March 29, 2024

Profile: Don Gaetz

Golden Gaetz

After shaking up education in Okaloosa, a multimillionaire entrepreneur turns to Tallahassee.

Neil Skene | 2/1/2007

Learning process

Gaetz grew up in North Dakota, reading books by or about its adopted president, Theodore Roosevelt. He worked summers and holidays in Washington for the state's Republican U.S. senator, Milton R. Young. He went to Concordia College on a debate scholarship, majored in political science and theology and became a national oratory and debate champion. At 22, Gaetz was editor of the weekly Cavalier County Republican.
His hospital career began in the mid-1970s at Bellin Hospital in Green Bay, Wis., which started the first hospital-based hospice. He moved to what then was the Methodist hospital group in Jacksonville. There he met his wife, Vicky, a pharmacist, who had grown up in Okaloosa County.

Florida health regulators wouldn't license hospices, so Gaetz came to Tallahassee to lobby in 1979. He met a Methodist urban minister from Miami, Hugh Westbrook, who was working to create hospices there. Two Miami legislators, influential Sen. Jack Gordon and freshman state Rep. Carrie Meek, sponsored their legislation to authorize hospices. It passed. Gaetz's employer in Jacksonville got the first license.

Westbrook and Gaetz soon started Vitas Innovative Hospice Care in Little Havana. And they became key figures in getting Congress to provide Medicare and Medicaid coverage for hospice care in 1982.

Gaetz was the Vitas partner in charge of revenue, and as it hit about $10 million, he learned a lesson about decentralization. "We had to hire good people, set performance objectives, establish corporate values. We had to have standards of care. And then we had to let people do their jobs. We had to give them operational flexibility, and we also had to give them control of resources. When we did that at Vitas, our company became a half-billion-dollar company."

About the same time, Vicky was pregnant with their second child but suffered a rare bleeding in her spinal cord. They continued the pregnancy, and their daughter, Erin, is now a senior at the University of Virginia. (Son Matt is in law school at William & Mary.) But Vicky was left partially paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. They moved from Miami back to Vicky's hometown.

Gaetz cut back his role in Vitas but had made his fortune. He lists a net worth (not counting his family's) of $26.5 million, including nearly $10 million in real estate (hence a special interest in limiting property taxes).
Teddy Roosevelt is still his hero, along with Winston Churchill. "Neither one of them would back down from a fight, even when the cause was thought to be lost," Gaetz says.

His own causes do not include legislating new school programs like those in Okaloosa. Instead he wants to attack "micromanagement" by the state -- not just in education, though he has the Department of Education in his cross hairs. As many government functions as possible, he says, ought to be assigned to local government -- "people you can reach out and grab by the neck."

Gaetz, after all, knows a little about doing just that.

Tags: Politics & Law, Around Florida, Education, Government/Politics & Law, Northwest

Florida Business News

Florida News Releases

Florida Trend Video Pick

Bitter-to-swallow cocoa costs force chocolate shops to raise prices
Bitter-to-swallow cocoa costs force chocolate shops to raise prices

Central Floirda chocolate shops are left with a bitter taste as cocoa prices hit an all-time high earlier this week.

Video Picks | Viewpoints@FloridaTrend

Ballot Box

Should Congress ban the popular social media app TikTok in the U.S.?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Need more details
  • What is TikTok?
  • Other (Comment below)

See Results

Florida Trend Media Company
490 1st Ave S
St Petersburg, FL 33701
727.821.5800

© Copyright 2024 Trend Magazines Inc. All rights reserved.