Florida
Personhood Florida received a major endorsement this week from the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. The announcement is significant for the Florida affiliate of Personhood USA, which wants to place a “fetal personhood” amendment on the Sunshine State’s 2014 ballot.
Personhood measures, which would define life as beginning at the moment of conception, have cropped up across the country — most notably in Mississippi, where a personhood amendment failed on the state’s November 2011 ballot but might soon receive legislative support.
Democratic Florida House Representative Jeff Clemens of Lake Worth has put forth a referendum he and many Floridians would like to see on the ballot this November for the rest of Florida to vote: should medicinal marijuana be available in our state?
The Libertarian Party of Florida apparently thinks so along with the majority of seniors and a growing number of doctors now “coming out of the closet” on the issue. The measure would allow marijuana to be prescribed to patients in need of its healing benefits
Osceola County commissioners will face a significant pay cut if a citizen ballot initiative led by a group of former politicians succeeds.
County commissioners now make $71,755 a year, but backers of the initiative want their pay cut to about $39,000, aligning their salaries with the county’s median household income.
Lee County has turned down a request by backers of a destination resort casino to place a gambling initiative on the Jan. 31 presidential primary ballot. In a letter to Champion Development, the company that wants to build a billion dollar hotel-shopping-entertainment complex at the Forum alongside I-75, County Attorney Michael Hunt said the deadline had passed to add a referendum.
A proposed state constitutional amendment providing wide-ranging property tax relief has cleared the Florida House. The proposed ballot measure (HJR 381) that passed Monday faces an uncertain fate in the Senate where similar legislation is mired in committee. It would give a tax break to owners of property not covered by the existing Save Our Homes Amendment.
Anti-voter Florida legislators just won’t quit: Senate Bill 2086, which we told you about last week, is moving ever closer to becoming law. Another new version of the bill came out over the weekend containing the same restriction on the right to petition. If passed, Florida voters will have only half as much time to petition their government as they do now.
Florida has one of the youngest petition processes in the nation: citizens gained the right to petition constitutional amendments onto the state ballot in 1967. Florida legislators, like those in most states, don’t like the people having a say at the ballot box, and have worked hard in recent years to make voters’ rights as hard to exercise as possible.
As members of the Florida Senate Rules Subcomittee voted in favor of stripping away state petition rights by placing severe burdens on signature collection, Senator Paula Dockery stood up for the people, saying:
“We’re making it easier for the Legislature and harder for citizens to amend their constitution,” Dockery said. “And I fundamentally disagree with that premise.”
By a 7-5 vote, the committee approved a measure (SB 1504) limiting the ability of courts to knock constitutional amendments sponsored by the Legislature off the ballot, while also imposing new standards on citizen-initiative groups. That proposal would direct the Secretary of State to rewrite ballot summaries for legislative amendments if a court rules the language out of bounds; place new limits on who can gather petitions for citizen-initiative groups and bar petition gatherers from being paid according to the number of signatures they collect.
Voters swept Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez out of office by a stunning margin Tuesday, capping a dramatic collapse for a politician who was given increased authority by voters four years ago to clean up much-maligned county government but was ushered out in the largest recall of a local politician in U.S. history.
It’s the greatest municipal recall in US history, and the most significant recall election since California voters ousted former governor Gray Davis in 2003. An astounding 88 percent of voters said Tuesday that they wanted to recall Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez from office. According to the New York Times, voters were angry that the Republican mayor of America’s ninth most populous county raised taxes and increased the salaries of his aids at the height of the recession.
A recall may be on the horizon for a pair of Miami-Dade officials. A Miami Herald poll suggests that the majority of voters want the county’s mayor and one of its commissioners recalled. According to the poll, 67 percent of voters surveyed want Mayor Carlos Alvarez recalled, 18 percent say he should keep his job, while 15 percent are undecided.
Florida, a Peninsula dubbed the Sunshine State, a state known for its agriculture along with its lengthy growing season, does not have a stated commitment to renewable energy. A state known for its low taxes and therefore an ideal place for corporations and startups to locate is not even in the game with regard to clean tech innovation and deployment which are the jobs and economy of the 21st century.
The group trying to prevent private development on the Ocean Strand property with a ballot initiative is taking their fight to a judge. The group, Keep Your Boca Beaches Public, has been collecting signatures to get an initiative on the ballot for the March municipal election that would prevent private development of city or Beach and Parks District property between the Intracoastal and the Atlantic Ocean.
Members of Keep Your Boca Beaches Public, the group seeking to bar private development at Ocean Strand have hit a snag with their proposed ballot initiatives. The measures are intended to bar private development on city and greater Boca Raton Parks District land between the Intracoastal and the beach, but Boca Raton’s city attorney says the question is unconstitutional because the language would ask the city to regulate the parks district.