Gov. Rick Scott rounded out his administration today, naming three long-time state government workers as agency heads.

The appointments include a holdover from his predecessor Charlie Crist, a long-time legislative staffer and a former aide of his gubernatorial opponent Alex Sink.

Scott made Cynthia Lorenzo’s job as interim director of the Agency for Workforce Innovation permanent. Crist put Lorenzo in charge of the agency that oversees unemployment compensation in 2009. She’s worked in state government for more than six years, serving at the Department of Juvenile Justice and the state transportation department.

Mike Hanson will head up the troubled Agency for Persons with Disabilities, which for years had been running a deficit and at one time had a wait list of more than 18,000 Floridians seeking services. Hanson has been a health care guru for the state for more than three decades, serving under Gov. Jeb Bush and as a policy analyst in both the House and Senate. Most recently, Hanson was the staff director of the Senate’s health and human services budget committee.

Doug Darling, currently the governor’s deputy chief of staff and director of Cabinet affairs, will take over Scott’s new Department of Economic Opportunity. Darling was forced out as a top aide to former Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink – who lost her bid for governor to Scott by a hair – over an audit that found his division lacking in internal controls. Darling also served at the departments of Environmental Protection and Education.

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson will lead a series of rallies tonight and tomorrow in Florida challenging the state’s new election law.

The ACLU and others have filed a federal lawsuit against Gov. Rick Scott‘s administration over the elections overhaul, one of at least seven lawsuits prompted by the first-term governor’s actions and laws passed by the GOP-dominated legislature this session.

Jackson will participate in a rally in Orlando this evening, a workshop in Eatonville tomorrow morning and a rally and meeting in Tampa tomorrow night.

Critics of the new law, including the League of Women Voters, say it is designed to make registering to vote and casting ballots more difficult for minorities and low-income voters, who typically vote Democratic.

The law imposes strict regulation of third-party registration groups, including requiring that they turn in registration forms within 48 hours after they are signed. Minority and low-income voters are more likely to register through the third-party groups, said Washington-based Project Vote lawyer Estelle Rogers.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to block the new law from going into effect until federal officials sign off on it, a requirement because five counties in Florida require “preclearance” from the Justice Department before changes to elections can go into effect.

Scott last week asked to be removed from the lawsuit.

Former Miami U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, who lost a Senate bid last fall to Republican Marco Rubio, was nominated Monday by President Obama to serve as a representative to the U.N. General Assembly.

Meek was among three officials put forward by Obama. Since leaving Congress in January, Meek has been president of KBM Solutions, a consulting firm for disaster relief, and editorial chairman of Politic365, an online news site for policy and politics.

LARGO _ Surrounded by war memorabilia on the day after the Fourth of July, Gov. Rick Scott held ceremonial bill signings at the Armed Forces Military Museum, showing “just a very small part” of the state’s gratitude for veterans’ service to the country.

Scott, flanked by several lawmakers and local officials, signed new laws giving free park passes to parents of military vets killed or wounded in combat, giving spouses of veterans returning overseas temporary health care licenses to get back to work more quickly and creating the Florida Veterans’ Hall of Fame inside the Capitol.

“These bills are great for the military, great for veterans, great for our state. We’ve got to make sure we’re the most military-friendly state in the country because we have to take care of the people who defended our freedom. It’s also nice to do this the day after the Fourth of July, a day that we all need to be celebrating what great freedoms we have in this country,” said Scott, who will attend a meet-and-greet with the Navy Corp Relief Society in Jacksonville later today.

The first-term governor enlisted in the U.S. Navy when was 18, Scott told a crowd of veterans gathered in the museum. The G.I. bill, which paid for his college and law school, “was a great opportunity for me,” he said.

Scott was especially excited about the new memorial.
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Gov. Rick Scott defended his decision to allow a controversial Central Florida commuter rail project to move forward, saying he legally had no authority to block the $1.5 billion SunRail line as he did when rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funds for high-speed rail.

Scott, a tea party favorite, put SunRail on hold when he took office in January, freezing four contracts totaling $235 million. Tea party activists, railing against the commuter line, met privately with Scott to urge him to axe it.

Scott earned national headlines when he said ‘no thanks’ to $2.4 billion in federal stimulus funds for high-speed rail. Two lawmakers – one of them a fellow Republican – sued Scott but failed to convince the courts that Scott had overstepped his authority in sending back the money.

Scott said his lawyers told him there was a “significant risk” he would have lost a similar court challenge had he tried to block the commuter project.

“These are two totally different projects,” Scott told newspaper executives at the annual Florida Press Association and Florida Society of Newspaper Editors meeting at the Renaissance Vinoy Hotel in St. Petersburg. “It’s like comparing apples to oranges.”

