Dear Friend,
We just wrapped up our second week of committee meetings ahead of the 2024 Legislative Session, and I wanted to get you a quick update about.
Remember: The 2024 Legislative Session begins Jan. 9 – that’s less than three months away! More than 200 bills have already been filed and more are surfacing every day.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is running one of the most pathetic presidential campaigns in American history. But that also means he’s likely to try, yet again, using the session to cause as much chaos as he can in hopes of attracting attention away from former President Trump.
So we all need to be ready. And the best time to start paying attention and preparing is right now. One way to begin is to make sure you’re following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube so you can get updates and calls to action in real-time.
The Committee Week 2 recap is below. I hope you’ll find it useful.
Onward,
Rep. Anna V. Eskamani
The Legislature calls a special session to prop up a pathetic presidential candidate
The biggest news of the week came on Friday, when the Republican leadership of the Florida Legislature announced that we will have a four-day special session starting Nov. 6 – all to prop up Gov. Ron DeSantis failing presidential campaign.
There will be a number of issues on the agenda – including additional funding for Hurricane Idalia recovery, hurricane home-hardening grants, security for Jewish Day schools and additional private-school vouchers. But we could handle all of those budget issues immediately through our 14-member Joint Legislative Budget Commission.
We don’t need to wait two weeks – until, conveniently, the week of the next Republican presidential debate – and then call all 160 members of the Legislature back to Tallahassee for a special session that will cost taxpayers more than $70,000 a day.
The only reason we’re doing this special session is that DeSantis is trying to exploit the war in Israel and Gaza for his own personal political benefit. He’s going to use the special session to push largely symbolic and totally ineffective state-level sanctions against Iran – even though federal sanctions are already in place.
As a first generation Iranian-American, I despise the Islamic Republic of Iran. But I also oppose Ron DeSantis wasting Florida taxpayer money on his pathetic presidential campaign.
Pushing Florida toward true carbon neutrality
We just filed our second bill for the 2024 session: House Bill 193, which would transition the state of Florida to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 – and to carbon neutrality by 2051.
Our bill would also ban fracking in Florida – which is ironic since Gov. Ron DeSantis is now claiming he wants to expand fracking in the United States, as he sucks up to fossil-fuel industry billionaires. It would also enhance economic development and help Florida workers find good-paying jobs in the clean-energy industry, through a new Renewable Energy Workforce Development Advisory Committee.
Read more about my bill here: Representative Anna V. Eskamani & Senator Lori Berman Re-File 100% Renewable Energy Goals Bill.
Protecting abortion-seekers in Florida
And in case you missed, we filed our first 2024 bill earlier this month: HB111, which prevent the DeSantis administration or any other authorities in Florida from criminalizing people who end their own pregnancy via self-managed abortion.
Self-managed abortion is the term commonly used to describe when a person chooses to induce their own abortion outside a medical setting. Anyone who decides to end a pregnancy should be able to choose to self-manage an abortion at home or somewhere they feel safe — with the control in their hands, surrounded by the people they love, and with the support they want.
You can read more about our bill here: Rep. Eskamani Files Legislation to Forbid the Criminalization of Abortion Seekers.
We’ll be filing more bills soon, too. As a member of the House, we’re allowed to sponsor up to seven pieces of legislation each session.
Workshops on hurricane recovery…and air taxis
Two of the committees I serve on met this week.
In the House Select Committee on Hurricane Resiliency & Recovery, we received a briefing from the Division of Emergency Management about the continuing recovery efforts from Hurricanes Ian and Nicole, which struck Florida in 2022, and Hurricane Idalia, which hit the Big Bend region of the state in August.
We then had a panel discussion on how local governments are still responding to the storms.
You can watch that meeting here.
And in the House Transportation & Modals Subcommittee, we held a workshop on the advanced air mobility industry – a rapidly developing sector that includes transport options like air taxi services in cities and drone freight delivery.
The industry primarily uses “electronic vertical take-off and landing” aircraft (eVTOLs) that are kind of like small hybrids between helicopters and airplanes. Some of the immediate challenges we face in Florida are incorporating advanced air mobility options into things like local land-use and zoning plans and, of course, ensuring safety.
You can watch that meeting here.
The city of Gainesville is under siege from Tallahassee
I wanted to flag something else for you, because this is part of a really dangerous trend in Tallahassee: Last week, Republican members of the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee ordered a state investigation of the city of Gainesville, without any warning or any rationale reason to do so.
The city had *already* been audited by the state. This week’s meeting was supposed to focus on a presentation from city leaders updating the Legislature on all the procedural changes and spending cuts they had made in response to that review. But instead of listening, Republicans on the committee rammed through a pre-written motion ordering the state’s auditor general to launch a whole new investigation into the city
This comes less than a year after these same Republicans stripped control of the city’s municipal electric company away from the city and gave it to a new board controlled by Gov. Ron DeSantis instead.
We’ve seen Tallahassee Republicans abuse this audit committee in the past – like when U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz got his friends on the audit committee to order an investigation of Orlando International Airport, as part of his attempt to seize control of key contracts there.
And now it seems like somebody is trying to seize power in Gainesville too – perhaps as a plot to force the city to give its utility company to Florida Power & Light.
Read more about it here: State audit committee blindsides Gainesville officials by ordering new investigation (Gainesville Sun)
Medicaid Redetermination
As reported by Florida Politics: Health care advocacy groups continue to call on DeSantis to put the brakes on Florida’s Medicaid redetermination process and to reinstate children disenrolled from the health care safety net program due to procedural reasons. DeSantis received a letter last week signed by 50 organizations requesting the Governor to take a closer look at the state’s unwinding process and to streamline it to make it easier for people to re-enroll in the safety net program for the poor, elderly and disabled. The advocacy groups have also called on the DeSantis administration to take advantage of increased federal flexibilities offered by the Joe Biden administration.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the nation are being unenrolled from their Medicaid coverage following the suspension of the COVID-19 public health emergency earlier this year.
Florida has been one of the most aggressive in this removal process. WUSF’s Sky Lebron spoke with Health News Florida reporter Stephanie Colombini on the unenrollment process, and pushback the state is getting legally, and from advocates. Click here to learn more.
Property Insurance Crisis Continues
The skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums in Florida is leading residents to drop their insurance, consider selling their home, and even move out of the state, according to recent reports. Read more here.
Unfortunately, despite almost every Florida homeowner struggling with property insurance (and more Floridians also struggling with auto insurance) Florida Republicans seem unwilling to address the crisis. However, Commissioner Yaworsky of the Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) still tell lawmakers that his office will have legislative recommendations for the upcoming Session and later described it as “clean up in a couple of areas.” We will wait to see what gets filed, and will continue working on our own policy proposals too.
ICYMI: The Florida Museum of Black History Task Force
A task force has been convened via a bill by Rep. Bruce Antone of Orlando to explore the creation of a Florida Museum of Black History. The task force meetings are open to the public and virtual.
You can learn more and sign up to attend here: https://dos.fl.gov/historical/museums/blackhistorytaskforce/
I cannot stress enough the importance of public engagement on this process, especially when we think about DeSantis’ complete erasure of African American History via AP curriculum and K-12 educational standards.
Where are they now?
Remember Joe Harding? The Republican state representative who sponsored Florida’s awful “Don’t Say LGBTQ+” bill in 2022?
He got sent to prison last week for committing COVID-19 loan fraud.
The week in photos
As always, when we’re in Tallahassee, we make sure to show up for groups fighting for positive change and squeeze in as many meetings as we can. Here are a few photos to give you a sense of what else we were up to this past week in Tallahassee. You can also keep in touch with us on social media, too.
