Gov. Charlie Crist signed into law a tax break for businesses ten minutes before he began his state-of-the-state speech this evening.

The measure (HB 7033) will delay about $1.8 billion in unemployment tax payments for Florida businesses that will jump from $8 per worker to $100 per employee on April 1.

The higher tax rate kicks in in April because the number of jobless workers in Florida, among the highest in the nation, has wiped out the trust fund that pays for unemployment benefits.

Putting off the tax hike for two years means that Florida lawmakers today agreed to continue to borrow from the federal government to replenish the fund and rack up $675 million in interest payments. Those costs will be passed on to businesses over the next five years.

“Decisions are being made as we speak. Business owners are trying to determine what they’re going to do next to be able to deal with this Friday’s pay roll. This is what this bill’s about,” said Sen. Rudy Garcia, R-Hialeah.

The Senate unanimously approved the bill (HB 7033), which the House also unanimously passed earlier today.

The Florida Senate will kick off the 60-day 2010 legislative session at about 9 a.m. setting off a day of pageantry culminating with Gov. Charlie Crist’s prime-time state-of-the-state speech this evening.

Stay tuned to postonpolitics.com for continuous blogs throughout the day, beginning with the Senate session at 9 a.m., followed by the House session at 10 a.m. and then later sessions in the afternoon. Then keep Post’ed with Crist’s final state-of-the-state address at 6 p.m.

Expect to hear lots of talk about jobs, jobs, jobs and what the legislature and Crist want to do to help small businesses weather the prolonged economic storm.

The House and Senate plan to pass a delay of the unemployment compensation tax hike that could increase taxes on some businesses up to 5,000 percent unless lawmakers act quickly.

The business tax increase is necessary to replenish the trust fund that pays out-of-work Floridians and to repay the federal government $1.1 billion the state borrowed after the fund ran out of money last year.

Last year, lawmakers approved an increase in the unemployment tax to speed up the repayment of the federal loans and beef up the trust fund.

But the increases, originally signed off on by the business community, turned out to be significantly higher than expected, ranging from 21 percent to more than 5,000 percent.

The minimum rate for employers with a good employment track record is slated to skyrocket from $8.40 to $100.30 per employee per year unless lawmakers do something by April 1.

With more than 1 million Floridians out of work, Florida taxpayers are footing the bill for the salaries for out-of-state workers.

This time, it’s Florida Lottery vendor GTECH’s workers in Texas that are the beneficiaries. GTECH’s call center is located in Austin and that’s where calls regarding the Lottery’s on-line tickets and other products are answered.

And lawmakers don’t even know how many jobs are at stake in Texas because the private contractors hired by the state to handle call lines won’t give up their number of employees or where they’re located, according to legislative analyst Emily Leventhal.

Sen. Ted Deutch, a Boca Raton Democrat who sits on the committee, asked Leventhal how many of the 16 private call centers were located outside Florida.

Only GTECH’s, she told him.

“And do you know how many people the state of Florida is paying to work in Austin, Texas?” Deutch asked.

“I do not,” Leventhal replied.

“I think that would be worthwhile information for this committee,” Deutch said.

An incensed Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander agreed.

“If they take the cash or check they can tell us what we want to know,” said Alexander, R-Lake Wales.

Last year, the Department of Children and Families got in hot water because the agency’s food stamp contractor, JP Morgan Chase, routed questions about food stamp services to a call center based in India. The vendor stopped sending the calls overseas and instead sent them to Ohio and Illinois.

The head of the state’s tourism agency also earned the wrath of lawmakers last year when lawmakers found out that calls to Visit Florida were being answered in Missouri. The agency later canceled the contract.

By MICHAEL C. BENDER and DARA KAM

Here are some notes from an interview today with Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach:

FIRST DAY OF SESSION: With bipartisan support to delay unemployment tax payments, the plan is waive the rules and pass it to Gov. Charlie Crist before the end of the first day. The Senate will also name a Jacksonville roadway for the late Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville and debate reforms to the Public Service Commission.