Local officials’ pledge to cover cost overruns gave Scott some security in approving the project, backed by powerful GOP legislators including House Speaker Dean Cannon of Winter Park – and local officials of both parties.

Even so, he said, “I don’t know that I would have made the decision to go forward with this if I had been around three or four years ago.”

Chanting “Pink Slip Rick,” dozens of left-leaning activists staged a protest as Gov. Rick Scott addressed a gathering of the media in St. Petersburg.

Florida Watch Action, Progress Florida and Awake the State organized the protest to coincide with Scott’s speech and more than a hundred new laws went into effect today.

As of today, teachers, firemen, police officers and other state workers will have to contribute 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions. And more than 4,500 state workers will lose their jobs under the new $69.1 billion budget that also goes into effect today. Lawmakers also slashed education spending, all part of an effort to fill a $3.62 billion budget gap.

Wearing a “Governor Scott Enemy of the State” T-shirt, Madeira Beach teacher Mary Niemeyer held a sign decrying the state’s education cuts. “Our future is at stake,” she said.

Middle school teacher Steve Adams and his wife Mary drove from Lakeland to participate in the protest across the street from the waterfront Renaissance Vinoy Hotel where the Florida Press Association and the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors held their annual meeting.

“I object to the way teachers and public employees have been the ones forced to pay for Florida’s deficit,” Adams, 67, said.

While the protest may have little – if any – impact on Scott, Adams, who said he did not vote for the first-term governor, said it and similar events have worked.

“The tea party made a difference and this is how they started. So we should take a lesson,” Adams said.

Gov. Rick Scott has a 59 percent disapproval rating and would lose a do-over election to Democrat Alex Sink by a 57-to-35 percent margin, Democratic firm Public Policy Polling says in a new survey.

If the 2014 gubernatorial election were held today, and if Republican-turned-independent former Gov. Charlie Crist were running as a Democrat, Crist would thump Scott by a 56-to-34 percent margin, the poll finds.

Asked if the Republican governor’s actions have made them more or less likely to vote Republican in the 2012 presidential race, 40 percent of all voters — and 45 percent of independents — said they were less likely to vote Republican next year because of Scott.

The June 16-19 poll of 848 Florida voters has a 3.4 percent margin of error.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott attended a secret, invitation-only meeting outside Vail, Colo., hosted by conservative billionaire GOP donors David and Charles Koch, the governor’s staff confirmed today.

The meeting wasn’t on Scott’s official schedule and his spokesman Lane Wright initially refused to confirm or deny whether the first-term governor would make an appearance, saying he would not “speculate as to what he has done, or will do on his personal time.”

But, after The St. Petersburg Times reported Tuesday Scott did attend the meeting, Wright confirmed that the governor was there but would not say whether Scott was in Colorado on Sunday or Monday.

“I told anybody who asked me,” Scott, in Washington, D.C., told the Times, without revealing too much about what took place.

“It was very interesting,” he told the Times. “They wanted to know basically… what am I doing in Florida.”

Scott, the self-proclaimed “jobs governor,” joined at least three other conservative Republican heads-of-state at the semi-annual meeting.

Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Bob McDonnell of Virginia all dropped into the conference, entitled “Understanding and Addressing Threats to American Enterprise and Prosperity.” And Scott’s competitor-in-chief, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, addressed the group on Sunday, the first of the four-day meeting that wraps up Wednesday.

“The purpose of this conference is to develop support for the kind of free-market policies and initiatives that can get our country back on the path to economic prosperity and sustained job creation,” a spokeswoman for Koch Industries told The Denver Post last week.

Kansas-based Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the United States, earned $100 billion in revenues in 2009, is controlled by Charles and David Koch, political activists who have donated more than $100 million to conservative GOP causes over the past three decades, according to a New Yorker profile. The pair have recently donated to tea party groups and organizations opposed to President Obama.

Florida Democratic Party spokesman Eric Jotkoff blasted Scott for secretly leaving the state during a state of emergency he declared because of wildfires.

“For Rick Scott to secretly leave the state during a state of emergency is completely irresponsible and shows why he continues to be the least popular governor in America,” Jotkoff said.

Former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre, a Democrat who endorsed Rick Scott in last fall’s governor’s race, was named Tuesday by the Republican governor to the state’s Transportation Commission.

Ferre, 75, was named to a three-year term — succeeding Marcos Marchena. The appointment must be confirmed by the Florida Senate.

After losing his Quixotic bid to become the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate — drawing 4.9 percent of the vote in losing to then-U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek — Ferre said Scott would be the first Republican he voted for in 54 years of casting ballots.

