RESTORING... PAGE 2 (.pdf page 10)

P5, P6 - Why should corporations that aren't reinvesting in their communities pay less in tax than the average American? A revision of the tax code should incentives corporations to pay their taxes and partner with local and state governments to invest in their communities at home. American corporations often bend to the requirements of foreign governments to have access to those consumers, yet at home, because of (come up with a catchy term for weak regulation) at home, they often take advantage of American consumers with few consequences.

P7, P8, P9 - These paragraphs show that the Republicans are the party of big business with little to know concern for how our own or or global partners' business practices impact regular people. And, it's funny to note that Trumpito had Mike Pompeo on a whirlwind trade-related tour in HIS lame duck period - a tactic that bypassed Congress altogether.

RESTORING... PAGE 2 (.pdf page 10)

P1 - This is about the wealth tax, yet it doesn't discuss the FACT that middle and working-class Americans pay a higher % of their earnings in taxes compared to the wealthiest Americans and corporations (need source).

P3, P4 - This language goes after activists, notions of class; they're still invoking the Communist boogie man.

RESTORING... PAGE 1 (.pdf page 9)

P5 - What the RNC lables "American diminishment" is actually "American repositioning" in a deeply connected, global world.

P6 - Taxes are moral yet, under Republicans, tax dollars are not distributed to equally serve ALL Americans.

P7 - I actually agree with them on this - the tax code needs serious, ground-up revisioning and revision.

RESTORING... PAGE 1 (.pdf page 9)

P1 - This is the 2016 Platform, so... Trumpito inherited a revitalized economy with strong jobs growth (need source).

P2 - Government can support the conditions necessary for ALL Americans to proper. Inequality is a THREAT to economic stability and growth (need reference). How is it possible to de-regulate at home but have strong global leadership abroad?

P3 - This platform IGNORES the roots of the 2008 economic crisis under a two-term Republican President (GWB).

P4 - What we've seen in the last 20 years with "pro-growth" Republican tax codes is that the wealthiest corporations DO NOT pass gains on to workers but keep them for their executives, that those corporations are, in fact, terrible corporate citizens (examples).

The Obama-Biden and now the Biden-Harris Administrations HAD/HAVE policies; the RNC/Trumpito have none beyond tax cuts for the rich...

They DID NOT change or amend their 2016 platform - the RNC supports Trumpito's LACK of governance and NEGLECT of the needs of everyday people.

This is interesting: it explains the disconnect between what a guy like McConnell says (denounce Trumpito) and does (use Trumpito to win elections, pass tax cuts, fill the courts w/ Republican judges). That they spell it out is interesting, too...

Democrats have an opportunity here: There SHOULD be a connection between policy priorities and political rhetoric - true transparency.

Miami Herald November 15, 2020: Florida legislators meet for the first time in eight months on Tuesday to swear in newly elected lawmakers, but legislators will keep their distance from one another, in an attempt to stave off the coronavirus — and from any talk of addressing the economic and health-related fallout from it.

The one-day legislative session is required by the state Constitution “on the fourteenth day following each general election...for the exclusive purpose of organization and selection of officers” and it is expected to last just two hours.

In some years, when circumstances have warranted it, legislators have expanded the agenda of the organization session to either conduct committee hearings and begin hearing legislation or they have called a special session to address emergency issues after a hurricane or budget crisis.

But, after months of avoiding any public association with the coronavirus during a bitter election cycle, the Republican-led House and Senate have no plans to elevate the issue now.

Incoming House Speaker Chris Sprowls, a Palm Harbor Republican, and Senate President Wilton Simpson, a Trilby Republican, have both announced that committee meetings will not resume until January at the earliest as lawmakers prepare for the annual two-month legislative session that begins March 2.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel September 9, 2020: The Broward Teachers Union has reached a tentative agreement with the School Board for raises that use both referendum dollars approved by county voters in 2018 and a new pot of money approved by the state Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis to boost the minimum teacher salary to $47,500.

...

(M)ost experienced teachers will get between $500 and $2,700 extra. They’ll also get a 1.3% cost-of-living increase.

The lowest-paid teachers will all be brought up to at least $47,500, but their referendum supplement will drop from $2,500 to only $500. A teacher who earned a $44,500 base salary last year received $47,000 after the supplement. This year that same teacher would make $48,000.

The supplement is considered more like a bonus than a permanent raise because it could go away in 2022, unless county voters agree to renew it.

Broward Teachers Union officials say they wanted to help compensate teachers who didn’t benefit from the minimum salary legislation, so they bargained for them to get more of the referendum money.

Associated Press November 9, 2020: A deluge of rain from Tropical Storm Eta caused flooding Monday across South Florida’s most densely populated urban areas, stranding cars, flooding businesses, and swamping entire neighborhoods with fast-rising water that had no place to drain.

