The Florida House today passed the special session bill, 84-25, aimed at expanding the state’s commuter railroad system. The bill now moves to the Senate.
The bill is targeted at winning $2.5 billion from the pot of federal stimulus money to build a high-speed rail system in the state. State lawmakers believe the best way to do that is to impress the feds with their commitment to a state rail system: the special session bill would earmark $15 million per year to subsidize the struggling South Florida Tri-Rail line and spend $432 million to buy 61 miles of track from CSX for a Central Florida commuter line, known as SunRail.
Since the special session opened last week, lawmakers and Gov. Charlie Crist have repeated and repeated again the same mantra: “This is about creating new jobs.” Crist said he will “take money from anyone” as long as it creates jobs. Although the bill doesn’t actually talk about jobs, they would be a consequence of creating rail systems.
December 7th, 2009 - 3:06 pm
While I think the commuter rail is a great idea and hope that Floridians will use it, right now I can’t help but think Crist’s priorities are out of whack. Florida is ranked dead last in the country for educational funding. Next year funding for education will drop again. School districts have already made adjustments by reducing bus service, reducing school hours, reducing or freezing teacher wages, and cutting programs like music, art and vocational education. Florida also ranks amongst the lowest in many other educational categories. Florida ranks very low in funding for child health care funding.
Sure, spending money may bring in stimulus dollars-dollars that can only be spent on this specific project. What if we don’t get the stimulus dollars? We will still have to spend the money on the rail system because of this bill. What do they plan to do to fix the education crisis? Florida has extremely high teacher turnover rates, and if things don’t get better even more people will leave the profession.
December 8th, 2009 - 9:31 am
I 100% agree with Janine…but being a realist, I don’t expect lawmakers to get their priorities right about 90% of the time, so I’ll take what I can get =)