Ferre said he liked Scott’s plan for Florida’s economy. Ferre also said he was mad at the “exclusionary direction” of the state Democratic Party, which had cold-shouldered him in his run for Senate.

Florida’s 2012 Republican U.S. Senate primary so far has been a three-way contest between state Senate President Mike Haridopolos, former appointed Sen. George LeMieux and former state House Majority Leader Adam Hasner.

But with polls suggesting roughly two-thirds of GOP primary voters are up for grabs, retired U.S. Army Col. Mike McCalister is hoping direct-mail money and tea party buzz can put him in the running. McCalister — whose ultra-low budget 2010 gubernatorial campaign ($8,422 in reported expenditures) got a surprising 10.1 percent in the 2010 GOP primary against Rick Scott and Bill McCollum — has lined up Washington mailhouse Base Connect to raise money and signed veteran GOP operatives Buzz Jacobs and John Yob to advise his 2012 campaign.

Jacobs and Yob both worked on the 2008 John McCain campaign. Yob last year advised unsuccessful tea party Senate-seekers Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware as well as Michigan outsider-turned-Gov. Rick Snyder.

Disparaging Hasner, LeMieux and Haridopolos as the “Tallahassee Triplets,” Jacobs says McCalister “has all the qualities of a candidate that will resonate with Tea Party, Project 9/12, and conservative grassroots Republicans.”

Base Connect is the direct-mail firm used by U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Plantation, whose 2010 campaign was marked by stupendous money-raising but also a fairly high burn rate for mail expenditures.

Gov. Rick Scott signed into law Tuesday legislation that reshuffles the state’s economic development agencies, while eliminating Florida’s lead growth management department.

Scott signed SB 2156 into law while meeting with Enterprise Florida business leaders in Orlando. The head of the public-private Enterprise Florida, Gray Swoope, who Scott recruited from a similar post in Mississippi, becomes Florida’s secretary of commerce, under the legislation.

The legislation also consolidates much of the state’s economic development efforts under a new Department of Economic Opportunity.

“In today’s globally competitive marketplace, Florida must be able to respond quickly and decisively when business opportunities come our way,” Scott said. “The bill I signed today provides us flexibility to seize opportunities created by developing markets and effectively respond to the changing needs of the businesses that grow our economy.”

Scott wanted to command the state’s job recruitment efforts from his office, and be given virtual complete control over millions of dollars in incentive money formerly steered by the state’s Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development.

The legislation eliminates OTTED. But lawmakers were reluctant to give Scott all the authority he wanted. Instead, Scott was given the go-ahead to approve incentive awards of less than $2 million without legislative approval, while a simple notice to legislative leaders is needed when the governor puts as much as $5 million on the table for any company or industry eyeing Florida.

Awards topping $5 million require approval from the 14-member Legislative Budget Commission.

Scott campaigned for governor with the pledge that he would create 700,000 jobs in seven years. He has touted his efforts as helping reduce the state’s unemployment to 10.8 percent, still among the highest rates in the nation.

Environmentalists had urged Scott to veto the legislation, since it abolishes the Department of Community Affairs, which they say threatens future state oversight of development projects.

Scott’s early efforts at luring companies to Florida also have proved uneven, according to many analysts.

Last week, Scott used a trade mission to Canada to announce the decision by Garda Worldwide Security to relocate its U.S. headquarters to Boca Raton from California, bringing with it 1oo jobs. Palm Beach County officials said the move was agreed to months ago, clouding Scott’s role in the development.

Meanwhile, Scott signed a $69.1 billion state budget last month that is spawning thousands of job cuts in school boards, health and social service providers, and in many state government agencies. 

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Gov. Rick Scott erased some of the last vestiges of his predecessor on the board of  Enterprise Florida, removing a pair of former Gov. Charlie Crist’s big fund-raisers and replacing them with two advisers of his own.

Gone are Marty Fiorentino, a Jacksonville fund-raiser, and Scott Peelen, a financial manager from Winter Park, who was among the few Republican rainmakers who stuck by Crist during his failed, independent run for U.S. Senate.

Fiorentino and Peelen were both appointed from the Crist bunker to Enterprise Florida, being named to three-year terms only eight days before Scott was sworn in.

Replacing them are Chris Kise, a lawyer who worked for Crist, but who lately helped direct Scott’s transition team. Joining Kise on those directing the public-private agency charged with selling Florida to national and world business leaders is Adam Hollingsworth, chief-of-staff to outgoing Jacksonville Mayor John Peyton.

Kise and Hollingsworth were named to the unpaid posts for terms that expire July 1, 2014.

