House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Boca Raton, announced today that he and Sen. Thad Altman, R-Melbourne, will push a bill that to create tax incentives for electric cars.
According to the press release, the bill provides for

*Sales tax exemptions for highway-capable plug-in electric vehicles and electric vehicle components

*An annual $1,000 tax credit per vehicle each year, for 5 years, for corporate fleets of 10 or more highway-capable plug-in electric vehicles

*Toll exemptions on Florida toll roads for highway-capable plug-in electric vehicles

*A $2,000 rebate for installing a public charging station

*A $2,000 rebate for converting a hybrid to a plug-in hybrid with a US Government certified conversion kit.

Discovering that $250-a-plate tickets are a tough sell during a recession, the Palm Beach County Republican Party has scrubbed plans to have conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin speak at the party’s Feb. 21 Lincoln Day fund-raising dinner.
Malkin’s fee would have been $18,000, said county GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein. He said the cancellation will end up costing the local party about $2,000. A representative of Malkin’s booking agency didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail requesting comment.

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Local tourism officials never asked the Seminoles to charge a bed “tax” at the tribe’s Hard Rock resort in Hollywood.
They did, however, ask them to stop calling the fees a “tax;” the tribe doesn’t remit any of the collections to the state or local officials.
The Seminoles collect the same per-room fees _ which they now call surcharges _ as area hotels which charge an 11 percent tax made up of 6 percent state sales tax and a 5 percent “bed” tax which goes to the area’s convention and visitors bureau.
But the Seminoles keep the fees _ estimated to be about $4.4 million per year in total and about $1.9 million for the room surcharge portion _ and use the money to fund its tribal government.
The tribe does have an agreement with the Greater Ft. Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, according to bureau president Nicki Grossman.
The Seminoles give the bureau $100,000 a year to participate in marketing programs with the tourism board.
That’s just a fraction of what the tribe charges in room fees, but Grossman said she’s happy to have it.
The Hard Rock is located on the Seminoles tribal land and the Seminoles are a sovereign nation who is not obligated to pay the state or local officials a dime for anything.
As tribal councilman Max Osceola repeatedly reminds state lawmakers and anyone else, the Seminole language does not have a word for “taxes” and don’t believe in them.

Gov. Charlie Crist and black leaders held a mutual love-fest at minority issues roundtable at the governor’s mansion this morning.
Crist, dubbed Florida’s “first black governor” by black Democrat Rep. Terry Fields of Jacksonville, after his 2008 election, anointed NAACP state president Adora Obi Nweze as a special advisor on minority affairs.
“I love her. I really do,” Crist, a Republican, said after heaping praise on Nweze, with whom he has a long friendship.
“I love you, too. We’ve loved each other for a very long time,” Nweze, sitting beside the governor in the Florida room, said. “People are still whispering about us, governor. But since you got married I told them to cool it, cool it.”
Nweze will advise Crist on ways to increase minority participation in government and other issues including education, housing and criminal justice.

A GOP activist tried unsuccessfully Wednesday night to get the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee to “censure” Republican Gov. Charlie Crist for, among other things, appearing with President Obama in Fort Myers this week and supporting an $800 billion economic stimulus plan pushed by Democrats.
The suggestion by REC member Steven Ledewitz of Boynton Beach drew a fair amount of applause from the audience of about 120 GOP committee members. But county GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein said Ledewitz would have to wait until the party’s next meeting and present his proposal in writing before it could be considered.
Dinerstein didn’t directly criticize Crist, but said “I understand the frustration” and called the stimulus bill “awful.”