Atwater choked up when speaking of the road designation for King, a former Senate President who passed away last summer.

“Though that may seem as ceremonial, for those of us who had the honor of serving with him, it’s far more than that. It’s really,” Atwater said haltingly, on the verge of tears. “It’s important.”

Also on the first day, the Senate will take up changes to the Public Service Commission that will put into effect suggestions from a grand jury report left on the shelf since 1992 to improve the integrity of the maligned regulatory agency.

LAST DAY OF SESSION: What Atwater doesn’t want to happen is another breakdown in budget negotiations and be forced to extend session past April 30. With that in mind, Atwater is planning on planning to encourage more transparency, which would require more time for the budget process

“I’d like to test some things this session and recommend them to the next administration of the legislature,” Atwater said. “Last year we did our very best. So now, we’re going to try to see if we can lay that down in writing.”

Atwater didn’t say if he planned to specifically include the allocation process (when the two chambers decide how much money to spend on broad areas, like education, health care and transportation), but it sounded like he would:

“I would want every bit of the process to be discussed in public and the conversation completed in public.”

BUDGET PRIORITIES: There will be winners and losers. Atwater said he’s not interested in across-the-board cuts and anything that can be considered a job generator will be more likely to get money.

“We will have to go deeper in some places to create any initiative for job creation: incentives, venture capital funding, all of that,” Atwater said. “I don’t know where those places will be or the depth of those reductions.”

The economic incentives could include lowering the bar for some programs already in existence or loan programs for small businesses.

Atwater’s “seed” programs won’t include the $10 million economic gardening loan incentive hurriedly pushed through by Gov. Charlie Crist more than a year ago that still hasn’t gotten off the ground.

“I can’t tell you that we would measure any level of success there,” he admitted. “We may try again a loan program. We may try some more in the area of venture capital. But that’s fair criticism. We’ve got to get them out on the street and get them working.”

(more…)

A race for an open Panhandle state Senate seat may stymie success of a jobs package.

State Rep. Dave Murzin, House Economic Development and Community Affairs committee chairman, took a swipe at the Senate’s jobs package sponsored by Sen. Don Gaetz.

Murzin, a Panhandle Republican who is running for a Senate seat neighboring Gaetz’s district, was asked about the Gaetz proposal at an Associated Industries of Florida event in Tallahassee yesterday.

“It’s a great package. If I had a $150 million it might be some good ideas. But quite frankly I don’t have $150 million. I think I stopped counting at about $150 million,” Murzin, R-Pensacola, told the crowd of business lobbyists.

Gaetz’ bill includes a $1,000 tax break for businesses that hire an out of work Floridian and a variety of other corporate tax breaks or incentives to induce them to put the unemployed back on the job and to get them off Medicaid and other state benefits.

Murzin said his package will be more realistic.

“So yeah, we’ll take a look at some stuff but quite frankly we’ll roll out a jobs package, an economic incentives package, an economy package that actually works, doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money because …an economic package that Floridians can afford,” Murzin said. “I’m not really into it for the is still trying to figure out exactly how much it will cost and how much it could save).headlines. I’m actually into it to put Floridians back to work.”

Gaetz, who is backing Murzin’s opponent Rep. Greg Evers in the Senate race, expressed tongue-in-cheek surprise at Murzin’s inability to come up with the money to pay for the package. (Gaetz says his staff

“Well, Rep. Murzin is welcome to his opinions. I wish him well this session. And in his future. I wish him well in everything except his aspirations to be a senator. In all other cases I wish him well,” Gaetz, R-Destin, said.

Bernard

The tri-county area is home to the greatest number of Haitian immigrants and has been ground-zero for state and federal Haitian aid efforts.

