got underway in Tallahassee.

House Speaker Daniel Perez announced a major investigation into insurance companies.

We are the House of Representatives.

We are the voice of the people.

We must speak for them on the issues that matter.

Property insurance matters to the people of Florida.

[applause] A couple of years ago, the insurance industry came to the legislature and said without sweeping reforms, companies could not compete in Florida.

We have since learned of reports in existence at the time, but not disclosed to the legislature.

That may suggest some insurance companies were using accounting tricks to hide substantial profits, while telling us they were in a crisis.

I have asked the Insurance and Banking subcommittee to conduct hearings, and they will have access to the full range of tools, including issuing subpoenas, putting witnesses under oath and hiring outside experts.

[applause] The investigation was prompted by a report in the Tampa Bay times that said that some homeowners insurance companies claimed economic hardship, while at the same time transferring billions of dollars to shareholders and sister companies.

Rosemary, that was a breathtakingly strong pronouncement by the House speaker.

I don't think I've seen any House speaker say anything like that about a big corporation or big corporations in the past.

And when he used the word accounting tricks to hide the words, accounting tricks to hide profits, that was amazing.

And it was nice to see the bipartisan support, too for this.

You know, homeowners have been duped.

We have been pickpocketed.

This report that he talks about, which was commissioned by the state, shows that insurance companies are siphoning off profits and sending them to affiliates and which for for billions of dollars.

I mean, there were over 50 companies in the three year study.

Some said they were barely scraping by.

At the same time, at the same time that they were reporting revenues of $14 billion.

So, you know, hip, hip hooray!

The legislature is going to investigate the insurance companies with subpoena power.

But, you know, it's hard to have a lot of hope because, as we heard, the legislature had a special session just two years ago for insurance reforms that made it a lot harder for you to sue your insurance company if they don't pay up.

And what's happened?

The Sun Sentinel dug into this for the nine consecutive quarters after that reform passed.

Premiums went up every quarter, an average of 31% statewide in two years.

And personally, in in Dunedin, my own insurance has gone up 33% a year for the last two years.

And finally, the other outrage is that the Tallahassee the DeSantis administration has kept this report from coming from being released to lawmakers at the time they're doing reform.

The Tampa Bay times Holmes asked for.

It took two years for them to get this report.

And so bully for the times for being a bulldog.

On getting the kind of information people deserve to know about this rip off Steve.

That's the thing that struck me the most to that, that this report was hidden by the DeSantis administration for years.

It existed, but they wouldn't give it to Lawrence Mower over the Times-Herald.

That's correct.

This you made you made a reference to Daniel Perez's strong language from the rostrum there on Tuesday.

And it it's a harbinger because, um, and this has been widely reported.

But the speaker, after all these years of the legislature acting like a lapdog to Ron DeSantis, the legislature is finally forcefully standing up to this guy in the last two years of his tenure as governor.

So you have the the they're going to hold hearings and they're going to put insurance executives under oath.

And they're also talking seriously about Overriding some of Ron DeSantis budget vetoes from last year on water projects, arts and cultural programs and the like.

It's a very healthy thing to see.

I hope it lasts.

Barry, what's your take on this?

Well, I welcome the investigation, but I think the investigation shouldn't be about these insurance companies.

We already knew that they were doing that.

Heritage was paying their CEO $25 million right before it collapsed, and he sold the company.

We should be investigating why the head of the insurance commissioner, who's going to be a congressman in a month, Jimmy Patronis, was part of the cover up of keeping this covered up and investigate who in the governor's office kept it covered up.

Did it reach the governor who knew what and when?

So that's, I think, where the real investigation.

We knew the insurance companies were already doing this, but also the legislature has power.

They can put people under oath.

Remember when Sandy Northam testified 25 years ago in the House, she wasn't under oath and all the doctors were fleeing the state and then the Senate.

They put her under oath.

Oh, and no doctor was fleeing because of malpractice insurance.

So they need to put people under oath when they testify.

Do you think they say they are, but I hope they do.

But the Senate needs to do it to under oath.

Daniel, there have been at least three special sessions dealing with the insurance crisis here in Florida.

And the insurance companies got everything they wanted from those sessions.

It underscores, once again, the power of lobbying in Tallahassee.

The lobbyists are really the third branch of government in this state.

I agree with everything everybody said.

I would just underscore one quick point.

This story shows that newspapers still count.

I know it's a we come from a tough business, Rosemary and Steve, but the this proved once again that newspapers can still make a difference in people's lives.

And dogged reporting by Laurence Mauer waiting two years for the document to be.

That's what it takes made public.

Well, in the state of the state message this week, the governor again expressed support for the idea of eliminating property taxes.

While Florida property values have surged in recent years, this has come at a cost to taxpayers Squeezed by increasing local government property taxes.