Irate senators gave a verbal spanking for the second day to Visit Florida officials who contracted with a Missouri vendor to field telephone calls about Sunshine State vacations.
Today, they questioned executives of the non-profit corporation, which receives more than half of its cash funding from the state, about salaries, travel expenses and the $587,000 contract which has since been canceled and will now go to a Florida-based business.
Senate Majority Leader Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who serves on the committee, said he telephoned the Kansas City-based vendor yesterday afternoon and four out of five times an operator was unable to tell him where the capitol of Florida is located.
The agency also spent $1 million on travel worldwide and another $500,000 bringing non-employees _ including travel agents and meeting planners _ to the state.
Visit Florida received $35 million from the state this year, and Gov. Charlie Crist put back in $5 million lawmakers had tried to take away for advertising during a budget-cutting exercise earlier this year.
The Senate Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations Committee today learned that at least one Visit Florida executive earned a $50,000 bonus last year and that the five highest paid officials there earn collectively more than $800,000 annually. Visit Florida president Bud Nocera earns $222,000 per year.
Crist said he expected the salaries to be trimmed as lawmakers are struggling to come up with ways to handle a $5 billion spending gap in next year’s budget and deal with a $700 million shortfall before the end of this fiscal year in June.
“This is not a time when high salaries are the kind of order of the day. I think we’ll probably see some reductions,” Crist said. He said he would defer to the legislature regarding whether some of the executives should be fired.

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The Seminole Tribe of Florida is charging visitors for a state bed “tax” at its Hard Rock properties but doesn’t remit the money collected to the state.
Representatives of the tribe told House Democrats this afternoon that the local convention boards asked the tribe to charge the tax so that nearby hotels wouldn’t be at a disadvantage.
The tribe uses the money from the bed “taxes” to pay for “government operations,” Jim Allen, CEO of Seminole Gaming told the House Democratic Caucus.
The tribe is trying to persuade lawmakers to ratify a compact previously signed by Gov. Charlie Crist but rejected by the Florida Supreme Court allowing them to run Las Vegas-style slot machines and tabled card games such as black jack and baccarat in return for a share of the proceeds.
But pari-mutuel operators oppose the deal because, they say, the state is getting too little in return and the deal is unfair. They pay state and local taxes of 62 percent of their gross proceeds, while the compact would have the Seminoles paying about $150 million per year on what they earn about $1.37 billion annually.
That’s not fair, said freshman Rep. Joe Abruzzo, D-Wellington.
“That’s about a 7 percent tax on their revenue compared to a 62 percent tax on our existing pari-mutuels,” Abruzzo said.
He’d like the tribe to pay at least $500 million per year _ still less than the 62 percent tax rate the Broward and Miami-Dade pari-mutuels pay to have the slot machines.
Abruzzo said he was shocked to learn that the state isn’t receiving the bed taxes from the Seminoles.

An inspection of fired Department of Juvenile Justice executive Gus Barreiro found hundreds of pornographic images on his state-issued laptop computer, according to an agency inspector general report released today.
Barreiro, a former state House member from Miami, was chief of residential services for the agency until he was abruptly fired last month.
An examination of his computer revealed 382 sexually explicit photographs downloaded from the Internet, according to the internal audit. None of the images were of children, the report said.
Barreiro told investigators that other people had access to his computer, but he did not name them, the report said.
Most of the images were downloaded from an Internet pornography site by a user logged in as “cubancigar107.” Barreiro is of Cuban descent and served in House District 107.

Palm Beach Post staff writer Paul Quinlan has an interesting tidbit today about what happened to former Gov. Jeb Bush’s “Acceler8″ program:

Bush signed the Acceler8 agreement during a news conference at a wildlife refuge near Boynton Beach, as staffers handed out clocks, pens, T-shirts and fans emblazoned with the Acceler8 logo.

Fast-forward to mid-2008.

With Bush out, leaders of the South Florida Water Management District say, orders came down from Gov. Charlie Crist’s office to stop using the term “Acceler8″ and start referring to the ex-governor’s Everglades package by a decidedly less sexy name: “Expedited Projects.”

“Quite frankly, the reason is that the governor’s office needed the Acceler8 logo for a new initiative,” testified Ken Ammon, a district deputy executive director, during a recent deposition.

Sure enough, in August, Crist unveiled an economic stimulus plan called “Accelerate Florida.”

Republican Gov. Charlie Crist just offered a warm introduction of Democratic President Barack Obama, who is in Fort Myers today.
After embracing Crist, Obama praised the governor’s bipartisanship. Crist may be the only Republican state officeholder at the town hall meeting today.
“When the town is burning, you don’t check party labels,” Obama said. “Everybody needs to grab a hose and that’s what Charlie Crist is doing right here today.”
Listen to Crist’s introduction here:

Here is Obama’s praise for the governor:

You can read Obama’s opening remarks here.