Newly elected state Rep. Mack Bernard, a West Palm Beach Democrat who was born in Port-au-Prince where the epicenter of the deadly earthquake struck last month, is heading up Palm Beach County’s delegation in the task force, which will include Reps. Juan Zapata, R-Miami, and Ari Porth, D-Coral Springs, and up to 9 other South Florida lawmakers.

Bernard wants better communication from Gov. Charlie Crist, who he said telephoned him the night of the earthquake on Jan. 12 but hasn’t spoken with him since.

Bernard visited Haiti last week. His sister and her three children are now homeless as a result of the disaster, Bernard said.

Crist should appoint a “Haiti czar” to streamline efforts that could be an economic boon to financially-strapped Florida, Bernard, D-West Palm Beach, suggested.

Read the story here.

“It’s that lack of communication, especially from the governor’s office” that is creating frustration for representatives from the tri-county area, which has the state’s largest Haitian immigrant population and is now on the front line providing aid and resources to the ravaged nation, Bernard said.

First, the good news: Florida’s economic woes have hit bottom, the legislature’s chief economist Amy Baker told the Senate yesterday.

Now, the bad news: The state’s unemployment rate is expected to climb to 12 percent as early as Friday when the most recent job numbers are released, Baker said.

And more bad news for lawmakers as they struggle to craft a budget with up to $3.3 billion - about 4 percent - less than they had for this year’s $66.5 billion spending plan.

Although the national recession is over, Florida’s not going to show an economic recovery for at least another year, Baker and University of Florida economist David Denslow told the Ways and Means Committee, which about 30 of the 40-member chamber attended after Senate President Jeff Atwater asked them to sit in.

“We think we’ve hit bottom and we’re going to hover around the bottom for a wile before we start picking up,” Baker said.

The economy will start picking up next spring, she said, but even with normal growth rates, the recovery is coming off a very low base level so the turn-around will be very slow.

It will be three years “before you’re going to be out of the hole on a lot of measures,” Baker said.

Read the story here.

On the other side of the fourth floor rotunda, House Democrats wrote a letter to GOP leaders saying they don’t like their approach in determining what the state’s critical needs are.

They want to look not only at expenditures but at revenues as well. (Translation: higher taxes?)

But that’s not likely to happen on the Senate side.

Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, told his members yesterday he “won’t extract another dollar” from Floridians.

Gov. Charlie Crist took credit for the Public Service Commission’s unanimous decision yesterday to grant FPL a $75 million-a-year rate hike, just a fraction of $1.2 billion the Juno Beach-based utility had sought.

Crist revamped the panel with two new appointments, Commissioners David Klement and Benjamin “Steve” Stevens,” late last year and appointed Chairwoman Nancy Argenziano and Nathan Skop in 2007. Crist’s appointments were intended to create a more consumer-friendly commission that in previous years when PSC votes were considered to lean more toward the utilities it regulates.

Asked if he had an impact on yesterday’s vote, Crist said: “It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?”

The FPL decision came on the heels of a vote Monday in which the PSC denied Progress Energy Florida’s $500 million rate hike request and ordered them to repay $23 million in depreciation costs to consumers.

Crist last year effectively fired two commissioners by not reappointing them and the PSC delayed votes on the issues until the new commissioners took office this month.

Crist dismissed Florida Power & Light Co. President Armando Olivera’s assertion that the PSC vote will cost the state 20,000 new jobs from projects it is now putting on hold.

“Well we certainly don’t hope for that. I don’t think that’s going to be the case. I think that what happened is the Public Service Commission is an independent body that has a duty to perform their job. I think they did exactly that,” Crist said.

Florida’s unemployment rate jumped again last month, climbing to 11.5 percent with more than 1 million workers out of a job.

The state’s unemployment rate climbed .2 percent from October’s jobless rate and is 4.8 percentage points higher than it was in November last year.