These escalating assessments have created a gusher of revenue for local governments, and in many throughout Florida have seen their budgets increase far beyond the growth in their populations.

Taxpayers need relief.

You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet you still have to write a check to the government every year just for the privilege of living on your own private property.

Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?

Steve, you were there when when the governor made this statement and some of the media availabilities afterwards.

Tell us, how serious is the governor about doing this and how quickly do you think something will happen?

Well, I think he's very serious.

And a lot of people in the legislature are very serious, and it's very reckless, and they're misleading the people of Florida right off the bat because they haven't been honest about even suggesting where the replacement revenue is going to come from if you abolish property taxes, you basically eviscerate cities, counties and school districts.

Mainly, though, it has many more tentacles out there all over the place hospitals, drainage districts, you name it.

I think I think it's a debate worth having, but we're talking about getting rid of 40 billion with a B in revenue.

So, uh, it would it would have to be phased out over a multitude of years.

I don't think they have any idea how much pushback they're going to face from local governments.

And God help that city or county that gets caught in the next couple of months with some scandal, with wasting money.

Uh, you know, uh, paying outlandish salaries.

They're in for a very, very difficult time.

The legislature is lying in the weeds looking for a good example of waste in local government, and they're going to find one.

Uh, Jennifer, if we do away with property taxes, where do we get the revenue from?

I would assume it would come from sales taxes, and from what I've read, it would increase sales taxes upwards of 12% or higher at minimum to make up the shortage in our property taxes.

So yes, to his point, schools, police, fire everything.

It's just going to decimate our localities, our municipalities.

So does there need to be a solution?

Yes, maybe it lies in regulating our insurance companies.

You know, the, um, the Florida Constitution requires that the state provide, um, a high quality public education system to fund that.

The state gets the money, some money from the lottery, but it also has counties imposing property taxes, two property taxes, one for their own county and one to help fund education across the state.

So if those property taxes go away, where is the state going to find the money to fund its constitutional obligation to provide a public a high quality public education system.

I can't believe you know nothing about how government works.

After all these years, your ignorance is in full, full bloom here.

Here's what you do.

You get the governor and he sprinkles fairy dust over everything.

And that's where the money comes from.

I did a little back of the napkin calculations here before I came.

The city of Tampa's annual budget is about $2 billion.

The Hillsborough County budget is around $9 billion, give or take.

And the school board is about $4 billion.

Hillsborough County has one of the top 15 top ten largest school districts in the in the United States.

So I don't know.

I don't know where you would replace the money from.

This is another example of the the eight weeks of stupid we have every year coming out of the legislature, and DeSantis is completely clueless if he thinks you can eliminate a major funding source.

Go on, go on the internet.

Pull up the budget for the city of Tampa or Hillsborough County.

Look at the line items.

You can see where every dime of it's been.

We're talking about garbage collection.

Police, fire.

We're talking about streets.

And sanitation, schools, cops, Sheriff's department.

It's part of his attack on cities and counties, on local governments and trying to con, um, keep all power in Tallahassee.

So, Barry, what do you say to those folks that say, well, the tourists that come to town, they'll pay the 12% tax on on restaurants and everything they buy.

But you got to look at the total.

About 20%, from what I can tell from economists, comes from tourists.

That means 80% comes from the five of us around the table, 80%.

So this is a reaction to there's a lot of Republicans, and I think a lot of Democrats and independents think that the counties and cities have increased their budgets too much.

So this is a reaction to that.

But we don't need to take a sledgehammer.

We need to put caps on how much they can raise with inflation and things like that.

Last year we passed an amendment with 67% that raises the homestead exemption to inflation.

So there's things like we can do that rather than this draconian, uh, tax.

But also not only is it regressive, it's not stable.

Whenever you have an economic downturn you lose revenue.

So then you've got to shut down the schools in the summer.

I remember trying to go to college in Florida 20 years ago, and we had to shut down the summer classes because the revenue wasn't there.

This is a bad idea.

So if it happens at all, it's going to be put before the Florida voters.

It'll be some issue will be on the state ballot.

Well, in one of the coming years.

This is the same state that voted for Trump.

Of course, these people are going to vote to get rid of property taxes.

Well, Florida Democrats also gave their take on the state of the state this week.

Senate Minority Leader Jason Pizzo, who represents parts of Miami-Dade and Broward counties, says that for the past few years, Republicans in Tallahassee have focused too much on cultural issues and not on the economy.

Certainly, no serious Democrat sought to expand any of the policies or positions Republicans claimed were so rampant and so necessary to defeat.

I have never pushed to install or even expand CRT.

ESG, DEI or Wokeism for none of these will lower your property insurance or your rent.

Nor will they result in your kids GPAs getting higher or their test scores going higher.

