2010 Year In Review In State Government

January 1, 2011

Gov. Charlie Crist started 2010 as a Republican, and the favorite to be the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate.

He ended 2010 as an independent, and about to join the 12 percent of Floridians who are unemployed as his four-year term as governor ends.

That was not the only thing that drastically changed in 2010 in Florida state government. With Crist ensured to be leaving office when the year came to a close and the entire Cabinet set to turn over too, change was the overriding theme of 2010.

Not many people outside of the health care sector knew who Rick Scott was when the clock struck midnight last New Year’s Eve. Next week, Scott will become the 45th governor of Florida. Similarly, Attorney General Bill McCollum was sure to be the Republican to taking on Democrat Alex Sink. Except, he wasn’t.

Sink was supposed to be the national Democrats’ one bright spot on what everyone saw shaping up to be a GOP tsunami this election cycle. But those 67,000 votes the Sink camp was looking for desperately on Election Night never came in from Palm Beach County, which was again at the center of a razor-thin contest in Florida.

Elsewhere, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Kendrick Meek was not supposed to be able to beat Jeff Greene in his party’s primary – he did – and he was not supposed to be able to overcome Crist siphoning Democratic votes in their fractious three-way race with Marco Rubio – he didn’t.

When Election Night 2010 was all said and done, Florida had an all-new – and an all-Republican – Cabinet. Former Senate President Jeff Atwater defeated former state Rep. Lorrane Ausley to replace Sink as CFO, leaving Democrats on the outside looking in. Ausley humorously biked to Atwater’s house to accuse him of ducking debates, but the charge – like her campaign – never really got rolling.

She also famously featured a spray-painted Old Capitol in her lone campaign commercial, but with Atwater being joined next year by Republicans Pam Bondi and Adam Putnam on the Cabinet, Democrats might consider tagging the place for real in 2011.

Speaking of unexpected political occurrences, Jim Greer was out as Republican Party of Florida chairman before Baby New Year 2010 was a week old. He was replaced by a legislative veteran in Sen. John Thrasher, who was brought in to calm things down as Greer was arrested and charged with steering party money to a company he set up with former RPOF executive director Delmar Johnson.

There was also probably a big change in Greer’s personal relationship with Johnson when he learned that his partner-in-alleged-crime had been working with investigators to catch him.

“Kiss my godson for me,” Johnson said as a farewell to Greer on a call released in May as he cooperated with an investigation targeting his boss and godson’s father.

If he’d only known the call was being recorded and Johnson had turned on him, Greer might have been the one telling Johnson to kiss something.

Last year’s scandal-plagued Republican, former House Speaker Ray Sansom, punctuated his fall from power this year by retiring from the Florida House all together just days before the beginning of the 2010 legislative session. He may be still muttering about the St. Petersburg Times, which drove the story that brought about his demise.

There was change on the state’s utility regulation panel as well. Five Public Service Commissioners voted against rate increases for the state’s largest power company – and now, four of them are no longer on the PSC. Commissioners David Klement and Benjamin Stevens were voted off the panel just months after joining – Stevens started out in the beginning of 2010. Later in the year, former PSC Chairwoman Nancy Argenziano and Commissioner Nathan Skop were denied second terms – in fact they didn’t even get interviews.

And at least one high-profile state agency head, Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Mike Sole, saw the changes coming at the end of the year and made plans for 2011 early. For Sole, that meant taking a much-better paying job with Florida Power & Light.

A SLICK SUMMER

Sole may have been ready for a change of pace in part because the situation in the Florida Gulf Coast was hard to get a handle on in the wake of a massive BP oil spill.

Hardly anyone in officially Tallahassee noticed when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded with days to go in a free-wheeling 2010 legislative session. But as soon as they adjourned Sine Die – with no handkerchief ceremony lest Republican leaders be seen with their then newly-former Republican governor – boy, did they notice the oil.

State government focused on the spill, the clean-up effort and the effect it all might have on the tourism-dependent Florida Panhandle all summer, and Sole was at the center of it.

The spill was finally contained in August, though the battles over the claims process continued the rest of the year – and likely will for years to come. BP set aside $20 billion to help the Panhandle recover, but the administrator, Ken Feinberg, likely wasn’t on anyone in Florida’s Christmas list this year. He came under fire from Crist, McCollum and Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, who went after Feinberg at times harder than she targeted Scott.

