Florida Trend | Florida's Business Authority

Rick Scott's Legacy as Florida's Governor

Rick Scott never once earned a majority of the vote from Floridians during his campaigns for governor. He survived each of his races by the slimmest of margins — 1.2 percentage points in 2010 and 1 percentage point in 2014. In the governor’s chair, Scott, the former HCA chief executive who had never before served in public office, didn’t take an expansive approach to the job, instead concentrating narrowly on a handful of core priorities and then focusing on them with the sort of discipline that few, if any, other Florida politicians have ever displayed. Scott, who has parlayed his governorship into a seat in the U.S. Senate, leaves behind a far stronger legacy than many expected.

Here’s where Scott had the biggest impacts on Florida:

Jobs, jobs, jobs

From the very beginning, the selfstyled “jobs governor,” who was elected when Florida’s housing-dependent economy was in ruins, made privatesector job creation and economic growth the chief focus of his administration. While there is plenty of debate about how much influence governors have over the economy, there is no arguing that Florida rebounded during Scott’s tenure. The state’s unemployment rate today, for instance, is 3.4%, down from 10.5% when he took office. Scott pulled every lever at his disposal, from tax cuts (many targeted specifically for businesses, such as a bigger corporate income tax exemption, eliminating the sales tax on manufacturing machinery and reducing the sales tax on commercial lease payments), to speeding up licensing and permitting processes (the Scott administration says it cut more than 5,200 regulations) to pumping more money into economic- development incentives and industry subsidies (such as tourism advertising). And he was a relentless salesman for the state, leading trade missions and recruiting trips around the country and the world, personally calling corporate executives to sing Florida’s praises and attending ribbon-cutting and businessexpansion announcements statewide. He even showed up for the opening of Wawa convenience stores.

The balance sheet

Scott made his fortune managing health care businesses and, in many respects, he took a CEO’s approach to governing Florida when it came to the state’s balance sheet. While he tried to drive growth through private-sector capital investment and job creation, he also devoted a great deal of attention to curbing Florida’s potential expenses and liabilities. During his administration, for instance, Florida paid down more than $10 billion in debt and reduced its total debt load by 25%. The state repaid loans to the federal government it took out during the recession to cover unemployment claims. The Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, which provides subsidized reinsurance to insurers, improved its financial position by $10 billion by accumulating cash reserves and reducing its own exposure. And state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. shed nearly 1 million policies — roughly two-thirds of its total — and reduced its estimated exposure to a 1-in-100-year storm from more than $21 billion to less than $6 billion.

Markets have noticed. In June, Moody’s upgraded Florida’s credit rating. Its report read like Scott himself would have written it, with the company citing “a sustained trend of improvement in Florida’s economy and finances, low state debt and pension ratios and reduced near-term liability risks via the state-run insurance campaigns.”

In the short term, that path meant not using historically low interest rates of the last few years to borrow more and make infrastructure investments. Meanwhile, as Citizens reduced its rolls — to smaller, untested private insurers — some homeowners who are paying more for their insurance were left feeling uneasy. But Scott’s fiscal discipline has left a lot more freedom to the state’s future leaders. “Ron DeSantis enters the governor’s mansion with a lot of options he might not otherwise have had if the Legislature and the governor had gone out and put everything on the credit card,” says one lawmaker who has worked closely with Scott.

Pushing the courts right

Although Scott only got to make one Supreme Court appointment during his eight years, he significantly remade the judicial composition of the state’s courts, aggressively vetting potential appointees and evaluating them through a narrow philosophical prism. “He said, ‘I want people who will follow the rules, respect the rule of law and serve with humility,’ ” says a former attorney in the governor’s office. Put another way, the governor sought out judges who are far less likely to deem laws unconstitutional or restrain executive authority. Scott also extended the vetting and litmus testing to the state’s Judicial Nominating Commissions — the nine-member panels made up of five direct gubernatorial appointees and four appointees the governor makes from nominees submitted by the Florida Bar, who winnow the overall pool of judicial applicants into a small group of finalists from which the governor must choose. In fact, Scott became the first Florida governor to begin rejecting entire groups of JNC nominees from the Bar, forcing the organization to come up with more names until the governor found enough to his liking. “We spent as much time vetting JNCs as we did judges,” the former governor’s office attorney says.

Altogether, Scott appointed hundreds of judges around the state — including more than half of the judges on the state’s five District Courts of Appeal, which together decide far more cases than the Supreme Court. Scott only got one Supreme Court pick (Justice Alan Lawson), but he got to pick nine of the 13 judges on the state’s second-most important court: The 1st District Court of Appeal, which includes Tallahassee and hears many cases involving regulatory agencies. Notably, not one of the more than 30 appellate judges Scott appointed is black.

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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