Despite differences of opinion, U.S. Senate candidate George LeMieux managed to stay on the air with conservative talk-show host Ray Junior this evening, unlike one of LeMieux’ GOP primary opponents, Senate President Mike Haridopolos.

Junior tossed Haridopolos off his show last week for refusing to answer whether he’s vote for or against U.S. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan‘s spending plan.

After a long back-and-forth about commuter rail and SunRail, Junior asked LeMieux the same question.

“Should I give you a five minute answer?” quipped LeMieux, who served 16 months as U.S. senator after being appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist to fill a vacancy created by Mel Martinez. “I would have voted for it.”

LeMieux gave a somewhat more rambling response to query about whether or not he supports the Fair Tax proposal that would replace federal income taxes with a national sales tax.

“I think there’s a lot of good things about it,” LeMieux began.

Junior credited LeMieux with knowing enough about Fair Tax to talk about it, and gave him a high grade at the end of the show, but not before putting him on the spot about Charlie Crist, who called LeMieux “the maestro.” The pair’s careers were closely linked until Crist left the Republican party for a losing independent bid for the U.S. Senate last year.

“When did you discover Charlie Crist was a dirtbag?” Junior, who has dubbed himself “America’s loose cannon,” asked.

LeMieux didn’t bite.

“I would not say Charlie Crist is a dirt bag. I would not say anything negative about him,” LeMieux insisted, despite repeated goading by Junior. “Charlie Crist is my friend. I have taken a pledge not to say anything negative about him. I don’t think it’s productive.”

Despite refusing to engage in Crist-bashing, Junior, who also bragged about throwing now-U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster off his show during the 2010 campaign season, gave LeMieux an overall thumbs-up.

“I thought I was going to have to kick him off. He did good. ‘Cause he answered the damn questions,” he said.

Gov. Rick Scott is willing to take the fight over drug testing state workers all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, his spokeswoman said today in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

The civil rights organization filed the lawsuit challenging Scott’s executive order mandating drug testing of all state workers, arguing it is a violation of the constitution’s protection from unreasonable searches by government.

“The Governor is confident the courts will see that this policy makes sense and is legally sound, and he’ll take the law suit to the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes to implement a common sense policy that is appropriate and fair to tax payers. If it makes good business sense for private sector companies to drug test their employees, why wouldn’t it make good business sense for the state?” Scott spokeswoman Amy Graham said in an e-mail.

Former Attorney General Bill McCollum is joining a Washington,D.C., law firm as partner — specializing in representing clients in legal matters before state attorneys general.

McCollum spent 20 years in Congress before unsuccessfully running for U.S. Senate in 2000. His four year term as Florida attorney general, 2007-2011, was sandwiched between another failed bid for Senate (2004) and losing to Rick Scott in last summer’s Republican primary for governor.

SNR Denton is an international law firm building a specialty pivoted around cases involving state attorneys general. While McCollum will work out of Washington, also joining the firm is former Indiana Attorney General Jeff Modisett, who will work out SNR Denton’s Los Angeles office.

“With the recent, dramatic growth in state Attorneys General consumer protection investigations involving key industry sectors such as financial institutions, energy, health care, telecommunications and the internet, it made sense for me to join a firm that is known for its deep bench strength in the public sector,” McCollum said, in announcing the move.

Being No. 3 isn’t good enough for Gov. Rick Scott. He wants to be the top dog.

Chief Executive magazine recently ranked Florida the third best in the nation for doing business, behind second-place winner North Carolina and top-ranked Texas. The survey of CEOs has placed the Lone Star state above all others for the seventh year in a row, prompting a challenge from Scott to Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Scott frequently tips his hat to Perry and looks to reforms in his state as models for what Florida should do.

Scott today wrote Perry a letter telling him to watch his back.

“Not only have you achieved this top ranking this year, you have achieved it seven years in a row. Like everything else Texas does, you have done it in a BIG way,” Scott wrote. “However, I must tell you: Seven years is long enough.”

Scott neglects to mention that among the big things Texas has is a budget deficit of as much as $27 billion – more than seven times greater than the $3.6 billion spending gap Florida lawmakers struggled to close this year. The Texas legislature is facing a potential special session to deal with their budget mess.

Back in the Sunshine State, however, Florida is “eliminating job killing regulation, reducing the size and cost of government, and making sure we have the best educated workforce,” Scott boasts.

“We have no personal income tax and are phasing out the business tax, starting with eliminating it entirely for half the business that paid it. Florida is definitely on the road to be number one. Thank you for giving us the motivation we needed.”