...

“Never seen this, never, not this deep,” said Anthony Lyas, who has lived in his now-waterlogged Fort Lauderdale neighborhood since 1996. He described hearing water and debris slamming against his shuttered home overnight.

...

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis called it a 100-year rain event.

“Once the ground becomes saturated, there’s really no place for the water to go,” Trantalis said. “It’s not like a major hurricane. It’s more of a rain event, and we’re just doing our best to ensure that the people in our community are being protected.”

City officials dispatched some 24 tanker trucks with giant vacuums to soak up water from the past few weeks. Some older neighborhoods simply do not have any drainage. The city also passed out 6,000 sandbags to worried residents over the weekend, but water seeped into homes and stranded cars in parking lots and along roadways.

State of Florida Long-Range Financial Outlook Draft Fall 2020 Report: Recognizing the heightened risk to the forecast due to the pandemic-induced economic effects on Florida’s tourism-sensitive economy, the Revenue Estimating Conference made substantial adjustments to the forecast adopted in January 2020. Anticipated revenues were revised downward by $3.4 billion in Fiscal Year 2020-21 and by $2.0 billion in Fiscal Year 2021-22, for a two-year combined decrease of $5.4 billion. This change reflects an overall 9.9 percent loss in Fiscal Year 2020-21 and a 5.6 percent loss in Fiscal Year 2021-22 from the prior estimates.

By far the largest adjustment in the new forecast relates to Sales Tax. The anticipated loss to General Revenue is $2.84 billion in Fiscal Year 2020-21 and $1.25 billion in Fiscal Year 2021-22, with about one-half of the loss each year attributed to severely dampened sales in the Tourism & Recreation sector. Even though a significant part of the loss arises from a reduction in the number of out-of-state tourists, this category also includes sales to Florida residents at restaurants, local attractions and other leisure-based activities that have also been negatively affected by the pandemic. The record-breaking increase in the savings rate that has developed since the beginning of the outbreak is also a factor since it comes at the expense of consumption.

Palm Beach Post November 11, 2020: Canadian tourists will not be coming down to Palm Beach County this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, and that spells bad news for businesses that rely on the dollars these winter visitors spend on everything from restaurants to real estate.

The land border between the United States and Canada remains closed for all non-emergency travel.

Air travel is permitted, but many Canadian travelers are wary of getting on an airplane. Among them is Mitchell Stein of Montreal. Since Stein was a child, he said he has been making the trek to South Florida during winters.

...

"It's a very awkward year. It feels strange we are not going down," Stein said. But among his group of friends who travel south each year, "no one is going down." The reason?

The response by the United States, and Florida, to the pandemic.

"The perception we have is that Florida is like the Wild West right now, and people are walking around without masks," Stein said.

He's not entirely wrong. Although Palm Beach County requires that masks be worn in public spaces where social distancing isn't possible, as well as inside businesses, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently prevented local governments from fining individuals who don't wear masks.

...

But even if he were to arrive safely in South Florida, Stein is worried about something else: Being away from the socialized health-care system in Canada. "The scary aspect, for a Canadian, is getting sick when you're down there," Stein said. "When you get sick in the United States, the cost is exorbitant."

South Florida Sun-Sentinel January 8, 2019: Desmond Meade spent years traveling to every corner of Florida gathering petition signatures to restore voting rights to former felons. On Tuesday, all he had to do to register to vote for the first time in decades was walk a few steps into the Orange County elections office.

“One hundred and fifty years of disenfranchisement, and this moment here marks the end of a system that excludes so many people for a lifetime,” Meade said, referring to the years after the Civil War when felons were first barred from voting during Reconstruction. “This is a moment for democracy.”

The right to vote was restored to more than 1.4 million former felons across the state Tuesday thanks to Amendment 4’s victory at the ballot box in November, leading to emotional scenes as tears flowed, confetti was thrown and U.S. flags were waved.

Palm Beach Post October 21, 2020: The DeSantis administration just won’t quit working to suppress the votes of former felons seeking to be returning citizens.

Last week, the state Division of Elections announced a push to remove from the voting rolls thousands of ex-felons who have outstanding court debts.

They did this, despite knowing there can be no such purge before Election Day, Nov. 3. That’s because, under state law, voters have 30 days to respond to a notification that they might be ineligible to vote. And it wasn’t until Oct. 15, just three weeks before Election Day, that state Elections Director Maria Matthews told county elections supervisors about her intentions.

