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“It was the least favorite of my 15 years in the Senate.”
So says State Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Pinellas, one of the deans of the Florida Senate speaking July 20 to a luncheon of the Argus Foundation in Sarasota.
Latvala delivered a litany of criticisms during his remarks — of the 2017 legislative session; legislators in general; how the Legislature operates; the battle over Visit Florida and Enterprise Florida; and, without naming him, House Speaker Richard Corcoran.
“What went wrong,” Latvala says, “started in 1992 when Florida voters approved term limits.”
Term limits have caused legislators to focus on climbing the political power ladder. “Lost in that is trying do what's right for the state,” he says.
“What [term limits] have done is concentrated the power of the process into two people” — the speaker and Senate president. He pointed to the closed-door budget negotiations between Speaker Corcoran and Senate President Joe Negron as explicit evidence.
He says the speaker and president each have three close colleagues in their leadership circles — “and everyone else is irrelevant.”
Latvala told the audience he “wouldn't mind” if the Constitution Revision Commission put a question on the statewide ballot repealing legislative term limits. He says he wants the Legislature to go back to the time when “one guy didn't tell them what to do.”
On Speaker Corcoran's efforts to eliminate the funding for Enterprise Florida and Visit Florida, Latvala argued both organizations had been working. To eliminate Visit Florida, he says, “It was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard.”
Latvala also criticized lawmakers' repeated efforts to weaken local governments' home rule powers. “That was a troubling thing,” he says. And he spoke against the proposed constitutional amendment lawmakers voted to put on the 2018 ballot to increase the homestead exemption — a measure that, if passed, would reduce cities and counties' operating revenues unless they raised taxes. “It's going to raise the millage rate on rentals and commercial properties,” Latvala says.
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