And like many of you, I've wondered how, with more than 30 years of majority control in the legislature and executive branches, how any of these issues were so insidious that they festered into such an instant concern?

Or rather, how did a generation of Republican predecessors allow us to get to this place?

And more important, why did these academic issues so dominate our time and capacity?

Instead of paying attention to failing infrastructure, plummeting test scores, spikes in homeowners insurance and housing costs?

So, Barry, I think it's fair to say there's been a lot of emphasis in Tallahassee recently on DEI, on black history, on wokeism fighting wokeism.

The governor says this is a state where Wokeism comes to die.

Yeah, exactly.

So what do you think of what Pizzo said?

Well, I welcome him to the party, just like Gavin Newsom, you know, had major changes with workers having to come back to the office and, and saying it was fundamentally unfair for men to play in women's sports.

I think Jason Pizzo has come back to the party because he realizes that the message that the Democrats have been selling, remember the status quo is what it is today.

So the revolutionaries are those who are trying to change that.

The Republicans are trying to restore, and he wants to be on the restorative side rather than the revolutionary side as he launches his bid, but.

Was die and wokism was that a big problem over the past ten years?

And should the Republicans have focused so much on it?

Some people and some of the universities thought it was in some places.

All right, Jennifer, what do you think?

Was it really a problem in the legislature?

I mean, like, were somebody there weren't bills going, we need a die bill.

We need all of these woke bills.

There was some things that were, in my opinion, humanitarian that were presented.

But the Republicans did an excellent job over the last, I don't know, four years of hanging this around our neck as an albatross to weigh us down and to deflect from the actual people powered bills that we would put forward.

I mean, in our own county, we have a representative, Lindsay Cross, who's consistently putting forth common sense bills that go nowhere because we get framed with wokeism.

Okay.

Well, in his speech to a joint session of Congress this week, President Donald Trump made this claim about Social Security an issue important to many Floridians.

He said millions of people well over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits.

>> 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149.

And money is being paid to many of them.

So, Daniel, that's just a slice of what the president said during the joint address to Congress.

He went on and on about all these ancient people receiving Social Security.

What are the fact checkers saying?

It's all a lie.

I should be I'm 103.

So you're on Social Security?

I'm on Social Security, so I'm part of.

I'm part of that, that group.

But it was just a pure steaming pile of balderdash that he was offering up here.

But the Republicans cheered him.

Yes, yes.

When he said.

Because they're stupid.

And it was a it was a talking point that he was trying to make.

And, you know, this is if we added up all the lies and misinformation he told her in that 100 and 100 minute diatribe, well, we'd be here for the next week.

He gets people inflamed to think that all these dead people are collecting Social Security.

It simply is not true.

The problem is, though, that a lot of people, millions of people, will only see that clip.

And it was one of the most effective parts of his speech when he started being specific about the kinds of things that DOJ has found.

And then when you learn later that that's not true that they cut off, you know.

So payments at 115 Mac, 115 years old Macs.

And that the way the computer system is built, the old language, it's not worth going back and dealing with all these old things.

When you learn that, then it's like, wow, what else is he saying?

That's not true.

But for most people, they'll only have heard what was the most effective part of his speech.

That's right.

Because a lot of what's that old line about how life is ping pong its way around the world.

There's a problem with the tech systems, and he needs to have the Doge people go, which are all techies, the tech bros, as they call them.

They need to go fix these antiquated systems.

AP did a great article that if you were past a certain age and they didn't have your birth date, it defaulted to like 1875.

Okay, so we know there's a problem.

It doesn't appear that there's people that are actually getting payments that are dead, but there are probably a few.

But they could fix that if they invest in getting their, uh, software systems, just like in the Department of Defense.

Most of the waste is in the Department of Defense.

They say 230 billion, but they don't.

They have antiquated systems that were used in the 90s.

That's where they should be putting their resources.

So he's got his finger on it, but he hasn't got it pointed in the right direction.

Steve, I did look up the numbers.

About 90,000 people over the age of 100 or 100 and over do receive Social Security benefits, but it's not in the millions.

Steve, what's Trump doing here?

Is he teeing up, you know, a reason that we should be doing away with Social Security or privatizing Social Security?

What's what's the president up to?

That's that's the fear.

That's the fear for sure.

You know, um, a 30,000 foot observation, if I may.

We're all who those of us who follow Trump and are disgusted with Trump.

We're all asking each other and asking ourselves, what's it going to take, you know, to get people in Pennsylvania and Michigan and certainly parts of Florida to say, you know what, I shouldn't have voted for this guy.

I shouldn't have done it.

I shouldn't have put this guy back in the white House.

My money is on messing around with Social Security.

Um, my friend Rosemary will attest to this as well.

If the Sun Sentinel, we've got a lot of well-educated older readers.

And yes, they've done pretty well financially.

A lot of them have in Broward and Palm Beach County.