2020-2021 Veto List: Gulf Coast State College - Construct STEM Building (Replace Building 12) - Panama City $2,000,000.00 cut

Florida International University - Targeted STEM Initiatives (Senate Form 1833) $2,000,000.00 cut

2020-2021 Veto List: Line Item 1635 A (pages 9 -12) cut

Appropriations Bills Fiscal Year 2020-2021: 1635 A = GRANTS AND AIDS TO LOCAL GOVERNMENTS AND NONSTATE ENTITIES - FIXED CAPITAL OUTLAY GRANTS AND AIDS - WATER PROJECTS FROM GENERAL REVENUE FUND

NBC News October 18, 2020: Paige, a middle school teacher in central Florida who did not want her full name used to protect her job, said teachers at her school received less than a week’s notice that they would be teaching in the classroom and online concurrently. They received no training on platforms or logistics, she said.

Since the beginning of the year, she has struggled with internet accessibility and technical glitches.

“We need greater bandwidth," she said. "I have five kids turn on the camera and suddenly nothing is working in real time anymore. We need more devices."

She said teachers doing double duty should receive improved products, technology training and professional guidance and mentorship. Other teachers said having a day or even half a day for planning would help.

McCarthy, the educational psychologist, said the best support teachers can get when demands are high are the resources to deal with the challenges.

"What's happening right now is lack of resources mixed with a lot of uncertainty," he said, "and that is a toxic blend."

Inside Higher Ed October 28, 2020: The University of South Florida shocked faculty members with its recent decision to close its College of Education, which has a large undergraduate population, and retain only a graduate program... Experts say that education programs -- long devalued on and off many campuses -- are under even greater threat in an era of COVID-19-related budget cuts...

At South Florida, education professors knew that cuts were coming, as the university previously announced that it needed to slash its budget by some $36.7 million this fiscal year: the State University System of Florida asked all universities to prepare plans for an 8.5 percent state funding cut, and a second round of cuts is expected next year. But these professors had no idea that the entire college would be scrapped until Judith A. Ponticell, interim dean of education, shared the news with them in an email this month.

The Hechinger Report November 9, 2020: Florida, where (Audrey) Green teaches, is one of the states that provides teachers with a pot of money to be reimbursed for supplies. But technology isn’t an allowable expense because the law excludes equipment.

Green is also a technology liaison at Silver Trail Middle School, so she was able to think of solutions to remote teaching issues that may trip up a less tech-savvy educator. “I’m a MacGyver,” she said. “I can cook you an entire meal with an old whisk.”

And yet even for Green, the start of the school year brought seemingly endless obstacles.

Consider, for instance, the seemingly mundane task of ensuring the 35 to 40 students in the virtual room could hear and speak during class. Most cell phones these days don’t come with headphone jacks, so many students only had wireless ear buds at their disposal, but needed plug-in headphones for their laptop school computers. Some students were unable to procure those. Green got a tablet to use on the side so she can chat with those students via text.

2020-2021 Veto List: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University - Brooksville Agricultural and Environmental Research Station (HB 2783) (Senate Form 1465) $200,000.00 cut

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University - Mandarin Institute (HB 4535) (Senate Form 1801) $200,000.00 cut

2020-2021 Veto List: Edward Waters College - Online Degree Program Service Provider (HB 4331) (Senate Form 1674) $100,000.00 cut

2020-2021 Veto List: Florida Memorial University - Technology Upgrades $200,000.00 cut

Florida Memorial University - Training for the Future of Aerospace (HB 3661) (Senate Form 2415) $500,000.00 cut

2020-2021 Veto List: Bethune-Cookman University - Small, Women and Minority-Owned Businesses $75,000.00 cut

Orlando Sentinel October 24, 2020:

Ally Schneider, a member of the board that oversees Florida’s 12 public universities, said Board of Governors staff have told her the state is reluctant to waive SAT/ACT requirement this year because students who want to qualify for the scholarships must still submit scores.

“It’s so tied up in the fabric of Florida higher education that people are hesitant to not require test scores for admission when it’s required for Bright Futures,” said Schneider, also the student government president at the University of North Florida who stressed she wasn’t speaking on behalf of other members of the board.

More than 110,000 students relied on Bright Futures scholarships last year, a large share of them attending public universities.

None of the 15 other members of the Board of Governors, most of whom are appointed by the governor, would answer emailed questions about why they refused to lift the standardized test rule. One directed a reporter to Board Chair Syd Kitson and Chancellor Marshall Criser. Neither responded to requests for comment.

United States Census Bureau May 11, 2020: The amount spent per pupil for public elementary and secondary education (pre-K through 12th grade) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia increased by 3.4% to $12,612 per pupil during the 2018 fiscal year, compared to $12,201 per pupil in 2017, according to new tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Florida is 44th in K-12 per-student public school funding.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel October 1, 2020: Broward’s reopening dates have gone through numerous changes in the past two weeks. Last week, (Superintendent) Runcie said he was ready to start opening schools on Oct. 5 and 12, but the School Board changed the dates to Oct. 14 and 20 after hearing complaints from employees and some parents that schools weren’t safe enough to return.