The agency in charge of tourism maintains a call center that is operated outside of the Sunshine State by a company not based in Florida.
The out-of-state hotline earned the head of Visit Florida, which contracted for the call center, the wrath of GOP senators on the Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations Committee this morning.
Lawmakers had cut the state tourism advertising budget by $5 million, but Gov. Charlie Crist reinstated that cut with his veto pen, further riling committee chairman Mike Fasano.
Visit Florida is a private agency that received $35 million from a contract with the governor’s Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development.
“You don’t know how unhappy that makes me that I just found that out. You don’t know how unhappy that makes me,” Fasano, R-New Port Richey, told Visit Florida President Bud Nocera, his voice rising. “We just gave you millions of dollars. The governor just vetoed cuts in your budget. And you have a call center in Kansas City using our tax dollars.”
The discovery comes as lawmakers are struggling to come up with ways to create jobs in the state where unemployment is now around 8.1 percent. They are also trying to lure visitors to Florida to try to boost the state’s economy as they face a $5 billion deficit next year and have to cut spending by another $700 million this year.
Nocera could not specify the amount of the contract with Kansas City-based USA 800 but said that agency officials were so unhappy with the vendor that they canceled the contract, set to run through June, early. The new contract will go to a Florida-based business, he said.
“People lose confidence when they hear these kinds of things in their government. Really,’ Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, scolded.

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The “sweet freedom” that Gov. Charlie Crist promised in the Amendment 1 property tax cut last year didn’t quite meet the state’s lofty expectations, according to a presentation made this morning to the Senate Finance & Tax Committee.
State economists expected the Save Our Homes “portability” element in the amendment to eliminate $11.6 billion in taxable value from property rolls. But figures from the state Revenue Department show the actual reduction was $3.4 billion.
The reason? Not as many homestead owners moved. Portability lets Floridians transfer their Save Our Homes differential from one homestead to another.
In 2008, 42,647 portability transfers occurred. Of those, 69 percent happened within the same county.
The biggest county-to-county change was the 448 Floridians who moved from Broward to Palm Beach.
Download the PowerPoint presentation here.

State Republicans are divided over whether to support or trash the federal economic stimulus plan backed by President Barack Obama which Congress is expected to pass as early as this week.
U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez said today that he would vote against the Senate version of the nearly $1 trillion package. Fellow Republican Gov. Charlie Crist last week sent a letter of support for the plan to the president.
This afternoon, state GOP Sens. Mike Fasano and Mike Haridopolos expressed their skepticism or outright disdain for plan during a Senate budget council meeting.
Fasano, R-New Port Richey, questioned whether the proposal would actually stimulate the state economy because so much of the money included in it would be spent on health care and education.
Haridopolos, R-Melbourne, asked Crist’s budget chief Jerry McDaniel whether any similar plans have worked in the past. Haridopolos stated that he doesn’t support the plan and that a similar effort in Japan “failed miserably.”
Some GOP senators even questioned whether the state should take its share of about $13.7 billion included in the U.S. House plan or leave it on the table.
But Evelyn Lynn, a Republican from Ormond Beach who is the Senate higher ed appropriations committee chairwoman, rejected that idea.

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Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander opened a week of appropriations committee meetings with a gloomy pronouncement this afternoon _ the state will be so deep in the red before the fiscal year ends in June that lawmakers will have to cut the budget again.
Florida’s spending gap could be about $350 million more than what’s left in reserves to handle the deficit, Alexander said.
Revenue collections were down $200 million from what was expected in December and January, and aren’t expected to climb over the next few months. That means that the state could be about $700 million in the red by June 30. Lawmakers have $366 million left in reserves after Gov. Charlie Crist tapped into the fund to offset his vetoes last month.
“With five months remaining in the fiscal year, it is indisputable that the limited working capital balance of $366 million will be exhausted and another deficit will be declared following the March revenue estimating conference,” Alexander, R-Lake Wales said in opening remarks members of the Senate Policy and Steering Committee on Ways and Means, which he chairs, this afternoon.
And that’s not all, Alexander said.
Next year’s budget deficit is expected to climb by nearly $2 billion more than the November projections, meaning the state could bring in $5 billion less than this year.
Alexander told the other budget chairmen on the committee that further budget reductions and “revenue adjustments” will be necessary to balance the state budget next year.
“Fun and games, huh?” a dour Alexander said.