Florida’s unemployment rate is 1.5 percent higher than the nation’s jobless rate and is the highest in 34 years. (more…)

A man who asked not to be identified walks into a South Florida Mobile Workforce van to apply for a job at the Community Partnership for the Homeless in Homestead in August. (AP photo)

Unemployment rates dropped slightly in 53 of Florida’s 67 counties, contributing to a dip in the state’s overall rate of out of work citizens, unemployment numbers out today show.

Click here for more about our local unemployment rates. And go here for more detailed statewide information.

Florida counties with highest unemployment rates in August (change from July)
:
1. Hendry: 16.4% (-1.8%)

2. Flagler: 15.7% (-3.1%)

3. Indian River: 15.3% (-0.7%)

4. St. Lucie: 14.7% (-1.3%)

5. Lee: 13.5% (+1.5%)*

6. Hernando: 13.3% (-0.7%)

24. Martin 11.5% (0%)

27. Palm Beach 11.3 (-0.9%)

Florida: 10.9% (-1.8%)

*Other Florida counties where unemployment increased last month were Collier, Gulf, Lake, Lee, Marion and Osceola.

(more…)

Florida’s jobless rate remained at 10.7 percent in July, 1.3 percent points higher than the national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, the Agency for Workforce Innovation reported today.

The unemployment rate in June and July is the highest in the past 34 years. In October 1975, the jobless rate was 11 percent.

The rate remained steady although the state has already spent more than $944 million of federal stimulus money on unemployment benefits and resources.

As Gov. Charlie Crist asks Floridians tohope for the economy to turn around, numbers released Wednesday from the U.S. Bureau of Labor & Statistics show Florida among the hardest hit areas of the country.

The map above breaks down unemployment rates by metro area and shows the three toughest places to find work in Florida are huddled along the state’s central Atlantic Coast: 15.5 percent unemployment in Palm Coast; 14.1 percent in Sebastian-Vero Beach and 13.1 percent in Port St. Lucie.

For comparison, unemployment in the Detroit area is 17.1 percent, the highest among the country’s 49 most populated metro areas. The West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Boynton Beach has an 11.1 percent unemployment rate.

Click on the map above to enlarge it. And for a chart comparing the recent trend of Florida’s unemployment rates to the national average, click here.

Floridians so far have received less federal stimulus money than any of their fellow Americans, despite an unemployment rate here that ranks among the highest in the country and a budget crisis that few states can match.

Calabro

Florida has received more total dollars than all but three other states from a stimulus pot of about $198 billion so far for infrastructure projects and social services, according to figures reported this week by The Wall Street Journal.¹ That total includes money Congress left for states to divide among themselves and other dollars that federal departments have already disbursed.

But Florida received just $505 per person, which ranks last among the 50 states, all U.S. territories combined and Washington, D.C., according to a Palm Beach Post analysis of the Journal’s data.

The numbers raise significant questions about the stimulus program, which President Obama said during a February stop in Fort Myers would help curtail the state’s rising unemployment rate.²

(more…)

1. Wall Street Journal, 06/30/09: Stimulus Spending, Breakdown by State
2. Remarks of President Obama, 02/10/09, Fort Myers.

Gov. Charlie Crist made an impromptu promotion of Agency for Workforce Innovation chief Cynthia Lorenzo this morning by uttering a single sentence.

Lorenzo has been the temporary head of the department, which handles unemployment claims and early childhood education, since February.

“You’re interim? Why is that?” Crist asked Lorenzo at a morning powwow with his agency heads to discuss implementation of the federal stimulus boost. Lorenzo didn’t answer.

“I think you’re not interim anymore,” Crist said.

The governor quickly checked with his chief of staff Eric Eikenberg to make sure the promotion was legit.

“Chief, I’m allowed to do that?” Crist asked. Eikenberg nodded.

“You deserve it. And it’s the right thing to do,” Crist said.

Lorenzo, who was deputy secretary at the agency for two years before taking over in February, later said she had no idea her promotion would take place in public today.

“It was spontaneous. It was an audible at the line,” Crist confirmed.