Gov. Rick Scott remained upbeat on FoxNews this morning despite the final launch of the Endeavor shuttle, taking with it 7,500 jobs in the Space Coast.

Scott said the imminent shrinking of the Kennedy Space Center presents an opening for his “seven steps to 700,000 jobs” plan.

“We’ve got a great opportunity because of all the talent in that part of the state. There’s a lot of defense manufacturers that we’re talking to. There’s companies all over the world that are talking about coming to Florida, in particular the Space Coast because of the talent of all the employees,” he said.

The state’s cheerleader-in-chief took ownership of the nearly $70 billion budget lawmakers finalized last weekend and kept on message despite repeatedly dour reminders of the state’s high unemployment rate and foreclosures among the highest in the nation.

“I just finished the session where we reduced our taxes, our business taxes, our property taxes, the size of government.
We’re making this the place where people want to do business. And we’re going to get that part of the state back to work,” Scott said from Orlando. We’re coming back. Our tourism business is up. Our ag business is doing very well. We’ve got the shipping coming from the extension of the Panama Canal…Our state is getting back to work. And my plan – seven steps to 700,000 jobs – is getting implemented through our budget, through our session, so we’re headed in the right direction.”

Rick Scott’s vast financial holdings have continued to draw heat but today, Florida’ s chief executive is likely to draw support from the state’s Commission on Ethics for steps he’s taken to create some separation from his multi-million dollars investments.

Commissioners will review a draft opinion from the panel’s attorneys that endorse Scott’s efforts to transfer his investments to a blind trust steered by money managers independent of the governor.

 When he filed papers as a candidate last year, Scott put his net worth at $218 million and subsequently spent more than $73 million out of his own pocket in winning the governor’s race.

“Under the circumstances presented, we conclude that the governor’s passive investments in these large national corporations and investment funds do not create a continuing or frequently recurring conflict of interest with his public duties,”  the commission’s executive director, Phil Claypool, wrote last month in a recommended order to be reviewed today by the panel.

Scott was slated to sell what has emerged as his most controversial holding, Solantic, the urgent care company, that attracted criticism for potentially standing to profit from health initiatives he had advanced as governor.

Scott acknowledged last month he was selling his family’s 70 percent ownership of the urgent care chain he co-founded in 2001 for less than the firm’s reported $62 million net worth. The deal was expected to close by April 29, and Scott has said nothing publicly about the transaction.

Most of Scott’s other holdings are in large, publicly traded companies. According to documents submitted to the ethics panel, Scott’s invested in four holding companies that have Florida operations.

 Three are in the propane and natural gas transportation business and the fourth is Republic Services, the nation’s second largest waste-hauling company. Scott also is a limited partner in a New York headquartered investment fund that has a controlling interest in 21st Century Oncology, cancer radiation centers which operate in Florida.

Richard Coates, Scott’s Tallahassee lawyer, acknowledged to the commission in a letter that state law recognizes that investments are considered to be a contractual relationship. And state ethics laws bar public officials from having contract dealings with a business regulated by their agency.

“On the other hand, we are aware of no precedent where the commission has found a conflict of interest based on such an attenuated and speculative relationship between the official’s public office and the investments in question,” Coates wrote.

A committee that boosted former Democratic state Rep. Kevin Rader‘s unsuccessful 2010 bid for state Senate is facing a $15,250 fine for failing to file a campaign finance report just before last year’s Aug. 24 primary.

The Florida Elections Commission approved the fine Tuesday against the Committee to Improve Florida’s Economy. The committee plans to appeal the fine, attorney Mark Herron said this morning.

The committee is chaired by veteran Democratic operative Eric Johnson. Johnson was also Rader’s consultant last year.

While the committee was two months late filing a report that was due Aug. 20, Herron argued that a “significant portion” of the information required on the report had been mistakenly included in a previous report that was available for public inspection on the Division of Elections website.

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An elections overhaul likely to wind up in court that would cut nearly in half the number of days for early voting and impose tougher restrictions on groups registering voters is headed to Gov. Rick Scott.

The GOP-dominated legislature easily pushed through the elections revamp over the objections of Democrats who argued the bill will make it harder for Floridians to vote and get their ballots counted.

The 157-page elections measure will reduce the number of days available for early voting from 14 to 8 but keep the same number of hours – 96 – and allow supervisors of elections to extend weekend hours.

Palm Beach County elections supervisor Susan Bucher estimated the early voting changes would cost her office more than $941 million to secure additional polling places, equipment and salaries.

The overhaul make it tougher for like the League of Women Voters, labor unions and the NAACP to sign up prospective voters by requiring them to register with the state, give voter registration forms to elections supervisors within 48 hours or face $1,000 fines, among other things.
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