But they're also extremely reliant on that monthly Social Security check.

It's their lifeline to economic security.

And Trump is messing around with that.

And that's really dangerous.

And they vote Steve.

They vote.

I think he's made it clear he is not going to touch Social Security.

And there's nobody in his administration.

The serious people like Siouxsie Wiles and the people in Florida that support him, like the Joe Gruters don't want to touch Social Security.

So I but yeah, but you ask, okay, but but you ask, what will it take for people not to vote for him, for the Democratic Party to get off of the crazy wokism that and then and the most people that voted for Trump do so, even if they don't like him, which a large group of Republicans don't because they're scared of the alternative.

So make the alternative less scary.

If you want to be.

Elon Musk, who runs the Doge operation, said this week, Jennifer, that Social Security is nothing but a Ponzi scheme.

Yeah, he's not new in saying that.

I can think back to 2000 and George W Bush talking about privatizing Social Security.

This is laid out completely in Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation.

All of these steps to increase the age, reduce the amount.

And this isn't original.

Trump does not have an original thought.

He borrows from others.

All right, before we go, what other news stories should we be paying attention to?

Rosemary, let's start with you.

Big story.

Well, you know, to help make the budget cuts that Congress wants to make, they're talking about cutting Medicaid.

And so, you know, in they think there are a lot of money there.

They think there's a lot of freeloaders there.

And a lot of the blue states have increased Medicaid.

And so they're getting more money.

But in Florida, 65% of Florida medicaid dollars, go to elderly and disabled people in nursing homes 65%.

About 18% to children, about 18% to adults.

So if you cut Medicaid in Florida, look for Florida nursing homes to further cut staffing levels.

And that would be shocking.

Jennifer.

Your other big story.

I have a couple of big stories, but the biggest one is we have elections coming up on March 11th in Pinellas County municipal elections.

And I would like everybody watching who happens to have one to get out and vote.

And then on April 1st, we also have our two special elections in Congressional District one and Congressional District six.

Those are my big ones.

Important elections.

Barry, your other big story.

So I'm going to kind of steal the thunder for your last story that two decades ago, Jeb Bush was governor, Bill Clinton was president, Dick Greco was mayor.

And a something that became a regular activity for a lot of people in Tampa Bay that love politics Was a steady host, put together over a thousand different shows of lively debate and civil debate, which is what's lacking in most news shows today.

So congratulations Rob Lorei on an incredible run at Florida This Week.

All right.

Well, thank you for that, Daniel.

The other big story.

I would just echo what Barry said.

It's been an honor and a privilege to share this set with you for all these years.

>> You guys are you guys are taking.

It away from me here.

And, Steve, your other big story.

I want to add the sentiments of my colleagues here.

Rob, it's been great being on this program with you all these years.

We've covered a lot of ground together, and we've watched this state change dramatically politically.

Yeah.

Well, it's wonderful to have you all as panelists.

I'm honored that you would come on to this show when we ask you, and it's a real thrill to see you every time you're on.

So thank you so much.

And now for my news.

This will be my final episode moderating Florida this week.

For the past 23 years and seven months, I've had the good fortune of hosting this program.

Every week we brought together a group of panelists like no other.

Some of the smartest people from the Tampa Bay area and around the state and around the country.

We featured elected officials, reporters, columnists, scholars, consultants, authors, and community activists all coming together for a civil conversation on the issues that matter.

We've even opened the doors to bring in independents and third party guests, union members, religious leaders from many faiths, young people and advocates for senior citizens.

We've had many debates on important topics in all the years of doing the program.

While there have been disagreements on the set over policy.

No one has ever stormed off the program or left the set in anger.

We've shown it's possible to shed more light than heat in these divided times.

I'm stepping down because I'm dealing with a serious health issue cancer.

And I can say that for those of you going through the disease or who have friends or family members in the same situation, my heart goes out to you.

There are a lot of us out there.

I'll still be hosting a program here on WEDU.

It'll be a series of interviews called perspectives, and we'll be telling you more about that soon.

Over the years, we've received many emails about this program, mostly positive.

Telling us how much the show means to you.

The program will continue in its regular time slot with journalist Lissette Campos.

She'll be the new host.

I leave you in her capable hands.

My thanks to all the amazing staff here at WEDU who have made my work here a joy, especially my producer, Spencer Briggs and the station's CEO, Paul Grove.

And my thanks to you for watching Florida this week, and putting your trust in us to have a serious discussion about the most important issues in this wonderful state that we all love.

That's it for us.

Thanks to our panel members this week Rosemary Goudreau O'Hara, Barry Edwards, Daniel Ruth, Jennifer Griffith, and Steve Bousquet.

Send your comments to this program to FTW!

About this program to FTW at wedu.org and from all of us here at WEDU.

Have a great weekend.

[music]