The Florida Department of Education paid $12,000 for four months of advertising on the Sayfie Review, a political website owned by Justin Sayfie, a lobbyist, GOP consultant and former top advisor to Gov. Jeb Bush.

The state is advertising its “Ready to Work” program that certifies workers for certain jobs. The program is run by DOE in conjunction with the Agency for Workforce Innovation.

The money comes from about $11 million the state spends on the program annually. The certificates let employers know how well applicants can read, write and perform basic math.

“When you advertise with SayfieReview.com, you are instantly grabbing the attention of the major decision makers and opinion leaders in the State of Florida,” the Sayfie Review’s website promises.

The site is a regular staple for Capitol movers and shakers but it’s unclear how many literacy-certified job seekers routinely click on the site.

The credentialing program also includes a “job profiling” component in which companies pay $2,000 for an assessment of what their workers do. The research is performed by the University of North Florida.

JPMorgan Chase officials announced Friday they will stop using Indian call centers to answer customer service questions from Floridians on food stamps.

The announcement was made the same day the state’s unemployment rate climbed to 9.7 percent, the highest since 1975.

“No future calls will go to India,” Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon said. “This is permanent.”

The Palm Beach Post published a story Thursday about the frustration of a Jupiter woman who reached a customer service call center in India while trying to obtain state assistance. The state contracts with JPMorgan Chase to run parts of the Florida food stamp program and uses two customer service centers in India. The company will instead route calls to its centers in Ohio and Illinois.

“The state has indicated to us they want to bring these calls to the U.S.,” said JPMorgan spokesman John Murray. “We’re working with them to do so.”

More here.

View DCF customer service centers in a larger map
After selling real estate for two decades in Palm Beach County, Michelle Brown picked up a baby-sitting job when the housing market tanked. Then the children’s parents had their hours cut at work, so she turned to the state for help in buying food.

When Brown called the customer service line for the state’s food stamp program, a phone rang in India.

“It’s like a slap in the face,” said Brown, 52, of Jupiter. “That’s a job I’d be qualified for.”

With unemployment at 9.4 percent in Florida and nearly 50,000 new applications for food stamps each month, the state has paid JPMorgan Chase nearly $50 million over the past three years to provide food stamp program services, which include customer service call centers in Bangalore and Gurgaon, India.

Read the rest here.

A controversial Central Florida rail project appeared mysteriously in the Senate budget plan today not long before Senate Democratic leaders demanded that the $641 million for the plan be spent elsewhere.

The language was not included in the budget package vetted by the Senate Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations Committee but wound up in its budget anyway.

“This is a backdoor approach to legislation,” said Senate Democratic Leader Al Lawson of Tallahassee who earlier in the day dubbed the CSX commuter rail project the “choo-choo to nowhere…even Mickey Mouse can’t use.”

Proposed legislation for the commuter rail deal has yet to be approved by the House or the Senate, making the maneuver all the more devious, Lawson said.

And with a $6 billion spending gap, lawmakers should spend the money putting people back to work on road projects the rail project money could be spent on.
(more…)

People line up at a Workforce Plus job fair in Tallahassee on Thursday. The state's unemployment rate rose to 9.4 %, the highest since 1976, after 75,000 Floridians lost their jobs in February. Nearly one in 10 or 874,000 are jobless. (AP Photo/Phil Coale)

(more…)

Post reporter Jeff Ostrowski spends some time with the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation office in West Palm Beach and writes in a story published today that the “frustration is the fallout of Florida’s fast-deteriorating job market.”

It’s not just new applications that are swamping the phone lines. To keep their $300-a-week checks flowing, unemployed workers must complete a short questionnaire every two weeks, either by phone or online.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, getting through to the state’s call center or logging onto the state’s www.floridajobs.org site is especially difficult.

“Mondays and Tuesdays? Hopeless,” Abraham said. “The whole state of Florida is calling.”