UPDATE: Read the story here.
A combination of declining property values and the legislature’s increasing reliance on property taxes to pay for public schools is expected to leave the state with a $1 billion hole in the education budget next year.
“In order to make up that deficit and collect the same amount as last year, you would likely increase people’s property taxes somewhere along the line of 10 percent,” Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman J.D. Alexander, R-Winter Haven, said in an interview today.
The state’s K-12 budget this year is $17.9 billion, which includes $8.5 billion from the state and $9.3 billion from local property taxes.
Traditionally, lawmakers have relied mostly on general revenue – made up mostly of sales taxes – to pay for the public schools budget.
But with the run-up in property values earlier this decade and the legislature’s zeal for corporate income tax cuts, property taxes now make up 52 percent of K-12 spending.
“At the time, it was responsible for our schools,” Alexander said of the shift.
“At this point, it’s a new day. It might be nice to say more of the state dollars should go to fund schools – I would like to do that and generally support that concept – but burgeoning Medicaid and Medicare bills make it very difficult.”

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Republican Gov. Charlie Crist will introduce Democratic President Obama tomorrow at the town hall meeting in Fort Myers, the White House announced this afternoon.
“Gov. Crist and I have seen firsthand the toll that this economic crisis has taken on the American people, and we agree that we can’t allow politics to get in the way of urgent relief for the millions of families and small businesses that need it,” Obama said in the statement.

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Politics Magazine today released its list of best political ads of the year. The well-reported “Great Schlep” campaign won for best Web site for issue or candidate advocacy.
Here are some of the other Florida-related winners:
Best Direct Mail by an Independent Expenditure Campaign/Issue Advocacy/Ballot Initiative: Mission Control, Inc. – “Sweetheart”

This piece highlighted the fact that Tom Feeney, the incumbent Congressman from Florida’s 24th Congressional District, had taken an illegal golfing trip—paid for by lobbyist Jack Abramoff—to Scotland. By leveling this attack early and effectively, Mission Control, Inc. helped the DCCC get out in front of Feeney, and helped allow Democrat Suzanne Kosmas’ campaign to march toward a 16-point victory.

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House Speaker Pro Tem Larry Cretul made some leadership changes this morning as he transitions into replacing Ray Sansom.
Cretul, R-Ocala, named Rep. Dean Cannon, the Orlando Republican slated to take over as House leader in 2010, as head of the Select Policy Council on Strategic and Economic Planning.
Other changes:
Rep. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, will take over for Cretul as chairman of the Select Committee on Seminole Indian Compact Review. Galvano, was vice-chairman of the committee, keeps his Rules committee chairmanship as well. Rep. Sandy Adams, R-Oviedo, is now vice chairwoman of the gaming committee.
Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, will take over as head of the Finance and Tax Council, replacing Cannon.
Rep. Ray Sansom, the Destin Republican who stepped down as speaker last week, will chair the Policy Council and also will serve on the Finance and Tax and Rules councils.
Cretul said wants Rep. Ron Reagan, R-Sarasota, to replace him as Speaker Pro Tem after Cretul is elected as Speaker when the House convenes in March.

Floridians could have to give up a piece of their biological identity to get many prescription drugs filled under a bill one prominent GOP lawmaker is pushing.
And the bill appears to be tailored for a single company that advertises it could make up to $30 million the first year the proposed prescription drug verification program begins.
Republican lawmaker Carl Domino of Jupiter is sponsoring a bill to require all Florida pharmacies to buy biometric identification equipment for people filling prescriptions. Only one company, the one that took the legislation to Domino, could carry out the mandate.
Read the full story here.

State Senate Democratic Leader Al Lawson will challenge incumbent U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd in 2010, sources close to Lawson confirmed this morning.
Boyd, elected to Congress twelve years ago, is a leader of the “Blue Dog Coalition,” a group of conservative Democrats. The Panhandle farmer also served in the state House.
Lawson is a Tallahassee insurance agent who is approaching three decades as a state lawmaker. He was first elected to the Florida House in 1982. He will be term-limited out of office in 2010.