In the process, a proposal to allow drilling in Florida waters that seemed destined for the fast track with support from new House Speaker Dean Cannon and Senate President Mike Haridopolos was killed dead. To make it official – and Republicans argued to capitalize on the spill politically – Crist called a special session this summer to consider putting a ban on drilling in the state constitution.

Reluctantly, lawmakers came back to Tallahassee, though they didn’t stay long and didn’t do much. The session was over in the House less than an hour after it started, and with no House to send anything to, the Senate called it quits too.

Crist called them the “do-nothing Legislature,” and pledged like Harry Truman to “give them hell for it.” But needing Democratic votes to try to catch up with Rubio, the newly-independent Crist spent most of the fall talking about things like protecting abortion rights, so it was more like Crist was giving them heck.

SB DEEP SIXED

If there was one lynchpin in Gov. Crist’s decision to run for the U.S. Senate without a party affiliation, it may have been the day he vetoed a bill to change the way teachers are paid.

By vetoing the bill to end teacher tenure and create merit pay for educators that was favored by almost every Republican in the Legislature – and former Gov. Jeb Bush – Crist may as well have declared his Independence Day. The GOP never forgave Crist for the veto, and two weeks later, he was an independent.

The writing was clearly on the wall with SB 6, as the bill came to be widely-known.

Crist spent most of the spring publicly waffling on the legislation, and further infuriating the ruling Republicans in Tallahassee, he compared the way the bill moved through the Legislature to Congressional Democrats’ push to pass a national health care bill, which has riled the GOP.

That of course didn’t sit well with what very quickly became Crist’s (Grand) Old Party. “He’s got an `R’ (on the) back of his name right now. (But) you’d have to ask him if he believes he’s following the principles of the Republican Party,” Florida GOP Chairman and State Sen. John Thrasher said at the time.

Many of the Republicans in the Legislature who endorsed Crist when he looked unbeatable in the primary responded to the veto by taking back their support. Among them was now House Speaker Cannon, who said immediately after the veto that it would be difficult to continue supporting Crist’s Senate campaign. His attempt to do so lasted only a few hours, because the same day, Cannon wrote Crist a letter saying sayonara.

More than any other piece of legislation in 2010, SB 6 shaped the year where more things changed than things stayed the same.

CENTER STAGE – ERR, COURT

One of the biggest stories in national politics this year was Congress passing – and President Barack Obama – signing a federal health care law this spring in Washington, D.C. By fall, the fight over health care was hardly over – and it had moved to Florida.

Democrats – those that weren’t disappointed the plan didn’t have a so-called “public option” anyway – were dithyrambic, but Attorney General Bill McCollum was not at all impressed. He showed it by filing a suit against the plan minutes after Obama signed it, touching off a legal fight everyone expects to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but with the first rounds taking place in Florida.

There were also lawsuits filed in Michigan and Virginia, but McCollum’s Florida measure was joined by 20 other states, as well as the National Federation of Independent Business and two Florida residents who said they didn’t have insurance and didn’t want it.

The states claim that the sweeping reform violates states’ rights in the U.S. Constitution and will force massive new spending on hard-pressed state governments. Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice counter that Congress has always had broad taxation powers, and has been given the authority to regulate the parameters of the Medicaid program and who qualifies for coverage.

The judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, appeared repeatedly this year to be sympathetic to arguments being put forth by Florida and the other states, at one point invoking the 1800’s Whiskey Rebellion in comments that likely made federal lawyers want a stiff drink.

“We had the Whiskey Rebellion because people rebelled against having to pay taxes for the whiskey that they made. The government never made people buy whiskey,” Vinson said.

STORY OF THE YEAR: The fall of Charlie Crist. The rise of Rick Scott. A one-time political superstar was clearly eclipsed by a newfound Sunshine State supernova, and everywhere around the Florida political landscape, dominoes fell.

QUOTE OF THE YEAR: “Things change,” Crist, explaining why he was on the verge of abandoning a promise to remain in the Republican U.S. Senate primary to run as independent, both perfectly summarizing and understating a crazy year that was in Florida politics and government.

By Keith Laing
The News Service Florida

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Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under News