A few days later, (Education Commissioner) Corcoran wrote to the district that he had “grave concerns” that Broward was taking too long and saying he was rejecting the plan, prompting Runcie to recommend Oct. 6.

Chief Financial Officer Judith Marte said she feared that if the district didn’t adhere to Corcoran’s wishes, its schools would potentially lose $315 million on a “budget that’s already disgustingly low." That could mean deep cuts to academics, operations and the loss of about 4,300 jobs, she said.

2020-2021 Veto List

Signed into law on Monday, June 29, 2020 by Governor Ron DeSantis

State of Florida Long-Range Financial Outlook Draft Fall 2020 Report: Florida’s tourism-sensitive economy is particularly vulnerable to the longer-term effects of the pandemic. Previous economic studies of disease outbreaks have shown that it can take as much as twelve to fifteen months after the outbreak ends for tourism to return to pre-disease levels. The magnitude of this event is greater. The total number of tourists declined -68.1 percent from the prior year in the second quarter of 2020. Coupled with the losses from the first quarter, the projected annual loss for Fiscal Year 2019-20 was -18.0 percent.

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy October 2018: According to ITEP’s Tax Inequality Index, which measures the impact of each state’s tax system on income inequality, Florida has the 3rd most unfair state and local tax system in the country. Incomes are more unequal in Florida after state and local taxes are collected than before.

2019-2020: Florida’s per capita state tax burden of $1,822 is the second lowest among all states.

2019-2020: 755 positions "reduced".

Bay News 9 June 25, 2020: The bill, HB 641, provides $500 million for teacher pay raises, and it can’t be used for anything else by school districts — $400 million of that will go to raise starting teacher salaries across the state.

Lawmakers told Spectrum News that should raise the average teacher salary in Florida to $46,500, a big bump for most starting teachers.

But there’s only $100 million for the tens of thousands of veteran teachers who won’t already get their salaries raised, which teachers feel like won’t go far enough...

“So now someone with six years makes the same as someone with zero years experience? That seems a little surreal that that would be the case,” (JoAnna) Marino said.

The Urban Institute March 2003: Florida is required to keep at least 5 percent of yearly appropriations as reserves, but if used, the fund must be repaid to reach 5 percent of appropriations within five years.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel November 13, 2020: Florida, with a COVID-19 positivity rate of 7.95%, logged 6,933 COVID-19 cases and 74 deaths from COVID-19. OR ...6,933 more people were infected with COVID-19. That’s the most since Aug. 12...

The state’s positivity rates, including those in South Florida, also are beginning to mirror trends not seen since August.

The state on Friday said the positivity rate was 7.95%, for new cases only, up from 7.35% reported on Thursday.

The last time the positivity rate, which reached a recent high of 8.29% on Nov. 6, trended that high was in early August. Infectious disease specialists warn that a rate over 5% shows the virus is not under control.

With the official data released Friday, Florida has confirmed 870,552 total cases of COVID-19.

The state reported another 74 deaths from the virus.

Tampa Bay Times August 14, 2020: With a presidential election looming, Florida’s Republican governor and Republican-led legislative leadership have made a calculated decision not to address the budget shortfall before Nov. 3, avoiding a difficult debate that could amplify the state’s uncertain economy as voters go to the polls.

“Certainly, we’ll be able get to the end of the calendar year without doing any type of special session,’' said Gov. Ron DeSantis in Sarasota Friday, at a round table he held to discuss pandemic-related mental health issues.

What community projects? George Snow and...?

Is this a low number for a city this size? Do 'we', the city, care?

What happened to 39 people between 2017 and now?

Are these folks stakeholders? What do they think?

READ ME and figure out why this feels like... an obligation? An afterthought? Who are the two employees? Why did their salaries go down?

Human Service = 1,266,100 from Block Grant for Community Development

Human Services = 1,082,400 for Housing

And where is the money going?

Yikes! And where is the money coming from?

Pretty clear-cut.

This is not what I thought.

Nothing here...? Surprise, surprise.

And then COVID-19 happened.

Sounds like MORE development rather that protecting undeveloped land.

Timeline? Seems to me this could take WAY longer than 5 years. Probably 10 or 15 given what's there.

What's this?

Like...

What does this mean? What's coming down the pipe?

Whoa.

Pragmatic.

Are existing Boca companies... sophisticated or robust enough?

I get this as opposed to other industries. Not Silicon Valley or Alley, more like Silicon Way...

I support this.

This is what sets the city apart from its neighbors to the north and south.

A lot? A little? Spent where? On what?

Must know more...

A lot? A little? Where spent? On what?

What is this?

This. How do they do this? Who are stakeholders?

This is very clear. I'm interested in the community partnerships and the working definitions of "vibrant" and "sustainable".

Who set the goals?

Whose perspective?