Why I Am Running

Florida’s property-insurance market was genuinely broken, and recent reforms did stabilize it — rates slowed, new carriers entered, and far fewer families are stuck with the state insurer of last resort. I will not pretend otherwise. But stability is not the same as affordability. Families here pay among the highest premiums in the country to insure their homes, with more than half of a typical premium going to hurricane coverage alone. And policyholders have spent years paying a surcharge on every bill for the unpaid claims left behind by the companies that collapsed — even as Tallahassee takes credit for rate cuts.

• Reform the state insurance framework so that families hit by predictable losses can actually recover, rather than being left with denied claims and added fees.
• Demand transparency and fairness in how the cost of a company’s collapse ends up on your bill.
• Treat insurance as the cost-of-living emergency it is for this district, where the insurance bill is as urgent as the rent or the mortgage.

Florida already has one of the most regressive tax systems in the nation: it takes a far larger share of a working family’s income than of a wealthy household’s. As proposals move to cut homestead property taxes, we must raise the objection no one is raising on behalf of the majority of this district who rent: if the exemption only reaches homeowners but the lost revenue is replaced by a higher sales tax, you do not get relief — you get the bill twice: in your rent and in everything you buy.

• Insist that any tax change be measured by its effect on renters and working families, not only on homestead owners.
• Oppose shifting the cost of tax cuts onto regressive sales taxes that fall hardest on those who can least afford them.
• Protect funding for the local services — first responders, parks, road maintenance — that a sudden revenue hole would put at risk.

I will not insult you by pretending a state senator can lower the price of groceries or gas — those are set by national and global forces no one in Tallahassee controls, and any candidate who claims otherwise is not being straight with you. Your electric bill is different. Part of it is fuel and storm recovery, which the state does not set and the company cannot mark up. But part of it is a base rate and a guaranteed company profit that a state commission approves — and that guaranteed profit is among the highest granted to any utility in the country. The state’s own consumer advocate has put the cost of it in the hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from customers’ bills. The commission that approved it is not even required by law to consider whether families can afford the result.

• Fight for legislation that requires the utility commission to weigh affordability for families — something current law does not require it to do.
• Be honest about the limits: a senator cannot set a rate or order a bill lowered, but a senator votes on who sits on that commission and on the laws that bind it.
• Hold the state accountable only for what it controls — the base rate, the guaranteed profit, and the rules — while telling the truth about the fuel and storm costs it does not.
• Make sure a coming driver of your bill — the enormous power and water demands of new data centers — is paid by the companies that profit from them: no public subsidies, no tax exemptions, and no stranded costs left on the ratepayer when a site shuts down.

A state senator cannot raise a single street above the water — that is the work of our cities, and they are doing it. But the State of Florida writes the insurance rules that decide whether a family whose home floods can recover, and the state funds the grant programs — what Tallahassee calls “resilience” — that pay for the pumps, drainage, and seawalls that help communities adapt. Those are decisions a state senator votes on.

• Fight every year to fund the state’s flood-protection grants and to bring those dollars home to District 36’s communities.
• Reform flood and property-insurance rules so families whose homes flood are not left to absorb the loss alone.
• Make sure the state shows up as a partner to the communities already doing the hard work of adaptation.
• Repeal the law that deleted “climate change” from most of Florida’s statutes. A state cannot plan for a risk it will not name — and the market prices that denial into your premium.

After the Surfside collapse took ninety-eight lives, the state did the right thing: it required older buildings to be inspected and to fund the repairs they had long deferred. No one should undo that. But the state ordered the repairs and built no way to help families pay for them — and now, as those costs come due, the only help for an owner facing a five- or six-figure assessment is a county loan they have to repay. Tallahassee mandated the cost and handed people a loan application.

• Build the state assessment-relief fund that does not exist, so families are not forced to sell homes they have lived in for decades to comply with a safety law.
• Keep faith with the safety mandate while insisting the state share the cost of a decision it made.
• Be honest about what these assessments are: bills that were always coming, which the law brought into the open — and which families should not have to shoulder alone.

Here is something Tallahassee does not advertise. There are federal dollars — our own tax dollars — available to cover working people in this community who fall in the gap: earning too much to qualify for help and too little to afford a plan. The state turned that money down. So those dollars go to other states — and the cost of caring for the uninsured comes back to us anyway, in the county sales tax and property tax that keep our safety-net hospital open. We pay our federal taxes and watch the help go elsewhere; then we pay again, locally, to cover the gap here at home. This is arithmetic, not ideology: we pay twice — once to Washington, once to the county — and get nothing back for it.

