Rick Scott's Legacy as Florida's Governor

The environment

In the spring of 2017, Scott thrilled environmentalists when he signed a bill pledging $800 million toward the construction of a long-sought reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee that is meant to restore a flow of clean water from the big lake southward into the Everglades. A year later, Scott outraged them when the South Florida Water Management District, run by an appointed board carefully watched by the governor’s office, suddenly agreed to continue letting sugar giant Florida Crystals farm the land that is to be used for the reservoir — despite objections from DeSantis and others. The sequence of events underscored the fraught relationship Scott had with the environment, where his administration imposed a number of dramatic changes on both sides of the environmental ledger. Scott, for instance, negotiated a nearly $900-million deal with the federal government that expanded a wetlands network to clean water coming out of sugar cane fields and accelerated the construction of 2.6 miles worth of bridges along the Tamiami Trail where the roadway has blocked the natural flow of the Everglades. But he also pushed through enormous budget cuts that environmentalists say decimated the state’s water management districts, which today collect 40% less property taxes and have 25% fewer people than they did when Scott entered the governor’s mansion. And Scott’s most lasting environmental legacy may well prove to be the wholesale rollback of the state’s growth management regime — including abolishing the Department of Community Affairs — which he pushed through immediately upon taking office. Even some in the home-building industry, who credit the governor’s reforms with helping speed up Florida’s recovery from the recession, say the pendulum may need to swing back some.

Affordable higher ed

Scott had something of a Jekylland- Hyde approach to public K-12 education, muscling deep budget cuts through the Legislature at the start of his tenure and then pushing just as hard for big increases in his later years. But he was implacable when it came to one particular area of education: College affordability. Though the governor permitted tuition to rise in his first two years in office, when Florida was still rebuilding its finances, he also vetoed a bill that would have let the University of Florida and Florida State University raise tuition even faster. Then, in 2013, he killed a 3% tuition increase that had made it through the Legislature. And a year later, he signed a bill freezing university tuition (a bill that also extended in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants, in one of Scott’s most dramatic policy reversals.) He was also far more skeptical of university building projects than previous governors, arguing that they drove up costs for students. “He began to question university presidents and their boards,” says one former aide. Indeed, Scott leaned very hard on the people he appointed to university and college boards to oppose any proposed tuition increases. He even booted former House Speaker Allan Bense, a Panama City Republican who is one of the most widely respected figures in Florida politics, from FSU’s board of trustees after Bense supported a 1.7% tuition increase for the university.

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Tags: Politics & Law, Government/Politics & Law