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Coffee Talk (Tampa edition)
Big day
St. Petersburg attorney Jack Day has picked up endorsements from all three of the candidates who failed to make the runoff for a vacant Pinellas-Pasco circuit judgeship he is seeking.
Day, 55, announced Sept. 22 that former opponents Walter L. "Skip" Schafer Jr., William L. Vinson and Michael Berry have thrown their support to him. Day faces Cynthia Newton, an assistant public defender in the circuit, on Nov. 2.
Newton, 37, topped her four male foes in the Aug. 31 primary election with 31% of the ballots. Day trailed in second place with 27%. The order of finish after that went Schafer, Vinson and Berry.
The vanquished trio all had nice things to say about Day in a news release from the primary survivor.
"I think the community would be well served to have a judge with Jack's experience and temperament," says Berry.
"We need to choose a judge with high integrity and top-notch legal skills," Schafer added. "In this race, that means Jack Day."
Vinson contrasted Day with Newton. "Without a doubt, Jack Day has the depth and breadth of experience we need on the circuit bench," Vinson was quoted as saying. "His opponent's limited experience makes the decision an easy one."
Kind of makes you wonder why they ran against Day in the first place, doesn't it?
Newton, who usually works in the drug court, couldn't be reached by Coffee Talk for a reply.
The campaign for the Group 22 seat on the bench, currently held by the retiring Thomas E. Penick Jr., hasn't always been sweetness and the light this year.
Last month, Day was upset after his lawn signs started disappearing. Nothing unusual there. But his 85-year mother also had the tires slashed on her automobile. The vehicle was parked in a handicapped space at the supermarket, adorned with bumper stickers promoting her son's campaign.
Day suggested to the St. Petersburg Times that one of his opponents or their campaigns might be responsible for the mischievous acts. If so, that'd be a little rough for a Pinellas judicial race.
With the new endorsements, a beaming Day appears to have long forgotten those darker days of August. "I had a great deal of respect for these fellow lawyers during the campaign, and I'm deeply appreciative of their support now," Days says in his release.
Day is also doing well in the fundraising department. Through the end of August, Day had collected $38,408 in cash to Newton's $13,650. Day had loaned his campaign $65,000 and Newton $16,161 to hers.
Whom do you believe?
The news from the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation on Sept. 17 sounded great.
Agency Director Susan Pareigis announced that state employment growth in August continued to outpace the nation. Seasonally adjusted nonagricultural employment here grew by 155,400 jobs, or 2.1%, compared to the national rate of 1.3%
Pretty impressive when most of the rest of the news from hurricane-ravaged Florida has been less than upbeat.
Going back another month, the state says the revised unemployment rates for July in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater and the Sarasota-Bradenton metropolitan areas stayed below 4%.
Pareigis highlighted unemployment figures for the whole of Florida in July, the most recent period for which state-by-state comparisons are available. The jobless rate was 4.4%, according to Pareigis, second-to-the-lowest among America's 10 most populated states. Georgia was the lowest at 4.1%
That's certainly welcome news from the administration of Gov. Jeb Bush to his brother, going into the heat of the fall presidential election campaign in an important battleground state.
But Bruce Nissen, a director at the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University in Miami, looked over some of the same raw data and came up with an entirely different analysis on Sept. 20.
The glass is at least half-empty, he thinks.
By Nissen's calculations, Florida produced just 16,600 new jobs in August. One possible explanation for the discrepancy between his digits and the Jeb Bush administration's is that Nissen says he crunched his numbers with help from the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
His lower job-growth rate for Florida isn't enough to keep up with the increase in the state's working-age population, says Nissen.
Nissen says the best way to view employment data is to see how fast jobs have been added since the last economic downtown. In our case, that would be the 2001 recession.
Through that prism, Florida's frequently touted workforce expansion doesn't look so hot. Since the recession ended in November 2001, the population of working-age Floridians has gone up by 5.1%. Job growth over the same 33-month span through August was 4.3%.
That's a deficit of 60,100 jobs, according to Nissen.
"Concerning job growth, this has been the worst recovery in the post-World War II period," Nissen says in a summary of his findings. "Particularly troubling is that the state appears to be losing jobs in higher paying industries and gaining them disproportionately in lower paying industries."
Manufacturing is taking one of the biggest hits in that regard, both Nissen and Pareigis seem to agree.
Florida has given up 59,200 manufacturing jobs, which pay an average of $40,000 a year, since the March 2001 start of the most recent recession. Pareigis conceded that Florida lost 2,900 of those jobs in August alone.
As Nissen put it: "This is not a hopeful sign for the state."
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