• Fight to bring our own federal dollars home to cover working families in the coverage gap, rather than sending those dollars to other states.
• Be straight about the limits: when Washington let health-insurance subsidies lapse, premiums jumped here higher than almost anywhere — and a state senator cannot put a federal subsidy back. I will say so plainly, and fight for the state-level steps that could cushion it.
• Treat the cost of the uninsured as what it is — a charge already sitting on your county taxes, whether or not anyone admits it.

By the counts kept by Florida’s cities and counties, the Legislature has filed dozens of bills each session restricting the authority of local governments — on wages, on scheduling, on rent, on housing, even on protecting outdoor workers from the heat — and more. Most fail; but the Legislature files them again and again, session after session, year after year, and the ones that pass do real damage, including penalties aimed at the local officials who dare to cross Tallahassee. This is not a complaint about any single law. It is a pattern: a steady transfer of self-government to the capital.

• Defend the constitutional home-rule authority of cities and counties against the relentless tide of preemption.
• Trust the officials closest to you — the ones whose offices you can walk into — to address the problems they know best.
• Be honest that the trend is not absolute: when the state has wisely left decisions in local hands, that judgment deserves to be defended and extended, not reversed.

Florida’s housing crisis is real, and the state’s signature housing law has produced some new homes and modestly narrowed the shortage. But it overrode local communities’ own planning to do so, and it has delivered only a small fraction of the housing the state needs. We can do better than seizing local control in exchange for a fraction of the fix.

• Support affordable-housing approaches that give communities a real say in what gets built in them.
• Hold large state housing programs accountable for results measured in homes families can actually afford.

On flood and stormwater resilience, the state has so far left local governments the authority to act — which is why our cities have been able to write their own stronger building standards and protect their neighborhoods. That local authority is one of the few we still hold, and it is worth guarding.

• Protect local governments’ power to set stronger flood and storm-resistance standards from any future preemption.
• Defend Florida’s storm-resistant building standards from being weakened or repealed, and back the communities planning seriously for sea-level rise.

The same instinct that says the capital should not overrule your city says it should not reach into your home. Decisions about your family, your faith, and your private life belong to you — not to Tallahassee. Many of the families who built this district know from their own histories exactly what it costs when a government decides it may dictate who people are and how they must live. A government that respects its limits stays out of the places that were never its business.

• Defend the principle that the state has no place legislating your private life, your family, or your conscience.
• Protect the separation of church and state — your right to practice your faith, or not, free of government pressure either way.
• Keep the focus of state power where it belongs: on the costs and decisions that are actually the state’s job, not on policing private life.

Look honestly at what a generation of unchecked power has built. When the insurance market broke, the rescue went to the companies, and a surcharge went onto your bill. As tax changes advance, working families are being asked to pay for tax cuts they may never receive. And each time a community closest to you tries to act on your behalf, it is overruled or punished for crossing Tallahassee. None of this is an accident. It is what power that answers to no one does — it protects itself, and it sends the invoice to everyone else.

Consider the commission that sets the rules behind your power bill. The last time it denied the largest utility a rate increase was in 2010; the commissioners who cast that vote were denied reconfirmation and off the commission within months; and no commission has denied that company an increase in the years since. The people who said no were replaced, and the decisions have run one direction ever since. You can draw your own conclusion about who such a body answers to.

• Provide the check and balance that one-party supermajority control has erased — a vote and a voice that answer to this district, not to the capital.
• Insist on transparency and real oversight of what state decisions cost working families.
• Measure every bill by a single test: does this serve the people of District 36, or the powerful interests closest to power?

Florida now spends billions of public dollars on what the state calls private-school scholarships — vouchers, in plain terms — and on charter schools, and there is good in that record — families have used scholarships and their children have gone on to college, and competition has pushed some public schools to improve. I will not take that away. But the state has arranged the system so that the most basic accountability questions cannot be answered. Students who take scholarship money to attend private schools are not required to take the same statewide test that public schools are graded on, so no one can say whether the public is getting its money’s worth. Charter schools are public, and their students take the same test — but when one closes, as hundreds have already, the state does not track why, or what happened to the students. And when public dollars are paid out as rent and fees to private operators, that money does not come back to the public school system if the charter school fails. Public money should be traceable. Right now, by the state’s own design, it is not.

• Require that public dollars spent on scholarships and charter schools be measured by results the public can actually see.
• Demand that the state track school closures, and account for the students and the public funds when a school fails.
• Insist on transparency wherever public money flows to private operators, including the leases and management fees that ordinary families never get to see.

This district was built in large part by families who know, from their own histories, exactly what it means when power runs only to the center and stops answering to the people. That instinct — that government should be close, accountable, and answerable — is not partisan. It is the oldest American idea there is. It is the idea I will carry to Tallahassee.